Comment on NHS staff battling wave of food supplement disinformation
MareOfNights@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days agoNo people do alternative medicines because tiktok tells them to.
A doctors job is not to be your dietician or personal trainer. You go there to get a pill that fixes your stuff. Everybody knows whether they need better food or more exercise. You don’t need a doctor to tell you that. You can ask them during checkup if there are specific changes you need, but nobody actually does that. How many times do you hear fat people who don’t want to go to the doctor because he’s going to tell them they need to loose weight? It is happening, but people want the pill instead.
Alternative medicine is a big scam that does a lot of advertising. To the point where the US DHS pushes it now.
I think the combo of Covid and algorithms broke peoples brain.
Zombie@feddit.uk 6 days ago
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a doctor is.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_doctor
In the modern era that has most often been practiced via chemistry’s interaction with biology. Or as you put it, a pill. But prescribing pills is not their job, it’s just a function of it. Their job is to ensure good health and often that is best done via other means than chemistry. Chemistry is just the first port of call for many doctors because that’s one of the main things they’re taught and it’s a simple solution to a complex problem. But not always the best solution.
A doctors job is to be your dietician or personal trainer if that’s the best course of action. Obviously, not literally, they’ll give advice or refer you to others. But that’s the idea.
Many people do need a doctor to tell them to eat better or exercise. Nutrition is complicated. Many don’t know what contains carbs, proteins, or fat. Not to mention micronutrients. And then you’ve got to have the time, energy, knowledge, and finances to buy and prepare this healthier food. The time and energy to exercise after working 40h a week, commuting 5-10 hours a week, performing household chores, and potentially raising children.
The simple solution of pills has had many negative effects for people, so now they’re looking elsewhere. If people were happy and satisfied with their medical experiences they wouldn’t listen to influencers on TikTok, but they do. And it’s not because TikTok has some magical hypnotic brainrot function, people are dissatisfied and looking for alternative solutions. TikTok says it has the answers, so they give it a try.
MareOfNights@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days ago
No, we already have a shortage of doctors. They are not trained for that and don’t have the time. Doctors should do the chemistry stuff.
I wouldn’t have a problem with seeing dieticians and personal trainers as part of medical infrastructure, tho.
In the same way a general doctor will tell you to go see a heart specialist, they could tell you to go see a dietician. It might make sense to even have a session with them covered by health insurance.
But the training for those jobs is a lot easier and takes a lot less time. Doctors are trained for completely different things and are way more expensive.
Zombie@feddit.uk 6 days ago
We have a shortage of doctors partially because they’re often fighting fires with short term solutions. Providing reactive medicine instead of preventative. Treating symptoms instead of underlying root causes.
I’ll give an example; a common ailment for women is iron deficiency. A shit side effect of losing a lot of blood once a month. To cure this, many doctors will prescribe iron tablets. Not enough iron? Take iron tablets! Seems logical enough, yeah?
The problem with iron tablets is they fuck up your stomach. They’re difficult to digest, you get painful jet black shits, and never quite feel right while taking them. They also have a shit absorption rate. Only a fraction of the iron in the tablet is actually absorbed by the body. And they take weeks to bring you back to sufficient iron levels.
If instead there was a concerted effort to educate women to include spinach, varied beans and legumes, tofu, figs, dates, broccoli, pistachios, etc. Foods rich in iron, into their daily diet, then the amount requiring prescription iron tablets reduces significantly because they’re getting iron in their diet every day.
But many aren’t taught these things. They’re taught if you start feeling shit, come to the doctor, we’ll take a blood test and prescribe you some tablets that will take weeks to help, and make you feel like shit the whole time you’re taking them.
Repeat the process again in 6-12 months when your iron levels inevitably drop again because the root cause wasn’t fixed.
This is what I described earlier as a “bad experience” with professional medicine. And is part of why there’s a doctor shortage, because many aren’t fixing root causes but immediate symptoms instead. Creating a larger demand than there is supply of doctors.
MareOfNights@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
That just sounds like you get too much iron from the pill.
But no, this is still the job of a dietician not a doctor. A GP could give you your bloodwork and send you to a dietician with that. You don’t need a medical degree to be a dietician. It’s simply not the same job.
(Also spinach is not considered a good iron source because of the low bioavailability of the iron in it. The best sources are mostly animals. If you are vegan it’s probably a good idea to supplement, just like Omega-3)
DakRalter@thelemmy.club 5 days ago
It’s crazy how some people think medicine is just “take this pill” and nothing more. I had a severe blood test phobia, so bad that I even delayed getting cancer symptoms checked for a year because I was so scared of the needles.
When I eventually got it checked and my gp said I’d need a blood test, I went into a panic attack. He prescribed me three lorazepam. One for the morning of the test, one for just before the test and one “just in case”.
I didn’t take them because I know I have an addictive personality.
Another GP told me to self refer to the local talk therapy. After three sessions I went from crying at photos of blood tests to being able to get a two practice tests done with my therapist and then the actual test. Without getting dizzy or throwing up like I did as a child.
Medicine is and should always be about what’s best for the patient, not “here just take a pill.” Is anyone really going to say that I should have gone down the lorazepam route? Also the amount of times I’ve had SSRIs pushed on me when I didn’t need them. Once when I was 13 because I had autism related mutism. Instead of pushing my mum to get me assessed, I wasn’t even told that I could be autistic (aspergers back then), which is a big contributing factor to me being the basket case I am today.
This is not me deriding modern medicine, just pushing back against the argument that pills should always be the answer. Long term solutions are better than relying on quick fixes.