Random Pensées

Medical advice: science or politics?

I guess I have always had some kind of faith in the medical advice doctors have dispensed to me over the years. I have assumed that the advice I have been given has been truthful, that it is the distillation of years of rigorous study, of carefully monitored tests, of repeatedly observed phenomena, that it has all the indicia of truth gleaned from years of practice. I have thought that medicine is truth and that it is derived from good science.

I forgot that medicine, while it may be applied truth, is applied by human beings. Medical professionals bring to the scientific process of dispensing medical advice all of their own biases and preconceptions, all of their own political and social world views, all of their own narrow prisms. These people are just as imprisoned by their tunnel vision as the rest of us.

Scary, isn't it?

What do I mean, you may be wondering at this point?

I have just finished a very short, very compelling, terribly frightening book: Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student .

Go forth, buy it, read it, and give it to your daughters. I am completely serious.

But back to my topic. The book brought me to this realization because it makes terribly clear how ideology guides and informs mental health treatment and risk education for college age, and younger, women.

The bias is this: women are just the same as men. The translation of the bias into action is social activism and is praised by mental health counselors who are hoping to help break gender constructs in an effort to achieve a more just and equitable society. How? By telling girls that having any kind of sexual relationship they want, no matter how casual, is just fine. It is risk free and without consequence, so long as "safer sex" is practiced.

The author of the book makes clear that is ideologically driven and contradicted by medical fact. How? First, venereal disease is not so easily cured by a one day treatment of some wonder drug, as the ideologues would have you believe. There can be grave physical consequences to a woman's ability to conceive later in life. Second, there are serious mental health consequences which appear to be neurologically driven. Oxytocin is a chemical released during breast feeding to promote the bonding between woman and child. It also is released during sex. It means, to boil it down very much, a woman is more likely to bond with a man during sex and thus, when the man blows her off because they were just hooking up for a no strings attached thing, she is more prone to become depressed. These consequences are not shared with women because they might blow away the political agenda -- female equality. Women, as a result of the agenda applied, are not being told that maybe it would be better to wait until they have fallen in love to have sex and then to have sex within a monogamous relationship. It conflicts with the agenda.

Read the book. I could go on. Instead, I am putting it on the shelf until my daughter just about hits puberty, and then I am going to make her read it and discuss it with her. Just so that she can make informed decisions about her own life in the context of knowing that all the facts and further knowing that the advice she may be getting about a healthy lifestyle is coming from a place more concerned about the end result of a political agenda than about keeping her safe.

By the way, the author originally wrote this as "anonymous" out of the fear she had for the consequences for her own career. She has since come out: Miriam Grossman, M.D., psychiatrist in the UCLA health services.

Here's an interesting piece about her and the book.

Posted by Random Penseur at March 28, 2007 10:49 AM | TrackBack