[somenameforme]

A question for you. Imagine you're a doctor and after extensive research and your own medical experience and praxis, you conclude that, for instance, vaccination is probably a less than optimal choice for individuals under the age of 40. How comfortable would you feel publicly expressing this?

One of the biggest problems when a society starts to become intolerant towards dissenting views is that consensus itself starts to become impossible, or at least meaningless.

Most people don't care that much about most issues. Make it sting enough to dissent, and you'll eliminate dissent from all but those willing to choose this hill to die on. But in such a case the lack of dissent becomes meaningless.

[staticman2]

I assume by "publically expressing" you mean not saying things to friends over a beer but posting things online or that will go online in some fashion.

If I was a doctor it's unlikely I would be publically expressing anything.

As far as I know I've never been treated by a doctor who goes around publically expressing things on any topic.

When I see a specialist it's usually because I got a referral from a family doctor not because "This doctor has an exciting Twitter feed".

I would guess my doctors have no public twitter feeds at all, not that I've ever checked.

But your question is too vague. In this scenario am I a random "doctor" or am I a nationally regarded expert in the relevant field? And did I run my views past respected colleagues and did they recieve it well or tell me I'm being an idiot?

I think the job of practicing medicine is generally about going to conferences and basing your practice on what the doctors regarded as being in the top of their field suggest.

Just like the job of becoming a doctor is about answering the questions on medical school exams in line with what the teacher told you is true, not "sharing your original views" on how the teacher is wrong.

I was born before social networks existed and reject the implicit framing society works better when everybody debates everything on social media all day. Some things might work well being debated on social media, but not everything.

[artificialLimbs]

Doctors shouldn’t be sharing their opinions online is your hot take?

[staticman2]

Doctors are supposed to be providing the public with medical advise in line with the standards of their profession, not sharing "opinions" on medical matters whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.

If you can't convince your colleagues that your "opinions" have value and you have such a high opinion of your judgement relative to the rest of your profession that you insist on broadcasting these "opinions" to the world anyway, chances are you have a high level of confidence and a low level of competence and you aren't a very good doctor.

Especially if these "opinions" are outside your specialty.

I know the notion that a doctor should show intellectual humility may offend autodidactics who doesn't even think a layperson should show intellectual humility, but so it goes.

[somenameforme]

The story of penicillin is an interesting one. As the first antibiotic, it's without doubt single most important medical discovery in modern times. It was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928. He left a number of samples of a bacteria to culture while on holiday. One of his petri dishes had been inadvertently exposed and when he returned it had grown a bluish green mold.

But the interesting thing about this mold is that there was no bacteria around the areas where the mold had grown. It seemed to have repelled or killed them. He was quite excited by his discovery. But upon sharing his discovery with his colleagues they were largely dismissive. He gave a number of talks discussing the mold, where people were also universally dismissive. And he even managed to get a paper published, where you can guess the response.

This isn't the end of this story of course, though it is for our purposes. It would take more than a decade but of course eventually penicillin would eventually be refined and shaped into the life saving drug that it would rapidly become. The point I want to make with this is rather evident. Had Fleming taken public views into account before expressing himself it's entirely possible we might still live in a world without antibiotics.

And this story is the rule more than the exception for many of the most important discoveries in the progress of humanity. Human progress is heavily decentralized in no small part because the "right" answer often seems wrong at first, and is rarely enthusiastically adopted when it runs contrary to the views of a day. It was none other than Max Planck that remarked, "science progresses one funeral at a time", precisely because of this.

[staticman2]

I don't think the moral of the Alexander Fleming story is the medical community should abolish the FDA and medical malpractice laws so every doctor can do whatever and say whatever any more than the moral of "science progresses one funeral at a time" is we should fire every scientist who is older than thirty.

[artificialLimbs]

To attempt to force a populace to discard their own intellect and intuition in favor of simply listening to the 'experts' (who are always self appointed) is the dream of every psychopathic authoritarian who has lived.

[staticman2]

Medical experts aren't self appointed but I can see how that belief might correlate with a belief in a number of other things.

[artificialLimbs]

So, medical experts don’t appoint medical experts?