Obviously these kinds of delusions disqualify her to practice medicine, as it makes her a threat to her patients, but how do these kinds of people get medical degrees to begin with? I just can’t imagine they got through medical school and then suddenly lost their minds, but I also can’t imagine that they’re able to go through medical school where their mental model of how medicine works is completely unrelated to what they’re being taught, constantly having to give the correct answer that they believe to be wrong to pass. (Although I do know about a creationist who got a biology degree by doing exactly that, so maybe that’s what they are doing?)
It’s faith healing, and it’s likely not the next stop, but it came along with the belief in evil spirits. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t doing faith healing herself, and that wasn’t in fact her main treatment, rather than, you know, actual medicine. People like her are actively dangerous.
People can have mental health issues develop at any time in their life – if that is a factor it could easily have happened after medical school. But she equally could be a con artist or just a regular self centered idiot. People have their own beliefs that are unassailable, but they have no problem adapting to fit through an educational system that wants to teach them pesky facts.
The first thing it made me think of were all those pseudo-religious psychic surgery practitioners back in the 1970’s. They palm a handful of bloody chicken livers and then “remove them” with lots of show and speaking in tongues and stuff.
Not just any doctor. A pediatrician. Some people must think it’s ok to subject their children to this persons woo.
This question has been nagging me from the start. Trump had the resources and the available knowledge to respond to COVID early and effectively. If he had said Real Americans ™ wear masks on day one then he would have had nearly 100% compliance. He could of had the best and earliest response to the virus in the world.
It could be as Melz said that they hope more POC and marginalized people than his own. But it seems clear that the only people taking him seriously are his true believers.
My working theory is that the GOP voting apparatus has a basic algorithm. Distress the GOP voters and then blame it on some “others” leading to all the angry mouth breathers getting out to vote. Like a Roomba it looks like chaos but at the end of most days the job gets done. Except this time the GOP Roomba is stuck in a corner doing the same thing over and over with no adults to give it a kick.
I would have assumed that El Presidente could have found someone less black, and ideally with more prominent protestant credentials, to deliver medical advice of similar quality.
I don’t think mental health issues come into it. This is the kind of insanity that comes from “sane” people. I’ve had family members like this, and it may have gotten worse with age, the expression of it sometimes more extreme due to mental health issues, but this was always their worldview.
Yeah. It’s just such an insane amount of cognitive dissonance to have to go through for such a long time to get the degree. That it’s possible undermines the whole notion of “education.”
Trump likes to surround himself with pro-Trump Black people (Ben Carson, Diamond and Silk, etc.) to give the impression that he is not a racist. It fits with the conservative “anti-racists are the real racists” logic.
Depending on exactly how deeply they are invested in faith healing as an exclusive option there is room (though not exactly Occam’s-razor-approved room) for not-technically-contradictory theories.
If you think that endometriosis is literally a layer of demon semen you’ve committed yourself to a theory that will run straight up against the first histological examination anyone feels like performing; but if you just fall back to the “well, incubi are why some people suffer abnormal tissue growth and others don’t…” position you’ve got something that is deeply suspect and medically useless; but much harder to directly dislodge you from.
Such an exercise is profoundly useless, at best, but you can ram pretty much any quantity of angels, demons, spiritual warfare, and similar nonsense into any areas where the root cause is still a bunch of probabilities and risk factors. Playing god-of-the-gaps isn’t a very impressive thing to do; but if that’s your thing there is plenty of room to do it.
