Remember how I told you about Brain Tumor Boy in my article about medical testing? See [1], if you need a refresher. Why I find that whole thing as funny as I do is that I suspect that if you look at my chart and a Physician's Desk Reference, you can easily conclude why my blood pressure is abnormally low.
The med side effects and symptoms of end-stage heart failure and HF REF are things I've validated from multiple legitimate online sources.
"Chris, you're cool, go the fuck home, because you and I both know you don't belong in the ER. You might need a change to your drug prescriptions. Perhaps you've reached end-stage heart failure. I'm not your cardiologist, and despite the fact that your cardiologist told you that you needed to come here, he's actually the guy who needs to be talking to you right now, not me."
Human nature seems to run on this principle that it is always better to do something about a problem, rather than nothing. It happens in medicine too, because medicine is practiced by humans. So we get guys who want to test patients with abnormally low BP for brain tumors, even though all the evidence that is staring us in the face says: "This poor motherfucker probably just hit end-stage heart failure, and perhaps he needs a change to his medications."
Sometimes, inaction might be better than action. And my gut tells me this is true far more often than we might think.
Here's Alan Watts quoting Robert Oppenheimer:[2]
You know, it's like Oppenheimer said: it's perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell, and the only possible way we might stop that happening is not to try to prevent it.
There are dumb patients squealing about how they need antibiotics for their viral infections, even though antibiotics don't do jack shit for viral infections. That's like high school biology type stuff. And some doctors -- hopefully fewer and fewer these days -- have been known to comply to keep their patients happy. They're doing something, yippity doo-dah! And little Johnny's mommy is happy because they're "treating" his flu, yay! I've forgotten a lot of what I learned in high school biology -- and in college biology 101 for that mattter -- even though I was top of the class in college under my university's most difficult professor. But I remembered that antibiotics are ineffective against viruses, because that was a biology lesson directly applicable to humans in daily life. And now, overuse has increased the problem of antibiotic resistance, just like I knew it would when I was six-fucking-teen years old. Though arguably, factory farming of animals and misuse of antibiotics has done far far more harm here than the doctors who want to make little Johnny's mommy shut up and go the fuck away. Maybe a bird flu pandemic and more strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria will make the planet finally go vegan?
And then sometimes action is better than inaction. Apparently they're looking into stem cell research to treat the heart, and they're even doing clinical trials. I'm a gamblin' man with nothing to lose and potentially everything to gain; I'd sign up for that, if they think I'd be a promising candidate.
[1] Reason 666 Why US Health Care Is So Fucked: The Testing Obsession!