Bill G

And Jeremy, you have pointed to ideas regarding how messages get amplified and how much more effective you can be in distributing your constructivism using social media tools. Apparently, the more controversial or offensive the idea is, the more quickly it gets amplified. This, too, is a new reality. Solidly constructed arguments don’t really tend to get amplified very quickly.

Mark

The Corey Booker event is especially poignant because, in this day of soundbites, just the commitment and the stamina weren’t lost on people who are communicating. And at several points, it was the largest online streaming message. It was one of real-time amazement. And if that could be somehow translated into primary care, that would be awesome. I just don’t know if there is an audience. But certainly, every time I go on YouTube, I get all these 30-second remedies. And somehow, Corey Booker may have offered a template on how to go beyond soundbites. I don’t know. I just tossed that out there.

Jack

I think in healthcare, we may have brought some of this onto ourselves. We are not making much sense of narratives. Because, in healthcare, we’ve learned to reduce, truncate, and shrink all of our descriptions about people into this brief set of facts. Bruce. is a 68-year-old male who lives in a house and has diabetes. That’s it. And we narrow it down to a couple of facts and medical issues, essentially eliminating the person. And that’s not just the shorthand. That’s the pedagogy. That’s what we teach. And so, hundreds of thousands of doctors over the last hundred years have learned this technique of narrowing a human to a few facts. There are some exceptions. Some places are teaching it differently. But our everyday language in medicine is so truncated that it doesn’t connect to people.

And then, pseudo-health people come in and tell a story. Even if it’s just a 30-second story about some, you know, quack solution, it’s a story. The pseudo-health person doesn’t say: “Mrs. Jones is a 78-year-old female who had sleep disorders and she was prescribed X”.  The pseudo-health person says: “I’ve got a solution for your sleep problems”. Mrs. Jones follows this person’s advice. She believed this person. She’s a human who has been helped. It’s not just a p-value or a table.

Within our own healthcare system and in the world, I think we have essentially allowed a distracting consideration. We allow the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc to gain a foothold. After which, therefore, because of which. You know, I get calls from my PhD-educated siblings all the time. Oh, you know what? I ate some nuts and I couldn’t sleep for a week. And it’s like, I think the nuts made it so I couldn’t sleep. And this happens all the time. And then, there are people like our current HHS secretary who feed into that mythology. My child had a vaccine. My child has autism. Therefore, post hoc ergo propter hoc. My kid had a vaccine. It must be the cause because people need answers. And we have given up this narrative space to non-scientific people rather than claiming it as part of the tools that healthcare and science uses. And I think we’ve done it to our detriment.