I've contemplated this thread for a while b/c 1) it'll be long & 2) it'll be personal. TLDR; I had a foray with the medical health establishment in my 20s that attuned me to the fact that those within it often don't care about quality of life, but only about preventing death 1/
from whatever the doctor in question treats. I believe that this experience was one of the major factors that primed me to reject covid hysteria.
Here goes: I discovered in my late 20's that I had the BRCA 2 mutation, although my family's history of breast cancer was limited 2/
Here goes: I discovered in my late 20's that I had the BRCA 2 mutation, although my family's history of breast cancer was limited 2/
Estimating my lifetime risk of BC to be ~ 60%, the doctors advised me to have children and get prophylactic surgery ASAP. This was not what I wanted to do with my life. I did a deep dive into the literature, & learned that many scientists actually questioned these statistics &
whether the BRCA/BC link is causative, or rather correlative to an extent. Some believe that the interplay is much more complex, and other genes are involved. Therefore, someone like me who doesn't have a strong family history of BC might have a much lower risk than estimated 3/
I presented the doctors with the research, but they weren't interested (nor were they familiar with it). They simply told me that the "safe" thing to do was to follow their instructions. It was beyond evident that they didn't care about my quality of life, or my well-being -4/
apart from me not dying of breast cancer, for which presumably they would be blamed. I was dismayed by their lack of interest, unwillingness to question their assumptions and biases, and lack of consideration for my cost-benefit analysis. I was also stunned that 5/
I, a 20-something year old law student, had read studies bearing on their area of supposed expertise that they had not bothered to consider. I reached out to some of the doctors/scientists who questioned the prevailing wisdom surrounding BRCA mutations, & they conveyed that 6/
they had been silenced and ostracized by their peers. I don't think I need to connect the dots here: this experience bears a striking resemblance to the COVID approach & may have been responsible for my early rejection of the myopic focus on prevention of a single disease 7/7
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