Watch 'Dr. Phil,' no medical license, rant COVID-19 falsehoods on Fox News

True, automobile fatalities account for over 30,000 deaths a year, but that figure is spread over a whole year, and is slowly declining over time. Imagine if there were zero auto deaths in all of 2019, zero deaths in January and February of 2020, and then suddenly 30,000 auto deaths in March and April. You can damn well believe we’d be saying “For God’s sake stop driving your car until we can figure out what’s going on.”

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He has a phd in psychology, so yes, he can be called doctor. Doesn’t mean he’s not a jack ass.

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He’s not licensed to practice. Just like I am not licensed to practice internet law (or bird law)

Only if her Dr. Phil- and Dr. Oz-money-stuffed mattress is too lumpy.

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They don’t take phds away just because one isn’t licensed to practice. That’s not how phds works… it’s pretty rare for a university to retract a degree like that.

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btw, 100 people per day die from car accidents

2000+ per day die from covid19 (and that’s only the people tested)

(sure doesn’t look like a flattening of the curve to me)

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Have you considered the Judge Reinhold loophole?

judge

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Being a PhD is entirely different from being an MD or any kind of licensed medical practitioner.

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I’ll allow it…

image

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But a phd does entitle one to use the title Dr - which is why he calls himself Dr. Phil. That’s what @anon32019413 asked.

Also, has he ever said that he’s a medical doctor, cause I don’ think he’s gone that far? All I’ve ever seen is him doing on TV is “psychology”. This just seems like more a case of assholes ignoring people who have actual expertise… typical of Fox News, of course. And they’re clearly counting on their audience not understanding the difference between a phd and an MD, rather than out and out saying he’s an MD. Which kind of makes it worse, I’d say.

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I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. I am saying that a novel corona virus that we didn’t have a vaccine for, but still only killed fu season numbers. Of course for that to be a reality it would require the symptoms to be much milder and/or much harder to contract than the regular flu. If we had such a disease, we wouldn’t need these precautions. That isn’t what we currently have.

Oh, I grok the intended semantics-based chicanery ; regardless to what he’s allowed to call himself that opportunist is no medical doctor let alone an expert on infectious diseases… and he has NO business speaking out publicly, as if he is.

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Roger that! We are in agreement! Fox just wants to use the public’s lack of understanding of who can use that title to promote Trump’s agenda.

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If we had no vaccine and killed flu season numbers, then either its rate of spread or mortality rate would be so low it wouldn’t be as big of an issue.

The 2002 SARS outbreak was effectively this - it was even caused by a novel coronavirus. The mortality and infection numbers were way down because it was taken seriously from the start, but it could have been much worse.

I like how a few journalists can take something poorly said by a famous person, slap a headline on it, the internet has an hatefest over it, and the famous person has to spend 30 minutes the following day carefully apologizing. The whole thing is such a shitshow.

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My chemistry professor only called himself Dr when working in academic fields. So among staff and students he was a Dr. And when he published papers and books on chemistry, he’s Dr. With lay people he didn’t try to confuse them. He didn’t run a talk show to give lay people advice, calling himself Dr. Redacted.

I’m not suggesting what Dr. Phil does is illegal. Someone suggested he’s an asshole. I’m going further and saying it’s unethical to misrepresent yourself outside of your field when you do not practice professionally.

(my dentist is a Dr. And that’s fine, even though he’s not a medical doctor. I hope you can see why I am fine with that)

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Assholes gotta Asshole.

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PhD is in fact the original “doctor”. The MD came later as a way of establishing respectability for the profession.

It’s only in a narrow-minded, less informed era that we assume “Dr” must equal MD. Rather, it used to be common that the first question asked when someone introduced themselves as “Doctor” was “What is your degree in?” as medicine is hardly the only field to offer advanced degrees and (as I said), that is a recent development as compared to the PhD.

Yet it’s funny how often those who claim it’s disingenuous for a PhD to call themselves doctor are quite eager to blame others for weakness in thought and overcredulity on other matters.

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It’s funny how titles get passed around. Somehow physicians absconded with the “doctor” title, I guess because it was an additional four years of study. But I knew an MD who also had a D.Med.Sci., a doctor of medical science. It was more or less equivalent to a PhD, in that it required original research and a dissertation. But he never called himself Dr. Dr. Of course there are a lot of medical docs out there with PhDs too.

From what I understand, quite a while ago, law schools stopped giving out LLB’s (bachelor of law) and started giving out JD’s (doctor of juris prudence), despite the fact you could still get a PhD in law. My dad got a letter from his law school offering to exchange his LLB for JD for the low, low price of $50. He thought it was hilarious, and declined. He was retired but I bet he would have had the same reaction had he still been working (in govt, not law).

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