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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Is there any other population of people who thinks they know better than doctors?

I'm not able to find any trace of them now, but starting in the late 90s through at least the early 2010s there were multiple fora and other corners of the internet where schizophrenics encouraged each other to stop taking their meds and reject doctors and the medical industry as a whole. This was generally couched as the doctor being One of Them, and In on IT. Schizophrenia is probably uniquely susceptible to this sort of thing; especially intelligent sufferers are often quite able to conceive a very internally convincing grand theory of the conspiracies against them and further transmit these to others over the internet in a way face-to-face interaction, which triggers the delusions and paranoia, cannot. I know from personal experience working in rehabilitation that online shopping as been a godsend for some people with schizophrenia who couldn't manage trips to physical stores without navigating multiple triggering events. To have people you can speak to without having a triggering event, who understand you and sympathize with you for the first time in a long time can be overwhelming in a positive seeming way at first. Then these newly trusted online friends tell you that nothing is actually wrong with you and it is in fact the meds that are doing it to you. Most hosting companies shut these fora down pretty fast once its brought to their attention however, and schizophrenics have no political organizations, PR orgs, or lobbying groups. Being genuinely, profoundly disabled they tend to lack any sort of cultural clout they can pivot into bullying people.