Finding new fuel in social media

With the virility available in social media and our ever perceived shrinking schedule, the dangers of 140 character extremism is all too real. You mix viral possibilities with extremist ideas fueled by media induced fear and personal experience you have a psychological stage set for ingraining yourself with incorrect ideas that are not only vague but based on minimal and often erroneous information. This happens constantly and is a hallmark of chosen ignorance. The facts are out there, you just have to want to find them.

This virus of ignorant crusading is hurting many things, politics, economy, health services, and the list goes on. This type of thinking, grasping the nearest drama by believing the first thing you neighbor says that conforms to your ideology, is not a new thing and almost always ends in tragedy and horror. The only thing new to this formula is that our neighbor is anyone, because the walls of proximity have been crushed with web of the net.

The spread of disinformation happens at the speed with which you type.

Spend a little time researching the witch hunts in Europe. Perhaps more along the lines of this story look at lobotomy’s performed in the early part of last century or the somewhat comical look at bathing in medieval Europe. All tragic in hindsight but excellent examples of practically applied ignorance fueled by fear.

Profiteers

Now I see popping up in the social melting pot the loathing of doctors and modern nutritional science. People opting to do as their ancestors did and turn to only natural remedies and all sorts of strange diets – just another form of medical extremism. Well, your ancestors didn’t often have half your lifespan and they worked for a living, cubicles weren’t invented yet. Plus, at least modern science admits it doesn’t know much but it’s trying. The ones making the claims are those who profit from your ignorance.

Pharmaceutical and food companies are monopolizing on the public’s willingness to believe anything they see within reason. The spin doctors in marketing are able to make you believe when you walk down the aisle that you actually have a choice. Some people are catching this, which is excellent. But they fail to take the last step by identifying the real culprit – follow the money for that one – and pinning the blame on nutritional science or the doctors who prescribe the pills.

Unfortunately this results in a few people having a few bad experiences then simply boycotting ALL doctors. Sadly, this is just the other side of the coin. There is an opposite end to every extreme.

Perceived shrinking schedule

How much time do you actually spend researching facts and how much is spent clicking “like” under poorly captioned images from ten years ago? If we spent as much time researching the crap we get all riled up over when we see it on Facebook and less time re-posting information that came from who knows where we might find ourselves with less extremist viewpoints and more moderate solutions.

Americans spend an average of 8 hours a month on Facebook, two on Google, a little more than that on Yahoo and almost three hours on AOL. That’s a lot of hours, and it doesn’t include all the other tidbits you go watch and read when finding them at those places. If you’re going to melt your brain with short tidbits of information, try taking a bit of that busy schedule of paging through cat photos and look up some facts on your latest social media crusade.

Back to Modern Health

I’ve run into a few people who avoid doctors all together and most seem not to trust them period. There are roughly 370,000 primary care physicians in the United States and around 1 million doctors total. To get a statistically accurate measure on whether doctors help you or not you would have to see 2,386 (for a 95% confidence +/-2%).

Extremism itself is more closely related to suicide bombers and political fringes, but the idea can be applied to any of our own ways of thinking. One theory is that we have persistent experiences that create in us a desire to adopt conflict engagement strategies which feel consistent with our experiences. So, you saw a couple of doctors who were way off the mark and now all doctors are wrong. That’s extremism.

Just because you got sick one time from a certain food does not mean that food is necessarily going to make you sick again. Just because one doctor went to the Caribbean for his degree does not mean the next did. Linking isolated incidents or even small groups of incidents into a blanket perception that encompasses everyone or everything related to those incidents is foolish.

Trust and Belief

Was your trust broken? Sure, but does it mean you should stop trusting? No. I’m not going to argue for or against any particular diet, doctor or medical profession but we should stop and take a strong look at our beliefs, our motivations and the genesis of our prejudices. We should then try hard to spend a little time researching facts for ourselves using good research methods rather than finding those things that reinforce our preconceived ideas (finding stuff to validate our thinking rather than finding stuff that is fact). An article in  a newspaper should be an inspiration to research, not the research itself.

Leave extremism where it belongs, in the media, and practice moderation in your approach to finding your own ideological perceptions, in health or otherwise. You made it all the way to word 921, so I know you can keep going.

Related articles

• Health News Gets Social (prnewswire.com)
• Patients use Google for a doctor reference check (kevinmd.com)