I work with an otherwise intelligent guy that honestly believes he was “tricked” into getting addicted to his doctor-prescribed medicine for the treatment of high-blood pressure.
See, he didn’t take the medicine when he was young, and his blood pressure was fine. Now it’s high. It must be the medicine’s fault, and the drug companies are just trying to milk him. Makes perfect sense, right?
He’s on this insane cycle, which typically lasts about two months. Start cycle: He has been taking his medicine, and has been feeling fine. But he starts to think about how the drug companies are playing him for a sucker, and that he’s fine, he doesn’t need the medicine, right? He gets angrier and angrier and then just stops taking it.
From that point on, he deteriorates. Feels worse and worse as his blood pressure soars. You can literally see it on him - he just looks sicker and sicker. Once or twice co-workers have taken him to the emergency room because he looked like he was going to have a heart attack or a stroke or something.
Then, his wife or his doctor will find out he’s been skipping his meds and yell at him. At this point he’s feeling too lousy to argue so he’ll begrudgingly take the medicine again, and very quickly feel better. But of course this is just proof that the drug companies have him addicted. Now he needs the medicine, it’s all their nefarious plot.
After a few weeks feeling better, he’ll repeat the cycle.
:smack:
He’s also a vaxxer, but not for the autism argument. He believes the government is genetically modifying viruses and vaccines are their way to try them out on the public. I get this speech every year when flu shots are offered at work. Thank god his stepson was already done with the major vaccines before he married his wife.
One of my best friends is a serious believer in homeopathic medicine. She is definitely otherwise a very intelligent woman, but I cannot convince her that this is nonsense, so we simply don’t discuss that subject any more.
I know someone at a previous job who felt this way about her diabetes meds :eek: She passed out at work and when tested was somewhere in the 480 range :eek: I understand that she is now on disability for diabetic retinopathic based blindness. I believe she can see light and dark, and shapes but that is about it.
My friend Nancy, as a young child, was told by her parents that “the entire house would blow up” if she touched the stove. This was obviously hogwash, but the parents didn’t want their 4 year old to hurt herself (or start a fire).
Nancy continued to believe this until she was 12 years old and was starting to help her mom cook.
I have lost the capability for any belief to shock me. However, I will probably never lose the capacity to be saddened and disgusted by people’s beliefs.
If you look into a lot of examples of “food X made by company Y contains gross ingredient Z”, Z turns out to be more expensive than whatever food X is supposed to be made of. The rumor about fast food hamburgers containing earthworms is an example of this. Earthworms cost more per pound than beef, so the rumor makes no sense.
That was my immediate reaction to the Bubble Yum spider-egg rumor. “Wait, this company is selling candy made with the eggs of poisonous spiders? For 35 cents? How can they possibly be making money?”
There’s a grain of truth to this, in that pollution doesn’t respect national borders, and that the Soviet Union was pretty bad about environmental issues, particularly before Gorbachev came to power. Of course, the mind control bit is just plain nuts.
I actually believed this (that hyperbolic cooling towers are limited to nuclear power facilities) until I took a trip out to western China (Xinjiang) and saw the trademark “nuclear” cooling towers on the coal-fired power plant near Urumqi. A quick Google indicated that all of China’s nuclear power facilities were in the east. :smack: I consider myself well-educated-- it was just a situation I’d never thought about before.
I’m still amazed when people in my Facebook “friends” post those stupid urban-legend statuses as fact. I must seem like a pretentious bitch because I always point them towards Snopes.
I had never thought about it all that hard, but that was my take on it, too - all the way into my first year in vet school, actually. :smack: My mum’s still bringing that one up at family dinners ten years later.
Generally, when I run in to one of them, I’ll try feeding them facts. Most refuse to believe the facts, but every now and then I get one that’s actually willing to do a little bit of reading.
I don’t see a lot of difference between that, and people who point out that some of the highest crime rates are in cities with the strictest gun control laws.
I didn’t realize that. I’d always heard that vaxxers support childhood vaccinations and anti-vaxxers oppose them.
I suppose it makes just as much sense to use both terms for the anti-vaccine crowd and call the pro-vaccine crowd “realists” or “people who are influenced by facts.”
Yeah, I suppose I don’t know the current real term, I’ve always just thought of idiots that oppose vaccinations based on fringe false beliefs as “vaxxers”.
I got interested in this again, and had a long, thoughtful, interesting and fully insane discussion with this guy. He is a friend, and despite the difficulty - (he tends to veer off into sputtering crazy rants on his hot topics) - I think I at least understand the psychological motivation behind his (incorrect) position.
He’s basically anti-medicine. Western, Eastern, New Age, whatever. His crazy belief is that his own body should be able to take care of itself; any “treatment” is an invasion on his personal physical self. He doesn’t mind wound treatment (he’s a military enthusiast) but anything beyond stitching up a wound is poisonous, corrupting quackery.
Hell, he even hates having his hair cut by someone else (like a barber.) He spent years butchering his own hair (much to our amusement) with a cheap trimmer until he married his wife, and she put her foot down (no more looking like you have mange)
I guess this kinda jibes with his own pseudo-Libertarianism. Politically, he’s always been of the mindset “Just leave me alone, and everything will be better.”
He’s nuts, but he’s still a friend. It was a fascinating glimpse into a particular madness.
My sister was on a kick like that for a few years. She thought that eating unrefined foods, and not using antibiotics, would trigger the body’s natural defenses enough to cure and even prevent all the “modern maladies.”
I believe in live and let live, but she had just had her first child (via natural childbirth, of course), so I mentioned that a fairly extensive experiment had tested her theory. It was known as the Dark Ages, and the result was an average life expectancy of around 30, largely thanks to very high infant mortality.
I don’t know if that helped, but she did accede to vaccinations shortly thereafter, and eventually gave up on the whole thing.
My paw was weird about medicine. He hated doctors. He refused to have an arm injury tended to until the bright blue stripe of infection had run up his arm nearly to the shoulder. If he got a cut, he’d just pour rubbing alcohol over it. He believed that, if it didn’t hurt, it wasn’t doing any good. Even then, he tried to cut it out himself before he let a doctor cut on him any.
(To be fair, he was pretty good at digging out splinters…)
“The pain is how you know it’s killing the germs.”
That’s a new one. The opposite extreme are the people who believe that our body either can’t take care of itself, or can’t because our modern diet/world causes a build up of “toxins.” So you should jam a tube up your ass and squirt water up there. Another belief is that Eastern/New Age medicine is better, because it’s older or something.
Is this related to the above, or is he just too cheap/lazy like me to go to a professional place all the time?
