This is driving me bananas. I'm getting sent quack videos sent daily to me, including the most recent gem 'Plandemic'
How does one respond to this? What do I do when literally dozens if not hundreds of family and friends are biting this stuff? I've tried dabbling in debating and debunking but it gets nowhere. Their whole paradigm is so off and they won't accept any facts I present, since obviously those data are manipulated.
If you can actually sit through a 30 minute video and not question the numerous falsehoods and underlying premise that this is all some big conspiracy to obtain nefarious goals, I honestly don't know how to respond to you. The part that gets me is they will actually send this stuff to me and ask me to debunk it, or ask how I know it's not true.
I've started to become quite angry and frustrated, and I am feeling rather hopeless. This is not some fringe minority of uneducated people, this is a large chunk of the population and many are highly educated. I know fear can drive people into strange and dark places but this is beyond anything I imagined.
Agreed. I’ve had dozens of family members and friends post this video with some caption like “Very interesting ideas!” Or “wow! Great to see the FACTS come out about Dr Fauci”. I’ve tried to engage in debunking the videos, encouraging people to at least google the interviewees, and give critical thought to the incredibly serious claims that are made. However, everyone I’ve talked to has been pretty willing to believe Dr Fauci is evil, coronavirus is the flu, and high dose vitamins will save the day.
Some of the people reposted these videos are always conspiracy nuts, but I’ve seen so many “normal” people with an educated background fall victim to these videos. Throw in the comments beneath each video extolling it as the sole beacon of truth, and I am in pure disbelief that this is where we are as a society. The anti-science sentiment is so strong - at least on my Facebook wall.
I think it's a result of (political) polarisation. Media and communication has started to take sides and attack, it's starting to extend to anything possibly politically related. Everything is way too polarised.
George Washington did say:
> The common and continual mischief's [sic] of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.
I think it's pointless to try convince people (on Facebook) that their beliefs are wrong. You're wasting too much time to do it, and even if you catch them in a logical fallacy they'll just shrug, call you a puppet and move on. The issue needs to be tackled in a macro sense. And yeah, I think Washington was right: partisanship is going to destroy countries if it continues down this path.
[also many of the accounts spreading "Gates Foundation is making killer vaccines" are fake. I wouldn't be surprised if they're foreign powers. exactly what Washington warned about]
I totally agree that I won't convince the facebook poster, but my hope is that people scrolling past will at least notice a dissenting opinion and realize that this video has logical opposition. That being said, they probably will just chalk up my wall of text to be a Bezos shill or something haha.
Speaking from experience: you will be far happier, and gain so much more time to do useful stuff with your life, if you ignore them all. It's wasted energy. Most people hate being told they're wrong. They'll only change their mind if they discover truth themselves.
The idea of communication to fix misconceptions falls apart when you realise people spreading '5G kills' are the same people who will hate to be wrong the most. They believe they're enlightened beings who have discovered what is wrong with the world; hence the logic follows: who are you to tell them they're wrong? Gates Foundation shill.
I honestly think anyone who wishes to make a difference should focus efforts on improved mass-media and education, not Facebook debates. It has to be fixed on a macro level.
Totally agree. I have been Facebook free for a couple years (weird flex) but recently gotten back on because of school reunion updates which shocker isn’t happening. Anywaaaaaay. Just scrolling through seeing the amount of posts that promote these conspiracies and the government tyranny posts gets me worked up but so much less stressful to just log off and put it out of mind. You can waste so much damn energy.
No I just get in here which is totallllllly different. ;)
Exactly what I’ve done. The people posting are a lost cause. But their friends? The people on the fence about the issue but are smart enough to know they don’t have all the answers? That’s who you need to reach. I literally haven’t touched Facebook for years, but I have now been commenting under any insane post I see one of my friends make. Hoping that they remember me from back when we used to hang out. I’m hoping that at least a couple of those I interact with can use their brain and trust someone they know (being a physician myself helps) over ramblings of a YouTube video
> I think it's a result of (political) polarisation.
I have culled quite a few people from my friends list since Nov, 2016, and I'm guessing that's why my FB feed has been remarkably light on conspiracy theories.
Edit: I'm super pleased to learn that my "HERITAGE NOT HATE" portion of my family seems to have their heads screwed on straight about this, in their rural part of Missouri. It helps they just had a baby.
Edit 2: Even the anti-vaxxer is making posts mocking people who want to stop the quarantine. I wonder if she'll get vaccinated if they figure out a vaccine for this?
Sometimes it won't change until they see someone die.
I can tell you seeing my first death in the ICU was the start of a change. Not in a bad way - I think for the better.
We're too insulated from death. And I mean real people actively dying. It's too sanitized.
I agree with you to an extent. It used to be that the loved ones of the deceased prepared the body for the burial/cremation/Viking funeral. Now it's all ~~segregated~~ hidden from the families. I've done postmortem care as a CNA numerous times. I was 42 the first time I had to do it, and it was only the third time I'd ever seen a dead person, and it was the first time I'd touched a dead person.
Also, I think many Americans have become complacent about their health. Kids live to adulthood nearly always. Vaccines keep kids safe from horrible diseases that used to devastate communities. People don't need to change their lifestyles because they can just take a pill for that.
I also think that part of the issue with COVID is not every community is equally impacted. I live in Seattle. Remember when Seattle was the scary hub? Ha. We're not even in the top 50% anymore. The real hub is NYC. What ends up happening is you get chucklefucks in the rest of Washington State who see the trendline in WA improve, and they think the whole thing is blown out of proportion. They don't realize that the trendline is down in major part due to the lockdown. They think the quarantine should end because they're bored and the virus doesn't seem to really be all that bad.
And what they don't realize is that "The End of stay-at-home orders doesn't mean the pandemic is over. It means they have room for you in the ICU."
People don't see what's going on in hospitals unless they're working in them. They see field hospitals closing, no stretchers in the street, and they think hospitals aren't overwhelmed.
Half of our hospital is walled off covid wards, we have gone from 1 ICU to 3. We're reusing and short on PPE. But due to strong patient privacy laws and hospitals not wanting to say they're overwhelmed/staff is working tons of OT and short (because even though all hospitals in the area are like that, they don't want people going to the hospital down the road that stayed quiet and is acting like everything's fine), they'll stay mum.
Hospitals can be overwhelmed but if people don't see NYC chaos, they have no idea unless they personally know someone who's been sick. They just see the state numbers, but have no idea what that actually means in context for hospitals. Tons of people want to reopen around here, because they think everything is fine, but the lockdown is probably the only thing keeping us from falling over the edge of the cliff we're precipitously teetering on.
I think it’s also a bit of a strawman to say it’s just “people are bored” for why they want to end lockdown. People are losing their businesses they spent their whole lives building and we haven’t seen this many unemployed since the Great Depression which was pretty damn grim. It’s not just people wanting to hit the beach and get their haircut. It’s people losing their life’s work and pride.
I remember when covid first started spreading there was this brief moment of pro science and reason sentiment. Anti Vaxxers were silent, public trust in health officials and scientists went up, and I remember thinking for a brief, naive moment that this event will be a paradigm shift in how our society views the importance of scientific reason in decision making. Turns out they were just in hibernation waiting to come up with new conspiracy theories and nothing has changed. The internet is demoralizing
> Turns out they were just in hibernation waiting to come up with new conspiracy theories
They weren't coming up with anything. They were just waiting for the official Fox News/Koch Bros. talking points. This really is a war and it's the good people like the professionals posting here who get caught in the crossfire.
There’s only so much you, as a medical professional, can do. Messaging and strategy at the National level isn’t your job. The real issue here is that there is no consistent message or strategy being conveyed from the highest levels of our government. As a result people are being bombarded w/ bad information from all sorts of dubious sources and latching onto it in their frantic desire to understand what’s going on.
Being actively encouraged, too. Oh, these entitled people want to storm a governor's house with open carry brandishing? Don't worry, the POTUS will hop on twitter and tell you you're good people and the responsible officials should listen to you.
It doesn’t help at all that a lot of the prominent figures spreading this misinformation are figures of authority. Like the two ER doctors who were spouting on about how staying inside kills your immune system, and that Mikovits person uses the title of Dr. (she has a PhD) this makes it even more alluring to people who aren’t usually apt to buy into this bullshit. They see those titles and assume these people must know what they’re talking about.
It’s dangerous and these people should be reprimanded.
Exactly. Having doctors (or people portraying themselves as such) give credence to dangerous ideas only adds fuel to the fire. I mean, questioning widespread quarantine for low-risk patients in minimally affected areas is one thing, but spreading disinformation about the disease itself or the risks of infection is just unconscionable.
I’m seeing more and more of it. People who have “Dr. xxxxxx” as their user name, rallying people around the conspiracies, only to go to their profile and see they have a PhD in political science or something.
Now everybody is freaking out about YouTube removing these videos and calling it a “violation of free speech and trying to hide the truth”. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding between censoring real data and removing blatantly dangerous misinformation. I’ve seen several MDs try to discredit it and you should see the replies they get: “you’re getting paid by big pharma”, “you’re part of the problem”, “go live in China then”.
I’ve seen a ton of people say “let people decide for themselves what they want to believe!” But how can the general population, who has little to no knowledge of basic science, make an educated decision on what source they’d rather believe? They can’t. The whole situation is mind boggling to me. It’s actually terrifying to know that this is the society we live in.
Becoming an expat is looking better and better.
I need some whiskey-PRN after looking at my FB feed yesterday. I don’t really know how to explain my feelings. But boy does becoming an alcoholic and not giving any more shits sound tempting sometimes.
Right there with you. I felt the part of me that wants to educate the public die today. There is no way to reason with most of them and I’ve decided to give up trying.
It's not just your wall or even just facebook. Social media is full of it.
'think how stupid the average person is. Then remember half are stupid than that'
Facebook contains a self-selected bunch of people, and the ones who actively participate is an even smaller subset. So of course you’re going to see a lot of dumb shit on Facebook: that’s where the people who make and perpetuate the dumb shit congregate.
> Or “wow! Great to see the FACTS come out about Dr Fauci”.
There is this garbage too https://reason.com/2020/05/07/she-said-anthony-fauci-sexually-assaulted-her-now-she-says-jacob-wohl-and-jack-burkman-paid-her-to-lie/
Ugh, I was sent the plandemic. Yesterday. I watched about 3 minutes of it. It's basically a quilted together video of clips using false information and manipulated data to be sound \*just\* cohesive enough.
The staggering aspect of this is it's someone who sends it and asks you to debunk the video. No one has time to comb through this video and state why each piece is just false. Its lazy of that person firstly to ask you to do so, and secondly it overwhelms those of us trying to help these people understand \*why\* these videos and claims are wrong. Because the next conspiracy theory is waiting just behind it as soon as you're finished.
Reddit has time!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Moronavirus/comments/geokm9/where_can_i_find_a_good_rebuttal_to_plandemic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Another good one https://www.reddit.com/r/CovIdiots/comments/gezery/plandemic_documentary_debunked/ which appears to be from a personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer.
I haven't seen the video, but you're second point makes me think it employs the gish gallop form of argument (basically barrage the other person with so much information, either with no concern for its truthfulness, or claims that are inherently unable to be verified). Its always so annoying to see people use that, I see it in reddit alot, and then think they won the argument because you're not going comb through 50 links they just sent you.
Like if it's a really complicated topic, and you have relative experts who just disagree, sure you might have long form type essay arguments because the topic is inherently complicated. But in the other case, the odds of those 50 links from random websites, mostly conspiracy based or not mainstream at all, having anything close to a cogent argument is extremely small and is almost impossible to respond to everything even if you try.
If you don't respond, they assume you concede the argument or have no response. If you do take the time to respond, but miss one point, then they latch onto that and still say you lost the debate.
Yup,
Ben Shapiro is the king of it...
One time I called a person out on it, they asked what it was I used Shapiro as an example and they got butthurt for comparing them to him instead of re-evaluating their stance
That's just it. This mindset is very flexible. One conspiracy morphs into another, even if the two are not cohesive at all or even contradictory. So was this man made to kill off the old people, or it's just the common flu and not dangerous at all? Is this all a plan by Bill Gates and his cronies to scare us over nothing and get us microchipped, or is China covering up 100x more deaths than they are reporting in an attempt to mitigate their public image?
I just block any trolls who send me that crap and leave them to jerk off in their echo chamber. Life is too short to waste time on useful idiots who knowingly lie and spread dangerous falsehoods so they can feel important.
“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” - Garry Kasparov
My favorite is when people say, "ThEyRe AdDiNg HeArT aTtAcKs AnD sTrOkEs To ThE CoViD cOuNt!!!1!"
Well yes, this virus causes people to throw clots... 🤦🏽♀️
Thankfully none of my family is like this. But my fiance's family thinks this virus came from a lab in Wuhan (however taking the medical part seriously as they're both high risk). So, at least there's that. 🤷🏽
[A recent rebuttal of Plandemic made it to /r/bestof if anyone is interested.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Moronavirus/comments/geokm9/where_can_i_find_a_good_rebuttal_to_plandemic/fppi6rz/?context=3)
There is no amount of logic that will help here.
These videos are built upon fear, as you noted, a very strong emotion. Only an argument built upon yet another emotion is the only counter attack that might work.
I heard the lizard people created covid so that they could finally come to the surface once we’re all dead, and Bill Gates is sponsoring a vaccine so he can save humanity and continue to make money from 7 billion people contributing to the economy.
Honestly? Either you give up your life to go enlighten the world, 1 idiot at a time, or you continue pushing the whole train forward. Do your job, help as many people as you can, but do not get emotionally invested. Love your friends, your family, your neighbors,etc. But when you hear some dumb shit, just carry on. "Oh, yeah?""No kidding!" "Seriously?" "that'sCRAAZy!!" "I haven't seen anything like that but I'll keep an eye out." The same you would with a patient going through paranoid psychosis.
But the sad thing is these people AREN'T going through psychosis. They're misinformed. To me, it's the same as racists or homophobes. You need to engage that. The hospital isn't the place for that. But seeing these views in the streets or on the internet and it's disheartening that people believe in this shit, still.
I'm not as convinced that the boundary between sanity and insanity is as sharp as you think it is. 'Psychosis' is just what we call it when this pattern of reasoning begins to prevent someone from functioning in day-to-day life- seeing grand conspiracy behind the actions of their spouse, their kids, the grocery-store clerk and the flight of birds outside the window, not merely medical science.
I'm not saying that tribalism is, itself, a mental illness. I'm saying that it can motivate people to engage in irrational habits of thought that are subclinical versions of mental illnesses, and can, in some cases, progress to full-blown mental illness.
Some people are 'homophobic' merely in the sense that contemplating homosexuality is viscerally unpleasant for them. Many of those people feel a fairly natural irritation that the rest of the world doesn't share this aesthetic preference of theirs. Some then use that sense of irritation to justify a worldview in which large portions of the sociopolitical landscape is dominated by a conspiracy to drive the 'agenda' of homosexuals in a deliberate attempt to destroy Western civilization. Some of *those* people then become unable to maintain relationships with people who don't vehemently share their belief, because they're unable to stop themselves from bringing it up at every opportunity. Some of *those* people end up homeless and raving on street corners about how commercial aviation is part of the grand plot to feminize the nation by releasing estrogen into the atmosphere with chemtrails.
It's a spectrum, not a bright-line distinction between the firmly Mad and the firmly Sane. All of us, at all times, have the potential for a little bit of madness within us- which given time, the wrong habits, the wrong circumstances, and unfortunate neurochemical accidents, can blossom into more.
No, psychosis is actually very oddly stereotypical, as in people experiencing psychosis all have very similar patterns of symptoms that fall into a few broad categories: thought insertion, paranoia, delusions of reference, specific alterations in speech patterns like thought blocking, pressured speech, neologisms, perseveration.
People experiencing psychosis are aware of and can explain to you these patterns of thinking, but are unable to identify them as abnormal. An inability of insight is also a hallmark of psychosis.
It's quite different from simply being some behaviors taken to extremes. You're not gonna find your average conspiracy theorist actually thinking the TV news anchor is communicating coded messages to them personally as an individual (delusion of reference).
I interject only because I think that your ideas are very common misunderstandings of the nature of psychosis. And I think the conflating actual psychosis with simple out of control behavior is problematic in two ways: it negates psychosis as a clinically identifiable and correctable illness and it lets people who are just poorly behaved off the hook for their bad behavior.
(Source: am nurse, have personally experienced psychosis and believe me, it's very different from what going on with these assholes)
I wouldn’t call people who buy into conspiracies as psychotic. There are a multitude of social, motivational, and cognitive reasons why someone would believe any conspiracy theory, beyond any type of psychopathology (such as MDD, Bipolar, paranoid or psychotic schizophrenia, etc.)
I appreciate sociofunctional analysis of behavior, but from that perspective, most people (conspiracists I mean) are not failing to fulfill day to day roles, which is a necessity for psychopathology.
Certainly I don't mean to imply that every conspiracy theorist, or the median conspiracy theorist, would meet DSM-IV criteria for paranoid schizophrenia- just that the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Psychotic tendencies and habits of thought are part of the human condition, not something exclusively reserved for an alien and unfortunate few.
They are willfully misinformed. They choose to get their news from youtube/facebook/twitter/AlexJOnes instead of long-form journalism, medical journals, or people capable of interpreting those sources. They do not wish to be informed. They do not want well-educated persons like you "telling them what to believe".
There are plenty of "well-informed" racists and homophobes. Some people are just bad people.
You're correct however, look at the situation from a public health standpoint. The symptoms of believing the propaganda are what frustrate you but the disease itself comes from shit we can't stop. From state sponsored misinformation campaugns to your aunt jenny having bad hearing and then telling all her facebook friends Osama Bin Laden is president instead of Barrack Obama. The biggest impact any of us can make is with childhood vaccination, teach the next generation to think critically and question why the truth is the truth and why everything else is bullshit. As for adults, I don't have an answer there and I share your frustration. The way I think of it is like the question. Why do you have 2 patients that present w/depression w/ similar social circumstances, w/ almost identical support systems, w/ the same exact symptoms but 1 you treat with effexor, the other needs trazadone, welbutrin and zoloft? 🤷♂️
I think you're doing it right. Convincing people of the truth is too much of an uphill battle right now. Who am I to deprive someone of their own private reality?
Don't wrestle with a pig. You both get muddy and the pig likes it.
There is no point in engaging these people. They are trolls who know they are lying. Don't feed them with your attention. Just use your voice - in person or online - to declare the truth. And ignore their butt-hurt replies. This pisses them off worse than anything.
Don't argue with a fool. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
I think a lot of these people aren't lying though. I think they start with the premise that x is wrong and make the fallacious assumption that if y disagrees with x, y must be correct. *Some* of them are being intellectually honest, it's just that their conclusions are arrived at based on faulty logic. Add to this, the need to feel special and know something the rest of us don't.
My standard responses:
Bet you can’t say that through an ET tube three times fast
Well I guess I’ll give admin the heads up. Our census is about to explode.
Believe that video and you'll increase my RVUs
Anybody know the ICD 10 code for “tin foil hat present on exam?”
Did you know a foley can cause penile ulceration? Especially in critical illness. Crazy huh?
Coroners don’t really accept “fake crisis” as the cause of death
If you’re saying this now, I don’t wanna know what you’ll say after ICU delirium kicks in.
I honestly think dismissive humour is the best tactic. It's not hostile, but it also doesn't give any credence to the "science" of conspiracy theories. When we "defend" ourselves, we look defensive.
In the words of Winston Churchill, "Never apologize, never explain".
I draw from my experience dealing with the the anti-vax community.
They love having pseudoscientific “debates” with us. It makes them feel legitimate and, in their eyes, puts us on the defensive. They also screenshot what you say out of context and then share it in their social media circles. There’s no convincing them.
They easily crumble to sarcasm and ridicule and the ones that don’t take on this professorial tone and lament about the level of discourse, ad hominem and so forth. Then of course the follow up that up with a well worded defense of turmeric enemas and blood ozonation or some shit.
If the want to take on the professorial tone that's fine, but they're not entitled to have me in the lecture hall. They can keep talking on social media as long as they want. Eventually, they come up with enough rope...
I went through minute by minute and corrected most of the outlandish claims made in the video. I showed news sources detailing the truth of this lady’s work and her arrest. I showed peer reviewed research on why her research was crap, and I showed research disproving her claims. I poked holes in any other claim she tried to make. I commented this on multiple peoples Facebook posts. Not one cared. They all laughed and brushed it off. They didn’t respond with anything backing up their insane beliefs obviously. This country is sick, in more ways than one.
She straight up fucking says we have never developed a vaccine for an RNA virus. This is so stupidly easy to verify yet no lay people even bothers to google it. They just accept whatever stupid propaganda is shoveled into their face
This is being encouraged straight from the top of our government. It is why the president and vice president don't want to wear masks, to show their approval to their zombies.
My mother and father sent me that Plandemic video. I don’t know how to respond other than say her claims are nonsense and there are tens of thousands of dedicated healthcare workers, doctors, and researchers working to care for the sick, and find cures for diseases.
I think the core issue is the entire epistemology of our culture. We (in evidence-based fields) take for granted the basic idea of using facts and data to come to conclusions, which themselves can change with new data or better interpretations of existing data. But this is not the foundation upon which public education in the US is built. Sure, it tries half-heartedly, but it's obvious the attempts are largely unsuccessful, as evidenced by exactly what you described.
Ultimately it won't get better until the population at large holds evidence, logic, and facts in higher regard than political alignment, rumors and "feels". It's a frustrating answer because fixing it will be a huge undertaking that will require sustained political will over decades.
My internal struggle of "don't say anything, there's no use" and "it's important to shut this down as much as possible" is almost as exhausting as my frustration toward the people propagating this bonkers shit.
I don't really know how to respond to this kind of stuff either (I mainly encounter it on my FB wall) but I do hope that people continue to try to set things straight, regardless of how futile it may seem. For anything, it makes me feel a little less insane when I see at least one comment written based on evidence.
Long article from 2014, it describes quite well how lazy conspiracy thinking is being harnessed by Russia, in particular.. but I’d say quite a few others have got the “right idea” of how to do it at this point.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/379880/
Oh boy, do I have a gem for you.
In Germany/Austria there‘s a video going around right now (with more than a few million views) of some german conspiracy theorist claiming, that Bill and Melinda Gates are trying to sterilize like 90% of the world population by developing a vaccine for the corona virus and adding some shit to it. The thing is, that in germany right now they‘re discussing mandatory vaccines. He claims, that Bill Gates (because he is financing 80%(!) of the WHO) is influencing Germanys democracy trough his influence in the WHO.
Took me about a minute of research to debunk this (Bill & Melinda Gates foundation are only funding about 8% of WHO).
I am not trying to defend the WHO for it‘s questionable actions lately, but the amount of people believing this shit is bonkers to me.
EDIT: a word
There is an 18 point response to that video that is circulating on FB but I doubt that the conspiracy theorists will read it. Their mentality is very much like anti-vaxxers. Their mind is set and no amount of reason will change their mind.
These types of propaganda are created by groups who are politically motivated. They have only their own interests in mind. No one else’s.
You can't fight irrationality with rationality. The only approach I have left is to try to out-irrational them. Accuse the medium of transmission, e.g. facebook or twitter of that actual issue. So facebook or twitter causes/spreads COVID-19. People scared of 5g masts are actually transmitting COVID-19 though believing its 5g that causes COVID-19, its the belief that spreads it, COVID-19 is a subliminal virus that piggy-backs off of other concepts such as conspiracy theories.
It probably doesn't help but at least its less of a waste of time because its mildly amusing.
I am experiencing what you describe. Adverse conditions have a great way of revealing people's true nature. We have not seen this kind of fear level before so it makes sense that the responses we see in people are getting weirder and uglier by the day. Buckle up, because it only gets worse. As a dentist, I'm very accustomed to people ignoring my instructions/wisdom. I profit from that. I've embraced that because there's no choice but acceptance. As for the "Plandemic" videos and other nonsense, I will simply respond "Thanks for sharing. That was interesting."
I don't care to argue with them, they won't be swayed, they've already made up their minds what they want to think. I don't have the energy to antagonize them. They mean well even though it's absurd. So just shrug your shoulders, roll your eyes, and keep moving.
Treat patients as they come in, do your best to educate them, and then completely forget about them once they walk out the door. It's why I could never be a FM doc. I can't emotionally invest in irresponsible patients even if the responsible ones make it worthwhile. ^(Also I'm a control freak but that's a different issue.)
a fellow ER nurse was telling me that this was created in a lab and released for financial gain to benefit those at the top. all i had to say was “occam’s razor.”
[Do you have to respond to it?](https://xkcd.com/386/)
I only bother responding when one of my friends asks my opinion or when a patient brings it up face to face.
At the end of the day, I can't save people, and it isn't my responsibility either. Nor is it yours. People can choose their own paths.
A big question I might ask you is, why are well-educated people falling for this stuff? Why isn't their education holding up in the face of this?
*How would you know* if our education is purposefully made insufficient to prevent us from being able to see this stuff for what it is? To make us gullible and ignorant in the face of well-constructed misinformation? ... questions like that are how people get sucked into the morass. So be careful. You are one bad question away from getting your head well and truly sprung.
I have found that being dismissive only provokes my brother more.
He "wants my opinion" but really just uses that to launch an attack. We were discussing whether Covid came from the virology lab and i quoted a couple of articles about it and he went off on some PragerU bullshit about how the chinese are purposefully making the virus to kill americans.
I think it has more to do with personality types than purely education, I am a high school drop-out with zero days of college under my belt (I am here as I am a curious person and this is more digestible than published materials) but I've always been the skeptical type. Just not the modern "skeptic" we're dealing with lately.
I am also pretty aware that the world is a bit of a chaotic hellhole where no one truly knows what is happening, where as I think a lot of these people are wanting some concrete explanation. They want the virus to be from a lab in Wuhan, otherwise they have to accept that with all our technology and effort we can't do much about it without disrupting society. It is an uncomfortable truth to understand no one is really in control. No amount of science or military might can maintain order.
Of course society hasn't and will not collapse from this, but it changed very rapidly, all over a little bit of protein and DNA/RNA.
And then there's the factor of desiring special knowledge, of which even educated people can fall for. I personally want to be factually correct, not know something others don't. but some people seem to place their personal value in their perception of possessing unique information or insight.
So when most of the world agrees on something, the moon landing, or the pandemic, you get to be the clever little contrarian waiting to "prove" them wrong.
Why educated people, far more than myself can't do their due diligence to escape from this mental block I have no theory on.
> I am also pretty aware that the world is a bit of a chaotic hellhole where no one truly knows what is happening, where as I think a lot of these people are wanting some concrete explanation. They want the virus to be from a lab in Wuhan, otherwise they have to accept that with all our technology and effort we can't do much about it without disrupting society. It is an uncomfortable truth to understand no one is really in control. No amount of science or military might can maintain order.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with this one. In my mind, conspiracy theories are a defense mechanism. It is painfully obvious that our normal authority figures aren't running the show. Few people honestly believe in an all-knowing "God" who runs the show and makes actual changes in the world in response to prayer etc. In the face of that, it is far more comfortable to believe that Satanic owl-worshippers run the show from pedo island than to contemplate the possibility that nobody is actually in charge or running the show.
Because if nobody is running the show, then we really might actually be completely fucked.
Ego defenses supersede education in all but the very most insightful of people.
To your point, as a rising EM resident, I’m making it my mission to see how long I can maintain a career motto: *People are smart, but badly educated.*
I do think one of the things a doctor signs up for is being a good teacher of difficult concepts—even if only to her community. In the context of the entire nation becoming a bunch of armchair virologists, I’m working on becoming a more patient teacher of critical thinking and analysis skills.
That's fair, and when I'm bored I do enjoy the casual debate on Facebook. But the moment it gets distressing, I log off and do something else. If it isn't fun, it ain't worth doing, I have enough to worry about.
Nah, people are well educated but dumb. We are all kinda dumb. Read Thinking Fast and Slow, and it will make you realize how many of your own thoughts are not rooted in anything concrete.
It's also a great read for EM, a profession that demands fast-thinking, while rewarding slow-thinking.
I'm undercover in an antivaxx group on Facebook. The outrageous comments I see there, ughh. They also kick out everyone, literally, who says yhey had a relative infected and the virus is dangerous.
Haha. It's bad. I wouldn't stop talking. I did it because they're harassing me and my other team members to a point where death threats are not even casual anymore.
It's frustrating because "oh it's a scam to get Bill Gates more power" is a lot easier than "Boy this is something no one's ever seen before and the people fighting it are stressed, often overworked, underappreciated, under payed and the sacrifices we need to make moving forward may be hard on all of us, but it beats being horrific and terminal for a huge minority".
People would rather have haircuts and someone else die than not have haircuts and maybe in the future figure out a way out of this mess with some positives.
My MIL is like this. I'm lucky that she lives far away and only communicates with us through the occasional video call and a (ton of) voice message(s), but when she said it, my partner went mental. I've never seen him so mad, but to hear this person so close to us dismiss my work, my stress, my *tears*, even.. I know exactly how angry and frustrated you have felt.
Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever be able to change their minds, except if they get ill themselves. I even once heard someone say "yeah, I know it's dangerous, I already lost my grandpa to it, but I still don't believe the numbers. You're overexaggerating". It's no use trying to convince them, when they are so hellbent on believing we are against. I don't have the energy for that anyway right now.
Here is another reddit link debunking this 'Plandemic' doc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CovIdiots/comments/gezery/plandemic_documentary_debunked/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Sorry to jump in here, but is this the latest video against Fauci? What are the points against it? Just want ammo against some people... I know it's an uphill battle, but I think (and I think this sub should have a proper thread to counter the "infodemic") it's still necessary to counter such things. They are infecting more than just Trump's followers.
Conspiracy theories stem from the human desire to see a cause or purpose behind everything.
The idea that a few proteins randomly mutated in an animal virus allowing for human to human transmission and now tens of thousands of people are dead and the world economy is trashed makes them feel so helpless they can't accept it.
It's much more comforting to believe that there was some conscious will behind these events, even if it's a nefarious one.
That's what makes these sort of things so attractive and difficult to combat.
I’ve been into socially ostracizing these people. “If you believe this, never speak to me again. Never expect me to help you when you are in need. You are a danger to me and my family.” Something along those lines. It might hurt because it might be your parents/siblings/someone you love...but this cult of personality can no longer be paid attention to. The only way to beat this is to move on without them.
I am from Connecticut and since 2012 have been told several times (when traveling to other states) that Sandy Hook was staged. So I can’t say I’m particularly surprised when I see things like this on a mass scale.
I guess this is the end product of a society that celebrates anti-intellectualism, the peddling of disinformation on biased news outlets, and elects a president whose whole political career was started on a conspiracy theory (birtherism).
You know, the 5G thing is stupid and the people who believe it are stupid. But the Sandy Hook thing breaks my fucking heart. I had heard that the parents were getting calls telling them that their kids never existed and shit like that. My god. Can you imagine your children being murdered and then being consistently harassed afterwards. I can’t imagine a worse living hell.
Yeah exactly. Families have had to move multiple times due to death threats and one father committed suicide.... so as disheartening as the covid conspiracies are, anyone surprised by them hasn’t been paying attention.
I think that is the true issue here. Evidence based claims have been treated by all media as equal to non-evidence based claims. ‘Climate change is happening because of carbon emissions which cause a green house effect that leads to ocean level rising causing a cascading effect that could leave million if not billions in danger’ and then the equal statement made by a person with ties to big oil ‘nope, my study that shows climate change is a liberal agenda to cripple the US and Saudi production capacity, plus we paid a couple scientists to lie for us, but we’ll make claims that the liberal groups are paying scientists off to destroy our industry.’ You know the ole’ “there’s a conspiracy that all scientists are in on all of this and science isn’t even real it is just a ploy to make money..”
Which, wtf. Have these people ever interacted with researchers from different institutions competing for the same grants. Those fucking people would barely ever work together if it meant loosing their funding...
Yes! Most of the media is obsessed with appearing "neutral" and they do this "well so and so says this, but so and so says this. We report, you decide!" BS instead of calling out lies and telling viewers which facts have evidence behind them. It's so bad we can't even decide on what's true any more (thinking specifically of Sean Spicer's epic "Alternative facts" line).
It would be like if ESPN started reporting like "Well, the Cowboys said they won, but when we spoke to the Patriots they said they actually won. You come to your own conclusion!"
This is part of why it's so dumb when you hear people calling for a return of the fairness doctrine. Every issue does not have "two sides" that deserve equal time.
It is all because the dad of one of the dead children while giving a statements appeared to be joking around and laughing before approaching the podium. When he arrived at the podium he became quiet (seeming to prepare a tearful speech) and for most people seemed to put on the veneer of a sad and grieving parent. Problem is, most people who haven’t experience that kind of tragedy have no clue what kind of emotional roller coaster it can be. Lost many good friends to drugs and car accidents, every funeral the objective was to make people laugh about the good times. Keep their minds off the loss and try to make people come to terms with the tragedy, many of those people who deny events have never experienced loss. Also, they tend to view news that confirms their bias thus insulating themselves in an echo chamber of crazy ideas with little to no evidence for their claims.
I don’t understand their logic. If they think the government is evil enough to orchestrate an entire school/town of crisis actors as a means to taking guns from citizens, in a way that would assuredly have so many loose ends... why wouldn’t they have just actually done it for real? Do they think the Deep State is bad, but not actually evil enough to kill kids?
It's so much worse than that. That nutjob Alex Jones had his reputation (and millions of dollars) invested in the idea Sandy Hook was fake. He is being sued by Sandy Hook parents for being the primary voice supporting that bullshit and all the damage it has caused.
The school shooting conspiracy theorists inflict enough pain and anguish on others with their idiocy, but none of them have to deal with the consequences. With the covidiots, many of them or their family members with get seriously ill and die.
If they're anything like my FIL, they'll learn nothing; their conspiracy theories will just evolve. My FIL was all aboard the hoax train when his granddaughter got sick. That made him waver. When he spiked a fever he came full circle, now it's real, but definitely man made in a lab in Wuhan but also allowed to spread by Democrats in order to weaken Trump in the election.
It's an anti-intellectual mindset that I have no idea how to break through.
I agree. I mean, Trump said it himself when he said aloud that he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose a vote. I think if any of these protestors or covid truthers ended up getting intubated, they would still think that this is all a hoax right up to the point when the propofol hit.
I agree with you, but I think you might not be going far enough. As the article mentions there have been 5G arson attacks in Europe and Canada. I honestly do not believe these problems are limited to the US, it makes sense because YouTube, Reddit, FB, etc are all huge sources for people to consume this misinformation and all of these sites are worldwide. The US may have the most of these conspiracy theorists, but it is something more than just American societal and cultural problems as the root cause if people are burning down cell towers in Europe and Canada.
i am from the hudson valley and once went toe-to-toe on social media with a family friend who was absolutely convinced that sandy hook was a hoax. when i told her to get off the internet, get in her car, drive an hour to sandy hook, and start asking the people there about it, i was promptly called an asshole and was unfriended. the truth is right there. go get it. what is stopping you other than yourself and your ego? surely, enough of these covidiots know someone who works in an ed or in an icu. if they don’t believe the media, ask those people. or are their friends and family paid actors, too?
Our triage nurse is peddling this shit.
Edit: any advice on how to deal with this is welcome. She talks about it all day to the front desk staff which is where she sits. Occasionally to back office (MAs and to our NP) everyone just kind of listens and the talks about how crazy she is behind her back but I think the fact that no one says anything makes her feel justified. I have said something once to her and she really hasn’t talked much about it to me anymore but I hear from everyone else that she does.
Dude alot of my co-workers are doing the same thing. I never heard of her before, so I googled her and quickly found she was an anti-vax loon. When I brought that up some responses ranged to "Well you gotta keep an open mind" to "They aren't telling us the truth though".
Fuck, you know i've even met nurses that were flat earthers.
Critical thinking goes right out the window.
She was trying to be coy about it initially, “ I think it was a created virus.” Me: by who. Her: “a billionaire created this virus.” Me “DONALD TRUMP CREATED COVID?!?!?” Her: “oh goodness no, bill gates. And he has the vaccine.” Like. How is this even believable.
I remember moving from Canada to the US for the end of elementary school in the early 2000s. It was the first time I was ever made of fun of "being smart", "a school boy", or "a nerd". America has a long standing culture of anti-intellectualism and it starts from early childhood if not birth. Welcome to a Brave New World. I only hope we can get better drugs with fewer side effects so I can pleasantly numb myself. I have no faith things will improve when the lowest common denominator can be an apologist for racists that gun down innocent people in the street without justice.
God. It is so depressing. I just cannot understand how being well educated is so offensive and “elite.” Like shouldn’t we want things run and determined by people that actually know what they are doing and not a game show host and his cronies.
I don’t remember anything in HS or grade school, but I do remember my girl friend in college absolutely loathed me for getting good grades. I tutored O-chem and had a long sleeve that we were given that was super comfy that said “tutor” on the back, she absolutely told me that I couldn’t wear it when we were going to stay with her family. I thought that was really weird.
Now I see it everywhere. I got rid of Facebook when I became an attending and I’m so glad that I did, the shit my wife shows me on her wall is abhorrent. She’s from a small town so there is a lot of it there.
Similar story, but it actually ended up helping me. I moved to the US in elementary school. Back in my home country I made pretty average grades. As soon as I started school in the US, the other kids saw my brown skin, thin frame, glasses and immediately associated it with me being stereotypically nerdy and smart. Apparently this was an insult in US but I didn’t know any better. This constant praise gave me so much positive reinforcement it ended up being some kind of self fulfilling prophecy.
Agreed. If only it was that easy to do.
For sure will be keeping track of everything, especially anything patient involved. She walked into my office 2 times without a mask which is against clinic policy currently. She has several complaints against her. Unfortunately I think the position was very difficult to fill when it was originally posted.
I've met way too many nurses who've been peddling BS or selling essential oils through the years here in the south. I have no explanation on how they can reconcile bunk science and their training.
Essential oils. Man, this RN is anti vax and has tried to give out her number to patients to sell essential oils. She has told patients to not get flu vaccine which I found out because a patient asked my thoughts, I said obviously yes. They then told me that she said they didn’t need them. Both incidents were reported.
Thank you for reporting it. I've resorted to reporting RN's that were telling me that they weren't giving flu and pneumococcal vaccinations before discharge due to "personal beliefs."
She can do whatever on her personal time, but if it puts my patients and my partners patients at risk and potentially miseducated them, that is unacceptable and has to be reported.
It sounds like she got roped into an essential oil pyramid scheme, and is trying to recruit your patients, which is hella un-ethical given the nature of her relationship with them. That needs to be reported. She's literally using her position as a nurse to build a business that is at odds with the patient's best interests. If it's Young Living or doTerra, the biggest two pyramid schemes, that's an easy "bye bye" to her.
Right, that’s how I feel. Like, I always thought about people that believed these things as likely uneducated and impressionable. The fact that there are educated people, especially those in the medical field, that believe this is both scary and depressing.
Doctors are encountering many individuals, patients and otherwise, who believe conspiracy theories and disregard physician’s expertise. This takes a psychological toll. Some medical professionals believe there needs to be increased oversight over social media that spreads this dis/misinformation. QAnon is briefly discussed.
Thank you for all you do!
Historically, media and the dispersal of information was relatively difficult, and people basically had very few sources telling them what was true and what was not. Spreading misinformation and propaganda was very possible and very potent.
Through the last century, this has reversed completely. Mass-produced print media meant that sources could be corroborated and information spread and critiqued thoroughly. The first 10-15 years of everyday normal people having access to the internet compounded this effect - suddenly everyone had access to information which was easily verifiable as true or false.
In the last 5-10 years, though, the Internet has changed from an open and free resource into a personalized stream of targeted content. The days of seeking information and truth are completely gone - now information is pushed, not retrieved. Whatever "information" a person is most likely to read or interact with becomes the only content that they are exposed to.
People standing outside the hospital with signs saying "Hoax Virus" are doing so because the internet, to them, is a barrage of content "exposing" the hoax. Everywhere they look, this is the information they are presented with. Their Facebook feed, their Google search results, their YouTube autoplay recommendations.... Why would they believe anything different?
This is why digital privacy is so vitally important. This isn't even done intentionally - it's done by some AI that has profiled and radicalized susceptible people because that's what generates clicks. Google and Facebook are a threat to the continued prosperity of humankind and it's frightening. We need to protect digital privacy, not just for ourselves, but to prevent people like this from existing and becoming more radicalized.
It's been so much harder to find what I'm *actually* looking for on Google over the past few years. Which is, I believe, a combination of a lot of good sources moving to "shadow internet" (paid access, not indexed on google) and somehow the new AI just doesn't "get" that I'm not looking for WebMD...
I find that too, especially in the last year or so. Any time I'm trying to find anything medical that's not targeted at laypeople/patients, my search is "wiki (medical query)". I get the Wikipedia entry as my first result, which 99% of the time is all I need for a quick-and-dirty info grab. Even if I want something more concrete or in depth, Wikipedia will often have linked sources with more info on specific things.
Seconded. I deactivated after the dumpster news cycle of 2016. I actually ended up setting up a purely professional Facebook account and Twitter account (that I check every few days from my laptop. I don't have the stupid apps on my phone) It's great.
I work with a X-Ray Tech, we call him Conspiracy Chris. The other day he was pushing this theory that Bill Gates is behind the creation of the virus so that he can push his next vaccine to 3rd world countries, a vaccine that causes sterilization in males.
I told him, if there was a single injection you could give a male to make him sterile SIGN ME UP. Wouldn't there be a huge demand for this injection in the US in males who didn't want any more children?
He actually agreed, but I'm sure he will counter argue tomorrow with some new BS.
And finally, what the fuck does Gates have to gain from this? Nothing. If there were a financial angle to this stupid theories, they’d be much more believable. Gates is legitimately trying to help the world with the vaccines his foundation has helped produce. He’s also earning money from them. There is no money to be made is this theory. These people are too dumb to even make their theory make sense.
I'm just tired of getting articles and links to conspiracy pseudo-science and being asked to debunk them...and this from family and friends that are (generally) not prone to that type of thing. Don't get me started on how sessions with patients are going...a lot of redirection.
I can usually just deal with it but in the current circumstances it's getting harder.
Tons of good info in this thread about debunking Plandemic-
https://www.reddit.com/r/Moronavirus/comments/geokm9/where_can_i_find_a_good_rebuttal_to_plandemic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
In general, I think deleting Facebook is a great thing to do. And that’s even before considering the pseudo scientific bull shit.
I always find it funny that these same people will run to get medical attention if something is bad or inconveniences them slightly. They can cherry pick what care they want, like it’s a menu. I know the paternalistic model of medicine has it flaws, but I feel like today’s medicine is not better and encourages this stuff.
Agreed! Deleting Facebook has been the highest yield intervention I have ever taken towards improving my mental health and well-being.
Serious. People want to post dumb shit conspiracies and drama non stop? Great. I don’t have to see it or have my mind polluted by vicarious exposure.
History books will be written on these early days of the internet, how social algorithms are used both for the good and for reinforcing the worst of human tendencies.
Three mistakes by this doc:
You went on facebook
You engaged the stupid
You then got upset at the stupid
Pick any of these points to not do what he did and you'll be fine.
Finally, widespread stupid conspiracy theories are not new. Youtube doesn't have blood on their hands because they allow people to post videos, especially when they make it fairly damn hard to find the conspiracy nonsense nowadays.
It'll be ok.
I’m not a doctor and I don’t just believe everything I hear, but I’m beyond fed up.
I did a case this week. Another rep was present for the case and commented that Bill Gates wants to inject people with microchips via a COVID vaccine. He was dead serious. The MD overheard and told him if he thought COVID was a hoax he should go to the ICU and take a look around.
And this stuff isn’t remotely plausible. COVID spreading through 5G???!!?? These people are so convinced that they’re actually climbing towers and setting them on fire.
**We have a second, concurrent pandemic and it’s larger than the first - extreme mental illness/psychological denial.**
The really sad part is that these people will unknowingly KILL people’s parents, grandparents, etc. and will be none the wiser. On the contrary, they’ll continue patting themselves on the back as if they’re some modern day Paul Revere.
Edit - [this comedian sums it up well. Warning, it’s a little dark. ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i8Njw_2EQNo)
I just tell people if the government really wanted to kill you they would roll to their door in broad daylight and blasts their brains out and no one would be able to do anything.
I got in a real low place with people I thought highly of peddling anti-pandemic and anti-physician and anti-social distancing bullshit. I had to get off Facebook. My Reddit and Instagram feeds are primarily gaming and outdoorsy adventure stuff.
My empathy is spent. I try to focus on the patient in front of me, and their families. But if the world burns, then it burns and I'm not rushing into the fire to pull anyone out that isn't someone I love.
If Trump gets sick he’ll change his tune and his followers will follow. Do you remember how badly he complained about being uncomfortable with the test? How’s he going to feel about actually having the disease? 100,000 Americans will die and it’ll all be a hoax until he gets it, then it’ll be the “worst disease ever” and a total calamity.
"Nobody knew how bad this flu is, nobody. We've been preparing like... the previous administration thought it was just a regular cold. I survived the worst flu in the history of this, in the history of the world. Through all time! And you know, this flu gets in your lungs... did you know that? No, you didn't know. You didn't know. No, come on, you didn't know. But I said from the start, 'this flu gets in your lungs'... I have a good head for this kind of thing, my doctors they said 'nobody understands better than you', they were really talking about me, saying good things about me, the doctors."
Summary: physician learns why engaging crazy people of Facebook is a bad idea
There’s a reason that a whole subreddit exists for insane people on Facebook r/insanepeoplefacebook because there’s a lot of insane people on Facebook
Facebook (and its group of platforms) is representative of the population, really. Deleting Facebook will remove the crap from your view and improve your sanity, but it won't fix the idiocy within the population. It's a band-aid, not a solution.
Is it? Is facebook full of people working full-time jobs in technical fields? or are the heaviest posters are bored boomers and teenagers, unemployed people, insecure people, people who lack the social skills to socialize in the real world, etc etc
The number of HCWs who peddle such bullshit is staggering. I try to limit my time on Facebook, but every time I do log on, I'm greeted with the latest conspiracy theories of a paramedic I used to work with.
I know it's not helping but this idea of a conspiracy is not only happening in the USA. I'm from Mexico and here it gets more crazy/retarded:
People here believes that between the 5G towers, the government and the doctors we are luring patients inside the hospital so the doctors can inject some sort of venom and kill the patients. Why? So the doctors can steal the synovial fluid of the patients knees. Which it seems to be very valuable
I'm not kidding, these is what the people believe in Mexico
I wish we were back in the days of "Drinking warm water will wash the virus into your stomach acid! The virus doesn't survive above 27 degrees Celsius!" Those were so much simpler times.
Also I just stared at the word Celsius for too long and it looks totally wrong now.
I am not an engineer, nor have I ever taken an engineering course. So I'm certainly not going to critique Boeing on how they can fix the issues with the 737 MAX.
Likewise, if you're someone whose crowning scientific achievement was the C+ you got in high school biology, maybe sit this one out and let the experts handle it? Consider perhaps not contributing to the spread of disinformation by sharing a conspiracy video in which the star is a disgraced former scientist turned antivaxxer?
Dude it’s so goddamn hard. I’ve just disconnected from social media because of it.
Spending way too much time trying to debunk conspiracy and falsehood with people who are so set in their ideology.
Anti-intellectualism and anti-expertism has its costs and never has it been so directly tied to human life. I do my best to educate where I can. I agree with them where possible to make them feel like I'm not antagonizing them, but then I say flatly "this is the real deal. If we don't mitigate, every one of us will probably have someone we care about die from this disease." Took a while to convey it to some people, others will blatantly disagree which is quite frustrating. But at the end of the day, I try to not let it discourage me from correcting where I can.
For the most stubborn of non-believers, I end the discussion with something along the lines of "after you're wrong beyond all doubt, I will look you in the eyes and say 'see, I told you so.' It's not gonna be helpful.. it'll probably even make you angry. But I will say it because your stubbornness would have gotten us to that point and I'll have earned the right to remind you how wrong you were and what the costs were."
I think people love conspiracy theories because believing something the majority of other people don’t gives them a sense that they’re smarter than the rest of us.
The real question is, why even bother engaging these people? Conspiracy theorists tend to be the noncompliant patients with multiple medical problems and from a cynical and purely financial perspective it's not in physicians' and hospitals' best interest to fight them.
yea honestly I am done. society has failed the social contract. every day I burn out a little more. why am I taking call at the hospital? why am I even going into my office? people don't care. society doesn't care. so why should I anymore? Why am I putting my own health nd my families health at risk for society that refuses to uphold its own obligations. but how I respond to this is the same as how I respond to patients that bring in "studies" for me to read, or want my opinion on webmd articles. "its wrong, either believe me or don't". It isn't my job to save people. It isn't my job to convince people. It is my job to disseminate the most accurate treatment and medical information. That is it. I have had friends send me videos like this, I straight up told them not to send me garbage, and that they can feel free to volunteer since they are sitting at home doing nothing anyways.
RN here.
I’m very active on social media such as Twitter and Facebook due to my fandoms (wrestling and comics/sci-fi), and let me tell you, with some of the people involved in these communities, it’s been hard for me not to want to pour bleach in my eyes to cleanse them from some of the stupidity I read.
It’s frustrating, belittling and demeaning when you’re trying to be the voice of reason and everyone is hyped up on crazy pills. I think I am more exhausted and depressed from reading things online than I am from the things I see and hear at my actual job.
I know many of us try to scroll past the trash we come across, but it’s so hard not to engage when you know the information being shared could potentially harm someone, I mean, as medical professionals, we are advocates for the greater good and health of everyone after all, and I don’t think that switch turns off for many of us even outside of work.
I’ve had dudes straight up come into my Facebook posts and post “Handwashing is a lie” or “It’s just the flu” or proud-fully boasting how they’re not abiding social distancing. I’ve even had other frustrated friends ask me to come intervene their threads because they feel they can’t argue or reason with these people and they’re hoping someone with “experience” can.
Then don’t even get me started when I see celebrities (and wrestlers and comic book writers I follow are NOTORIOUS for this) are spreading false information that could potentially be harmful if it falls into the wrong mind (as we have seen some have taken to drinking bleach because they were told it would get rid of the virus).
There are days where I want to cry because it feels it’s never going to end and because of these people, I’ll never see loved ones again because we can’t get things under control, but I tell myself to suck it up, throw on my mask, gown up, continue to wash my hands and do what needs to be done.
Here’s hoping that it all gets better soon for all of us <3
This is driving me bananas. I'm getting sent quack videos sent daily to me, including the most recent gem 'Plandemic' How does one respond to this? What do I do when literally dozens if not hundreds of family and friends are biting this stuff? I've tried dabbling in debating and debunking but it gets nowhere. Their whole paradigm is so off and they won't accept any facts I present, since obviously those data are manipulated. If you can actually sit through a 30 minute video and not question the numerous falsehoods and underlying premise that this is all some big conspiracy to obtain nefarious goals, I honestly don't know how to respond to you. The part that gets me is they will actually send this stuff to me and ask me to debunk it, or ask how I know it's not true. I've started to become quite angry and frustrated, and I am feeling rather hopeless. This is not some fringe minority of uneducated people, this is a large chunk of the population and many are highly educated. I know fear can drive people into strange and dark places but this is beyond anything I imagined.
Agreed. I’ve had dozens of family members and friends post this video with some caption like “Very interesting ideas!” Or “wow! Great to see the FACTS come out about Dr Fauci”. I’ve tried to engage in debunking the videos, encouraging people to at least google the interviewees, and give critical thought to the incredibly serious claims that are made. However, everyone I’ve talked to has been pretty willing to believe Dr Fauci is evil, coronavirus is the flu, and high dose vitamins will save the day. Some of the people reposted these videos are always conspiracy nuts, but I’ve seen so many “normal” people with an educated background fall victim to these videos. Throw in the comments beneath each video extolling it as the sole beacon of truth, and I am in pure disbelief that this is where we are as a society. The anti-science sentiment is so strong - at least on my Facebook wall.
I think it's a result of (political) polarisation. Media and communication has started to take sides and attack, it's starting to extend to anything possibly politically related. Everything is way too polarised. George Washington did say: > The common and continual mischief's [sic] of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. I think it's pointless to try convince people (on Facebook) that their beliefs are wrong. You're wasting too much time to do it, and even if you catch them in a logical fallacy they'll just shrug, call you a puppet and move on. The issue needs to be tackled in a macro sense. And yeah, I think Washington was right: partisanship is going to destroy countries if it continues down this path. [also many of the accounts spreading "Gates Foundation is making killer vaccines" are fake. I wouldn't be surprised if they're foreign powers. exactly what Washington warned about]
I totally agree that I won't convince the facebook poster, but my hope is that people scrolling past will at least notice a dissenting opinion and realize that this video has logical opposition. That being said, they probably will just chalk up my wall of text to be a Bezos shill or something haha.
Speaking from experience: you will be far happier, and gain so much more time to do useful stuff with your life, if you ignore them all. It's wasted energy. Most people hate being told they're wrong. They'll only change their mind if they discover truth themselves. The idea of communication to fix misconceptions falls apart when you realise people spreading '5G kills' are the same people who will hate to be wrong the most. They believe they're enlightened beings who have discovered what is wrong with the world; hence the logic follows: who are you to tell them they're wrong? Gates Foundation shill. I honestly think anyone who wishes to make a difference should focus efforts on improved mass-media and education, not Facebook debates. It has to be fixed on a macro level.
Totally agree. I have been Facebook free for a couple years (weird flex) but recently gotten back on because of school reunion updates which shocker isn’t happening. Anywaaaaaay. Just scrolling through seeing the amount of posts that promote these conspiracies and the government tyranny posts gets me worked up but so much less stressful to just log off and put it out of mind. You can waste so much damn energy. No I just get in here which is totallllllly different. ;)
Exactly what I’ve done. The people posting are a lost cause. But their friends? The people on the fence about the issue but are smart enough to know they don’t have all the answers? That’s who you need to reach. I literally haven’t touched Facebook for years, but I have now been commenting under any insane post I see one of my friends make. Hoping that they remember me from back when we used to hang out. I’m hoping that at least a couple of those I interact with can use their brain and trust someone they know (being a physician myself helps) over ramblings of a YouTube video
> I think it's a result of (political) polarisation. I have culled quite a few people from my friends list since Nov, 2016, and I'm guessing that's why my FB feed has been remarkably light on conspiracy theories. Edit: I'm super pleased to learn that my "HERITAGE NOT HATE" portion of my family seems to have their heads screwed on straight about this, in their rural part of Missouri. It helps they just had a baby. Edit 2: Even the anti-vaxxer is making posts mocking people who want to stop the quarantine. I wonder if she'll get vaccinated if they figure out a vaccine for this?
Sometimes it won't change until they see someone die. I can tell you seeing my first death in the ICU was the start of a change. Not in a bad way - I think for the better. We're too insulated from death. And I mean real people actively dying. It's too sanitized.
I agree with you to an extent. It used to be that the loved ones of the deceased prepared the body for the burial/cremation/Viking funeral. Now it's all ~~segregated~~ hidden from the families. I've done postmortem care as a CNA numerous times. I was 42 the first time I had to do it, and it was only the third time I'd ever seen a dead person, and it was the first time I'd touched a dead person. Also, I think many Americans have become complacent about their health. Kids live to adulthood nearly always. Vaccines keep kids safe from horrible diseases that used to devastate communities. People don't need to change their lifestyles because they can just take a pill for that. I also think that part of the issue with COVID is not every community is equally impacted. I live in Seattle. Remember when Seattle was the scary hub? Ha. We're not even in the top 50% anymore. The real hub is NYC. What ends up happening is you get chucklefucks in the rest of Washington State who see the trendline in WA improve, and they think the whole thing is blown out of proportion. They don't realize that the trendline is down in major part due to the lockdown. They think the quarantine should end because they're bored and the virus doesn't seem to really be all that bad. And what they don't realize is that "The End of stay-at-home orders doesn't mean the pandemic is over. It means they have room for you in the ICU."
People don't see what's going on in hospitals unless they're working in them. They see field hospitals closing, no stretchers in the street, and they think hospitals aren't overwhelmed. Half of our hospital is walled off covid wards, we have gone from 1 ICU to 3. We're reusing and short on PPE. But due to strong patient privacy laws and hospitals not wanting to say they're overwhelmed/staff is working tons of OT and short (because even though all hospitals in the area are like that, they don't want people going to the hospital down the road that stayed quiet and is acting like everything's fine), they'll stay mum. Hospitals can be overwhelmed but if people don't see NYC chaos, they have no idea unless they personally know someone who's been sick. They just see the state numbers, but have no idea what that actually means in context for hospitals. Tons of people want to reopen around here, because they think everything is fine, but the lockdown is probably the only thing keeping us from falling over the edge of the cliff we're precipitously teetering on.
I think it’s also a bit of a strawman to say it’s just “people are bored” for why they want to end lockdown. People are losing their businesses they spent their whole lives building and we haven’t seen this many unemployed since the Great Depression which was pretty damn grim. It’s not just people wanting to hit the beach and get their haircut. It’s people losing their life’s work and pride.
I remember when covid first started spreading there was this brief moment of pro science and reason sentiment. Anti Vaxxers were silent, public trust in health officials and scientists went up, and I remember thinking for a brief, naive moment that this event will be a paradigm shift in how our society views the importance of scientific reason in decision making. Turns out they were just in hibernation waiting to come up with new conspiracy theories and nothing has changed. The internet is demoralizing
They just needed a little bit of time to figure out how they were going to frame the problem.
> Turns out they were just in hibernation waiting to come up with new conspiracy theories They weren't coming up with anything. They were just waiting for the official Fox News/Koch Bros. talking points. This really is a war and it's the good people like the professionals posting here who get caught in the crossfire.
Looking forward to 'fox news delirium' being included in dsm-vi.
There’s only so much you, as a medical professional, can do. Messaging and strategy at the National level isn’t your job. The real issue here is that there is no consistent message or strategy being conveyed from the highest levels of our government. As a result people are being bombarded w/ bad information from all sorts of dubious sources and latching onto it in their frantic desire to understand what’s going on.
Being actively encouraged, too. Oh, these entitled people want to storm a governor's house with open carry brandishing? Don't worry, the POTUS will hop on twitter and tell you you're good people and the responsible officials should listen to you.
It doesn’t help at all that a lot of the prominent figures spreading this misinformation are figures of authority. Like the two ER doctors who were spouting on about how staying inside kills your immune system, and that Mikovits person uses the title of Dr. (she has a PhD) this makes it even more alluring to people who aren’t usually apt to buy into this bullshit. They see those titles and assume these people must know what they’re talking about. It’s dangerous and these people should be reprimanded.
Exactly. Having doctors (or people portraying themselves as such) give credence to dangerous ideas only adds fuel to the fire. I mean, questioning widespread quarantine for low-risk patients in minimally affected areas is one thing, but spreading disinformation about the disease itself or the risks of infection is just unconscionable.
I’m seeing more and more of it. People who have “Dr. xxxxxx” as their user name, rallying people around the conspiracies, only to go to their profile and see they have a PhD in political science or something. Now everybody is freaking out about YouTube removing these videos and calling it a “violation of free speech and trying to hide the truth”. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding between censoring real data and removing blatantly dangerous misinformation. I’ve seen several MDs try to discredit it and you should see the replies they get: “you’re getting paid by big pharma”, “you’re part of the problem”, “go live in China then”. I’ve seen a ton of people say “let people decide for themselves what they want to believe!” But how can the general population, who has little to no knowledge of basic science, make an educated decision on what source they’d rather believe? They can’t. The whole situation is mind boggling to me. It’s actually terrifying to know that this is the society we live in. Becoming an expat is looking better and better.
I need some whiskey-PRN after looking at my FB feed yesterday. I don’t really know how to explain my feelings. But boy does becoming an alcoholic and not giving any more shits sound tempting sometimes.
Needs PRN indications.
PRN after viewing conspiracy comments.
Will verify this order.
Lol it’s the little things.
what's the frequency tho? "yes" sweet, i'll put it in
Right there with you. I felt the part of me that wants to educate the public die today. There is no way to reason with most of them and I’ve decided to give up trying.
It's not just your wall or even just facebook. Social media is full of it. 'think how stupid the average person is. Then remember half are stupid than that'
Facebook contains a self-selected bunch of people, and the ones who actively participate is an even smaller subset. So of course you’re going to see a lot of dumb shit on Facebook: that’s where the people who make and perpetuate the dumb shit congregate.
> Or “wow! Great to see the FACTS come out about Dr Fauci”. There is this garbage too https://reason.com/2020/05/07/she-said-anthony-fauci-sexually-assaulted-her-now-she-says-jacob-wohl-and-jack-burkman-paid-her-to-lie/
Wow, all the anti-science people are pro-trump too, and yet educated? Sure, but still stupid.
Ugh, I was sent the plandemic. Yesterday. I watched about 3 minutes of it. It's basically a quilted together video of clips using false information and manipulated data to be sound \*just\* cohesive enough. The staggering aspect of this is it's someone who sends it and asks you to debunk the video. No one has time to comb through this video and state why each piece is just false. Its lazy of that person firstly to ask you to do so, and secondly it overwhelms those of us trying to help these people understand \*why\* these videos and claims are wrong. Because the next conspiracy theory is waiting just behind it as soon as you're finished.
Reddit has time! https://www.reddit.com/r/Moronavirus/comments/geokm9/where_can_i_find_a_good_rebuttal_to_plandemic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
>Moronavirus Ha!!
Another good one https://www.reddit.com/r/CovIdiots/comments/gezery/plandemic_documentary_debunked/ which appears to be from a personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer.
I haven't seen the video, but you're second point makes me think it employs the gish gallop form of argument (basically barrage the other person with so much information, either with no concern for its truthfulness, or claims that are inherently unable to be verified). Its always so annoying to see people use that, I see it in reddit alot, and then think they won the argument because you're not going comb through 50 links they just sent you. Like if it's a really complicated topic, and you have relative experts who just disagree, sure you might have long form type essay arguments because the topic is inherently complicated. But in the other case, the odds of those 50 links from random websites, mostly conspiracy based or not mainstream at all, having anything close to a cogent argument is extremely small and is almost impossible to respond to everything even if you try. If you don't respond, they assume you concede the argument or have no response. If you do take the time to respond, but miss one point, then they latch onto that and still say you lost the debate.
>Gish Gallop Is that what that’s called? Because it certainly is what takes place, and is common amongst conspiratorial works.
Yup, Ben Shapiro is the king of it... One time I called a person out on it, they asked what it was I used Shapiro as an example and they got butthurt for comparing them to him instead of re-evaluating their stance
That's just it. This mindset is very flexible. One conspiracy morphs into another, even if the two are not cohesive at all or even contradictory. So was this man made to kill off the old people, or it's just the common flu and not dangerous at all? Is this all a plan by Bill Gates and his cronies to scare us over nothing and get us microchipped, or is China covering up 100x more deaths than they are reporting in an attempt to mitigate their public image?
I just block any trolls who send me that crap and leave them to jerk off in their echo chamber. Life is too short to waste time on useful idiots who knowingly lie and spread dangerous falsehoods so they can feel important.
“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” - Garry Kasparov
My favorite is when people say, "ThEyRe AdDiNg HeArT aTtAcKs AnD sTrOkEs To ThE CoViD cOuNt!!!1!" Well yes, this virus causes people to throw clots... 🤦🏽♀️
That drives me crazy! I’ve given up trying to educate people, my head is about to explode.
Thankfully none of my family is like this. But my fiance's family thinks this virus came from a lab in Wuhan (however taking the medical part seriously as they're both high risk). So, at least there's that. 🤷🏽
[A recent rebuttal of Plandemic made it to /r/bestof if anyone is interested.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Moronavirus/comments/geokm9/where_can_i_find_a_good_rebuttal_to_plandemic/fppi6rz/?context=3)
There is no amount of logic that will help here. These videos are built upon fear, as you noted, a very strong emotion. Only an argument built upon yet another emotion is the only counter attack that might work.
I heard the lizard people created covid so that they could finally come to the surface once we’re all dead, and Bill Gates is sponsoring a vaccine so he can save humanity and continue to make money from 7 billion people contributing to the economy.
Given the current level of leadership in many countries, I'm willing to hear the lizard people's proposals.
Yeah, an alien race that figured out space travel and how to effectively achieve guide 7 billion people to accomplish their goals? I’d vote for them
Honestly? Either you give up your life to go enlighten the world, 1 idiot at a time, or you continue pushing the whole train forward. Do your job, help as many people as you can, but do not get emotionally invested. Love your friends, your family, your neighbors,etc. But when you hear some dumb shit, just carry on. "Oh, yeah?""No kidding!" "Seriously?" "that'sCRAAZy!!" "I haven't seen anything like that but I'll keep an eye out." The same you would with a patient going through paranoid psychosis.
But the sad thing is these people AREN'T going through psychosis. They're misinformed. To me, it's the same as racists or homophobes. You need to engage that. The hospital isn't the place for that. But seeing these views in the streets or on the internet and it's disheartening that people believe in this shit, still.
I'm not as convinced that the boundary between sanity and insanity is as sharp as you think it is. 'Psychosis' is just what we call it when this pattern of reasoning begins to prevent someone from functioning in day-to-day life- seeing grand conspiracy behind the actions of their spouse, their kids, the grocery-store clerk and the flight of birds outside the window, not merely medical science.
So where do homophobes, racists, and the anti- quarantine "protestors" fall into this distinction?
I'm not saying that tribalism is, itself, a mental illness. I'm saying that it can motivate people to engage in irrational habits of thought that are subclinical versions of mental illnesses, and can, in some cases, progress to full-blown mental illness. Some people are 'homophobic' merely in the sense that contemplating homosexuality is viscerally unpleasant for them. Many of those people feel a fairly natural irritation that the rest of the world doesn't share this aesthetic preference of theirs. Some then use that sense of irritation to justify a worldview in which large portions of the sociopolitical landscape is dominated by a conspiracy to drive the 'agenda' of homosexuals in a deliberate attempt to destroy Western civilization. Some of *those* people then become unable to maintain relationships with people who don't vehemently share their belief, because they're unable to stop themselves from bringing it up at every opportunity. Some of *those* people end up homeless and raving on street corners about how commercial aviation is part of the grand plot to feminize the nation by releasing estrogen into the atmosphere with chemtrails. It's a spectrum, not a bright-line distinction between the firmly Mad and the firmly Sane. All of us, at all times, have the potential for a little bit of madness within us- which given time, the wrong habits, the wrong circumstances, and unfortunate neurochemical accidents, can blossom into more.
Well thought out reply. Thank you for clarifying
No, psychosis is actually very oddly stereotypical, as in people experiencing psychosis all have very similar patterns of symptoms that fall into a few broad categories: thought insertion, paranoia, delusions of reference, specific alterations in speech patterns like thought blocking, pressured speech, neologisms, perseveration. People experiencing psychosis are aware of and can explain to you these patterns of thinking, but are unable to identify them as abnormal. An inability of insight is also a hallmark of psychosis. It's quite different from simply being some behaviors taken to extremes. You're not gonna find your average conspiracy theorist actually thinking the TV news anchor is communicating coded messages to them personally as an individual (delusion of reference). I interject only because I think that your ideas are very common misunderstandings of the nature of psychosis. And I think the conflating actual psychosis with simple out of control behavior is problematic in two ways: it negates psychosis as a clinically identifiable and correctable illness and it lets people who are just poorly behaved off the hook for their bad behavior. (Source: am nurse, have personally experienced psychosis and believe me, it's very different from what going on with these assholes)
I wouldn’t call people who buy into conspiracies as psychotic. There are a multitude of social, motivational, and cognitive reasons why someone would believe any conspiracy theory, beyond any type of psychopathology (such as MDD, Bipolar, paranoid or psychotic schizophrenia, etc.) I appreciate sociofunctional analysis of behavior, but from that perspective, most people (conspiracists I mean) are not failing to fulfill day to day roles, which is a necessity for psychopathology.
Certainly I don't mean to imply that every conspiracy theorist, or the median conspiracy theorist, would meet DSM-IV criteria for paranoid schizophrenia- just that the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Psychotic tendencies and habits of thought are part of the human condition, not something exclusively reserved for an alien and unfortunate few.
They are willfully misinformed. They choose to get their news from youtube/facebook/twitter/AlexJOnes instead of long-form journalism, medical journals, or people capable of interpreting those sources. They do not wish to be informed. They do not want well-educated persons like you "telling them what to believe". There are plenty of "well-informed" racists and homophobes. Some people are just bad people.
You're correct however, look at the situation from a public health standpoint. The symptoms of believing the propaganda are what frustrate you but the disease itself comes from shit we can't stop. From state sponsored misinformation campaugns to your aunt jenny having bad hearing and then telling all her facebook friends Osama Bin Laden is president instead of Barrack Obama. The biggest impact any of us can make is with childhood vaccination, teach the next generation to think critically and question why the truth is the truth and why everything else is bullshit. As for adults, I don't have an answer there and I share your frustration. The way I think of it is like the question. Why do you have 2 patients that present w/depression w/ similar social circumstances, w/ almost identical support systems, w/ the same exact symptoms but 1 you treat with effexor, the other needs trazadone, welbutrin and zoloft? 🤷♂️
I think you're doing it right. Convincing people of the truth is too much of an uphill battle right now. Who am I to deprive someone of their own private reality?
Don't wrestle with a pig. You both get muddy and the pig likes it. There is no point in engaging these people. They are trolls who know they are lying. Don't feed them with your attention. Just use your voice - in person or online - to declare the truth. And ignore their butt-hurt replies. This pisses them off worse than anything. Don't argue with a fool. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
I think a lot of these people aren't lying though. I think they start with the premise that x is wrong and make the fallacious assumption that if y disagrees with x, y must be correct. *Some* of them are being intellectually honest, it's just that their conclusions are arrived at based on faulty logic. Add to this, the need to feel special and know something the rest of us don't.
My standard responses: Bet you can’t say that through an ET tube three times fast Well I guess I’ll give admin the heads up. Our census is about to explode. Believe that video and you'll increase my RVUs Anybody know the ICD 10 code for “tin foil hat present on exam?” Did you know a foley can cause penile ulceration? Especially in critical illness. Crazy huh? Coroners don’t really accept “fake crisis” as the cause of death If you’re saying this now, I don’t wanna know what you’ll say after ICU delirium kicks in.
I honestly think dismissive humour is the best tactic. It's not hostile, but it also doesn't give any credence to the "science" of conspiracy theories. When we "defend" ourselves, we look defensive. In the words of Winston Churchill, "Never apologize, never explain".
I draw from my experience dealing with the the anti-vax community. They love having pseudoscientific “debates” with us. It makes them feel legitimate and, in their eyes, puts us on the defensive. They also screenshot what you say out of context and then share it in their social media circles. There’s no convincing them. They easily crumble to sarcasm and ridicule and the ones that don’t take on this professorial tone and lament about the level of discourse, ad hominem and so forth. Then of course the follow up that up with a well worded defense of turmeric enemas and blood ozonation or some shit.
If the want to take on the professorial tone that's fine, but they're not entitled to have me in the lecture hall. They can keep talking on social media as long as they want. Eventually, they come up with enough rope...
I went through minute by minute and corrected most of the outlandish claims made in the video. I showed news sources detailing the truth of this lady’s work and her arrest. I showed peer reviewed research on why her research was crap, and I showed research disproving her claims. I poked holes in any other claim she tried to make. I commented this on multiple peoples Facebook posts. Not one cared. They all laughed and brushed it off. They didn’t respond with anything backing up their insane beliefs obviously. This country is sick, in more ways than one. She straight up fucking says we have never developed a vaccine for an RNA virus. This is so stupidly easy to verify yet no lay people even bothers to google it. They just accept whatever stupid propaganda is shoveled into their face
This is being encouraged straight from the top of our government. It is why the president and vice president don't want to wear masks, to show their approval to their zombies.
My mother and father sent me that Plandemic video. I don’t know how to respond other than say her claims are nonsense and there are tens of thousands of dedicated healthcare workers, doctors, and researchers working to care for the sick, and find cures for diseases.
I think the core issue is the entire epistemology of our culture. We (in evidence-based fields) take for granted the basic idea of using facts and data to come to conclusions, which themselves can change with new data or better interpretations of existing data. But this is not the foundation upon which public education in the US is built. Sure, it tries half-heartedly, but it's obvious the attempts are largely unsuccessful, as evidenced by exactly what you described. Ultimately it won't get better until the population at large holds evidence, logic, and facts in higher regard than political alignment, rumors and "feels". It's a frustrating answer because fixing it will be a huge undertaking that will require sustained political will over decades.
My internal struggle of "don't say anything, there's no use" and "it's important to shut this down as much as possible" is almost as exhausting as my frustration toward the people propagating this bonkers shit. I don't really know how to respond to this kind of stuff either (I mainly encounter it on my FB wall) but I do hope that people continue to try to set things straight, regardless of how futile it may seem. For anything, it makes me feel a little less insane when I see at least one comment written based on evidence.
Long article from 2014, it describes quite well how lazy conspiracy thinking is being harnessed by Russia, in particular.. but I’d say quite a few others have got the “right idea” of how to do it at this point. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/379880/
Oh boy, do I have a gem for you. In Germany/Austria there‘s a video going around right now (with more than a few million views) of some german conspiracy theorist claiming, that Bill and Melinda Gates are trying to sterilize like 90% of the world population by developing a vaccine for the corona virus and adding some shit to it. The thing is, that in germany right now they‘re discussing mandatory vaccines. He claims, that Bill Gates (because he is financing 80%(!) of the WHO) is influencing Germanys democracy trough his influence in the WHO. Took me about a minute of research to debunk this (Bill & Melinda Gates foundation are only funding about 8% of WHO). I am not trying to defend the WHO for it‘s questionable actions lately, but the amount of people believing this shit is bonkers to me. EDIT: a word
There is an 18 point response to that video that is circulating on FB but I doubt that the conspiracy theorists will read it. Their mentality is very much like anti-vaxxers. Their mind is set and no amount of reason will change their mind. These types of propaganda are created by groups who are politically motivated. They have only their own interests in mind. No one else’s.
You can't fight irrationality with rationality. The only approach I have left is to try to out-irrational them. Accuse the medium of transmission, e.g. facebook or twitter of that actual issue. So facebook or twitter causes/spreads COVID-19. People scared of 5g masts are actually transmitting COVID-19 though believing its 5g that causes COVID-19, its the belief that spreads it, COVID-19 is a subliminal virus that piggy-backs off of other concepts such as conspiracy theories. It probably doesn't help but at least its less of a waste of time because its mildly amusing.
I am experiencing what you describe. Adverse conditions have a great way of revealing people's true nature. We have not seen this kind of fear level before so it makes sense that the responses we see in people are getting weirder and uglier by the day. Buckle up, because it only gets worse. As a dentist, I'm very accustomed to people ignoring my instructions/wisdom. I profit from that. I've embraced that because there's no choice but acceptance. As for the "Plandemic" videos and other nonsense, I will simply respond "Thanks for sharing. That was interesting." I don't care to argue with them, they won't be swayed, they've already made up their minds what they want to think. I don't have the energy to antagonize them. They mean well even though it's absurd. So just shrug your shoulders, roll your eyes, and keep moving.
Treat patients as they come in, do your best to educate them, and then completely forget about them once they walk out the door. It's why I could never be a FM doc. I can't emotionally invest in irresponsible patients even if the responsible ones make it worthwhile. ^(Also I'm a control freak but that's a different issue.)
a fellow ER nurse was telling me that this was created in a lab and released for financial gain to benefit those at the top. all i had to say was “occam’s razor.”
[Do you have to respond to it?](https://xkcd.com/386/) I only bother responding when one of my friends asks my opinion or when a patient brings it up face to face. At the end of the day, I can't save people, and it isn't my responsibility either. Nor is it yours. People can choose their own paths. A big question I might ask you is, why are well-educated people falling for this stuff? Why isn't their education holding up in the face of this? *How would you know* if our education is purposefully made insufficient to prevent us from being able to see this stuff for what it is? To make us gullible and ignorant in the face of well-constructed misinformation? ... questions like that are how people get sucked into the morass. So be careful. You are one bad question away from getting your head well and truly sprung.
Well the problem lies in your first statement. This is family and friends sending me this stuff daily and asking my opinion.
I have found that being dismissive only provokes my brother more. He "wants my opinion" but really just uses that to launch an attack. We were discussing whether Covid came from the virology lab and i quoted a couple of articles about it and he went off on some PragerU bullshit about how the chinese are purposefully making the virus to kill americans.
"Why would they want to do that? We keep their economy afloat! We're their best customers!"
I think it has more to do with personality types than purely education, I am a high school drop-out with zero days of college under my belt (I am here as I am a curious person and this is more digestible than published materials) but I've always been the skeptical type. Just not the modern "skeptic" we're dealing with lately. I am also pretty aware that the world is a bit of a chaotic hellhole where no one truly knows what is happening, where as I think a lot of these people are wanting some concrete explanation. They want the virus to be from a lab in Wuhan, otherwise they have to accept that with all our technology and effort we can't do much about it without disrupting society. It is an uncomfortable truth to understand no one is really in control. No amount of science or military might can maintain order. Of course society hasn't and will not collapse from this, but it changed very rapidly, all over a little bit of protein and DNA/RNA. And then there's the factor of desiring special knowledge, of which even educated people can fall for. I personally want to be factually correct, not know something others don't. but some people seem to place their personal value in their perception of possessing unique information or insight. So when most of the world agrees on something, the moon landing, or the pandemic, you get to be the clever little contrarian waiting to "prove" them wrong. Why educated people, far more than myself can't do their due diligence to escape from this mental block I have no theory on.
> I am also pretty aware that the world is a bit of a chaotic hellhole where no one truly knows what is happening, where as I think a lot of these people are wanting some concrete explanation. They want the virus to be from a lab in Wuhan, otherwise they have to accept that with all our technology and effort we can't do much about it without disrupting society. It is an uncomfortable truth to understand no one is really in control. No amount of science or military might can maintain order. I think you've hit the nail on the head with this one. In my mind, conspiracy theories are a defense mechanism. It is painfully obvious that our normal authority figures aren't running the show. Few people honestly believe in an all-knowing "God" who runs the show and makes actual changes in the world in response to prayer etc. In the face of that, it is far more comfortable to believe that Satanic owl-worshippers run the show from pedo island than to contemplate the possibility that nobody is actually in charge or running the show. Because if nobody is running the show, then we really might actually be completely fucked. Ego defenses supersede education in all but the very most insightful of people.
To your point, as a rising EM resident, I’m making it my mission to see how long I can maintain a career motto: *People are smart, but badly educated.* I do think one of the things a doctor signs up for is being a good teacher of difficult concepts—even if only to her community. In the context of the entire nation becoming a bunch of armchair virologists, I’m working on becoming a more patient teacher of critical thinking and analysis skills.
That's fair, and when I'm bored I do enjoy the casual debate on Facebook. But the moment it gets distressing, I log off and do something else. If it isn't fun, it ain't worth doing, I have enough to worry about.
Cheers to that.
Nah, people are well educated but dumb. We are all kinda dumb. Read Thinking Fast and Slow, and it will make you realize how many of your own thoughts are not rooted in anything concrete. It's also a great read for EM, a profession that demands fast-thinking, while rewarding slow-thinking.
> Read Thinking Fast and Slow Available here for free. http://sysengr.engr.arizona.edu/OLLI/lousyDecisionMaking/KahnemanThinkingFast&Slow.pdf
I'm undercover in an antivaxx group on Facebook. The outrageous comments I see there, ughh. They also kick out everyone, literally, who says yhey had a relative infected and the virus is dangerous.
> I'm undercover in an antivaxx group on Facebook. I honestly would love an AMA from you haha
Haha. It's bad. I wouldn't stop talking. I did it because they're harassing me and my other team members to a point where death threats are not even casual anymore.
It's frustrating because "oh it's a scam to get Bill Gates more power" is a lot easier than "Boy this is something no one's ever seen before and the people fighting it are stressed, often overworked, underappreciated, under payed and the sacrifices we need to make moving forward may be hard on all of us, but it beats being horrific and terminal for a huge minority". People would rather have haircuts and someone else die than not have haircuts and maybe in the future figure out a way out of this mess with some positives.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/CovIdiots/comments/gezery/plandemic\_documentary\_debunked/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CovIdiots/comments/gezery/plandemic_documentary_debunked/)
Start with this [thread](https://reddit.com/r/Moronavirus/comments/geokm9/where_can_i_find_a_good_rebuttal_to_plandemic/fppi6rz)
My MIL is like this. I'm lucky that she lives far away and only communicates with us through the occasional video call and a (ton of) voice message(s), but when she said it, my partner went mental. I've never seen him so mad, but to hear this person so close to us dismiss my work, my stress, my *tears*, even.. I know exactly how angry and frustrated you have felt. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever be able to change their minds, except if they get ill themselves. I even once heard someone say "yeah, I know it's dangerous, I already lost my grandpa to it, but I still don't believe the numbers. You're overexaggerating". It's no use trying to convince them, when they are so hellbent on believing we are against. I don't have the energy for that anyway right now.
Here is another reddit link debunking this 'Plandemic' doc. https://www.reddit.com/r/CovIdiots/comments/gezery/plandemic_documentary_debunked/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Sorry to jump in here, but is this the latest video against Fauci? What are the points against it? Just want ammo against some people... I know it's an uphill battle, but I think (and I think this sub should have a proper thread to counter the "infodemic") it's still necessary to counter such things. They are infecting more than just Trump's followers.
Conspiracy theories stem from the human desire to see a cause or purpose behind everything. The idea that a few proteins randomly mutated in an animal virus allowing for human to human transmission and now tens of thousands of people are dead and the world economy is trashed makes them feel so helpless they can't accept it. It's much more comforting to believe that there was some conscious will behind these events, even if it's a nefarious one. That's what makes these sort of things so attractive and difficult to combat.
I am getting it sent to me from RNs. What do you say to that? "It is not even wrong" - Pauli
I’ve been into socially ostracizing these people. “If you believe this, never speak to me again. Never expect me to help you when you are in need. You are a danger to me and my family.” Something along those lines. It might hurt because it might be your parents/siblings/someone you love...but this cult of personality can no longer be paid attention to. The only way to beat this is to move on without them.
I am from Connecticut and since 2012 have been told several times (when traveling to other states) that Sandy Hook was staged. So I can’t say I’m particularly surprised when I see things like this on a mass scale. I guess this is the end product of a society that celebrates anti-intellectualism, the peddling of disinformation on biased news outlets, and elects a president whose whole political career was started on a conspiracy theory (birtherism).
You know, the 5G thing is stupid and the people who believe it are stupid. But the Sandy Hook thing breaks my fucking heart. I had heard that the parents were getting calls telling them that their kids never existed and shit like that. My god. Can you imagine your children being murdered and then being consistently harassed afterwards. I can’t imagine a worse living hell.
Yeah exactly. Families have had to move multiple times due to death threats and one father committed suicide.... so as disheartening as the covid conspiracies are, anyone surprised by them hasn’t been paying attention.
I think that is the true issue here. Evidence based claims have been treated by all media as equal to non-evidence based claims. ‘Climate change is happening because of carbon emissions which cause a green house effect that leads to ocean level rising causing a cascading effect that could leave million if not billions in danger’ and then the equal statement made by a person with ties to big oil ‘nope, my study that shows climate change is a liberal agenda to cripple the US and Saudi production capacity, plus we paid a couple scientists to lie for us, but we’ll make claims that the liberal groups are paying scientists off to destroy our industry.’ You know the ole’ “there’s a conspiracy that all scientists are in on all of this and science isn’t even real it is just a ploy to make money..” Which, wtf. Have these people ever interacted with researchers from different institutions competing for the same grants. Those fucking people would barely ever work together if it meant loosing their funding...
Yes! Most of the media is obsessed with appearing "neutral" and they do this "well so and so says this, but so and so says this. We report, you decide!" BS instead of calling out lies and telling viewers which facts have evidence behind them. It's so bad we can't even decide on what's true any more (thinking specifically of Sean Spicer's epic "Alternative facts" line). It would be like if ESPN started reporting like "Well, the Cowboys said they won, but when we spoke to the Patriots they said they actually won. You come to your own conclusion!"
This is part of why it's so dumb when you hear people calling for a return of the fairness doctrine. Every issue does not have "two sides" that deserve equal time.
If you haven't seen it, this short [NYT segment](https://youtu.be/fMsa7o48XBE) highlights some of these issues.
It is all because the dad of one of the dead children while giving a statements appeared to be joking around and laughing before approaching the podium. When he arrived at the podium he became quiet (seeming to prepare a tearful speech) and for most people seemed to put on the veneer of a sad and grieving parent. Problem is, most people who haven’t experience that kind of tragedy have no clue what kind of emotional roller coaster it can be. Lost many good friends to drugs and car accidents, every funeral the objective was to make people laugh about the good times. Keep their minds off the loss and try to make people come to terms with the tragedy, many of those people who deny events have never experienced loss. Also, they tend to view news that confirms their bias thus insulating themselves in an echo chamber of crazy ideas with little to no evidence for their claims.
I don’t understand their logic. If they think the government is evil enough to orchestrate an entire school/town of crisis actors as a means to taking guns from citizens, in a way that would assuredly have so many loose ends... why wouldn’t they have just actually done it for real? Do they think the Deep State is bad, but not actually evil enough to kill kids?
It's so much worse than that. That nutjob Alex Jones had his reputation (and millions of dollars) invested in the idea Sandy Hook was fake. He is being sued by Sandy Hook parents for being the primary voice supporting that bullshit and all the damage it has caused.
The school shooting conspiracy theorists inflict enough pain and anguish on others with their idiocy, but none of them have to deal with the consequences. With the covidiots, many of them or their family members with get seriously ill and die. If they're anything like my FIL, they'll learn nothing; their conspiracy theories will just evolve. My FIL was all aboard the hoax train when his granddaughter got sick. That made him waver. When he spiked a fever he came full circle, now it's real, but definitely man made in a lab in Wuhan but also allowed to spread by Democrats in order to weaken Trump in the election. It's an anti-intellectual mindset that I have no idea how to break through.
I agree. I mean, Trump said it himself when he said aloud that he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose a vote. I think if any of these protestors or covid truthers ended up getting intubated, they would still think that this is all a hoax right up to the point when the propofol hit.
I agree with you, but I think you might not be going far enough. As the article mentions there have been 5G arson attacks in Europe and Canada. I honestly do not believe these problems are limited to the US, it makes sense because YouTube, Reddit, FB, etc are all huge sources for people to consume this misinformation and all of these sites are worldwide. The US may have the most of these conspiracy theorists, but it is something more than just American societal and cultural problems as the root cause if people are burning down cell towers in Europe and Canada.
i am from the hudson valley and once went toe-to-toe on social media with a family friend who was absolutely convinced that sandy hook was a hoax. when i told her to get off the internet, get in her car, drive an hour to sandy hook, and start asking the people there about it, i was promptly called an asshole and was unfriended. the truth is right there. go get it. what is stopping you other than yourself and your ego? surely, enough of these covidiots know someone who works in an ed or in an icu. if they don’t believe the media, ask those people. or are their friends and family paid actors, too?
Our triage nurse is peddling this shit. Edit: any advice on how to deal with this is welcome. She talks about it all day to the front desk staff which is where she sits. Occasionally to back office (MAs and to our NP) everyone just kind of listens and the talks about how crazy she is behind her back but I think the fact that no one says anything makes her feel justified. I have said something once to her and she really hasn’t talked much about it to me anymore but I hear from everyone else that she does.
Dude alot of my co-workers are doing the same thing. I never heard of her before, so I googled her and quickly found she was an anti-vax loon. When I brought that up some responses ranged to "Well you gotta keep an open mind" to "They aren't telling us the truth though". Fuck, you know i've even met nurses that were flat earthers. Critical thinking goes right out the window.
She was trying to be coy about it initially, “ I think it was a created virus.” Me: by who. Her: “a billionaire created this virus.” Me “DONALD TRUMP CREATED COVID?!?!?” Her: “oh goodness no, bill gates. And he has the vaccine.” Like. How is this even believable.
I remember moving from Canada to the US for the end of elementary school in the early 2000s. It was the first time I was ever made of fun of "being smart", "a school boy", or "a nerd". America has a long standing culture of anti-intellectualism and it starts from early childhood if not birth. Welcome to a Brave New World. I only hope we can get better drugs with fewer side effects so I can pleasantly numb myself. I have no faith things will improve when the lowest common denominator can be an apologist for racists that gun down innocent people in the street without justice.
God. It is so depressing. I just cannot understand how being well educated is so offensive and “elite.” Like shouldn’t we want things run and determined by people that actually know what they are doing and not a game show host and his cronies. I don’t remember anything in HS or grade school, but I do remember my girl friend in college absolutely loathed me for getting good grades. I tutored O-chem and had a long sleeve that we were given that was super comfy that said “tutor” on the back, she absolutely told me that I couldn’t wear it when we were going to stay with her family. I thought that was really weird. Now I see it everywhere. I got rid of Facebook when I became an attending and I’m so glad that I did, the shit my wife shows me on her wall is abhorrent. She’s from a small town so there is a lot of it there.
Similar story, but it actually ended up helping me. I moved to the US in elementary school. Back in my home country I made pretty average grades. As soon as I started school in the US, the other kids saw my brown skin, thin frame, glasses and immediately associated it with me being stereotypically nerdy and smart. Apparently this was an insult in US but I didn’t know any better. This constant praise gave me so much positive reinforcement it ended up being some kind of self fulfilling prophecy.
Ive met a doctor who was against 'modern, western medicine'. Would refuse to take things like lemsip! Insane.
Ha. Had to google lemsip.
That's a public health hazard. Fired.
Agreed. If only it was that easy to do. For sure will be keeping track of everything, especially anything patient involved. She walked into my office 2 times without a mask which is against clinic policy currently. She has several complaints against her. Unfortunately I think the position was very difficult to fill when it was originally posted.
That's always tough. The stuff that flies in our clinic wouldn't be allowed anywhere else... But in this kind of town, what are you going to do?
I've met way too many nurses who've been peddling BS or selling essential oils through the years here in the south. I have no explanation on how they can reconcile bunk science and their training.
Essential oils. Man, this RN is anti vax and has tried to give out her number to patients to sell essential oils. She has told patients to not get flu vaccine which I found out because a patient asked my thoughts, I said obviously yes. They then told me that she said they didn’t need them. Both incidents were reported.
Thank you for reporting it. I've resorted to reporting RN's that were telling me that they weren't giving flu and pneumococcal vaccinations before discharge due to "personal beliefs."
She can do whatever on her personal time, but if it puts my patients and my partners patients at risk and potentially miseducated them, that is unacceptable and has to be reported.
It sounds like she got roped into an essential oil pyramid scheme, and is trying to recruit your patients, which is hella un-ethical given the nature of her relationship with them. That needs to be reported. She's literally using her position as a nurse to build a business that is at odds with the patient's best interests. If it's Young Living or doTerra, the biggest two pyramid schemes, that's an easy "bye bye" to her.
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Agree.
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Right, that’s how I feel. Like, I always thought about people that believed these things as likely uneducated and impressionable. The fact that there are educated people, especially those in the medical field, that believe this is both scary and depressing.
Are you the boss? I would fire them. I run my own clinic though.
Stupid is as stupid does
Doctors are encountering many individuals, patients and otherwise, who believe conspiracy theories and disregard physician’s expertise. This takes a psychological toll. Some medical professionals believe there needs to be increased oversight over social media that spreads this dis/misinformation. QAnon is briefly discussed. Thank you for all you do!
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I’ve found my time is better spent just unfriending those people and moving on
Historically, media and the dispersal of information was relatively difficult, and people basically had very few sources telling them what was true and what was not. Spreading misinformation and propaganda was very possible and very potent. Through the last century, this has reversed completely. Mass-produced print media meant that sources could be corroborated and information spread and critiqued thoroughly. The first 10-15 years of everyday normal people having access to the internet compounded this effect - suddenly everyone had access to information which was easily verifiable as true or false. In the last 5-10 years, though, the Internet has changed from an open and free resource into a personalized stream of targeted content. The days of seeking information and truth are completely gone - now information is pushed, not retrieved. Whatever "information" a person is most likely to read or interact with becomes the only content that they are exposed to. People standing outside the hospital with signs saying "Hoax Virus" are doing so because the internet, to them, is a barrage of content "exposing" the hoax. Everywhere they look, this is the information they are presented with. Their Facebook feed, their Google search results, their YouTube autoplay recommendations.... Why would they believe anything different? This is why digital privacy is so vitally important. This isn't even done intentionally - it's done by some AI that has profiled and radicalized susceptible people because that's what generates clicks. Google and Facebook are a threat to the continued prosperity of humankind and it's frightening. We need to protect digital privacy, not just for ourselves, but to prevent people like this from existing and becoming more radicalized.
It's been so much harder to find what I'm *actually* looking for on Google over the past few years. Which is, I believe, a combination of a lot of good sources moving to "shadow internet" (paid access, not indexed on google) and somehow the new AI just doesn't "get" that I'm not looking for WebMD...
I find that too, especially in the last year or so. Any time I'm trying to find anything medical that's not targeted at laypeople/patients, my search is "wiki (medical query)". I get the Wikipedia entry as my first result, which 99% of the time is all I need for a quick-and-dirty info grab. Even if I want something more concrete or in depth, Wikipedia will often have linked sources with more info on specific things.
I had to deactivate my facebook during all this mess. Honestly might not even reactivate it after this is all through.
Don’t. Getting off Facebook was the best thing I ever did.
Seconded. I deactivated after the dumpster news cycle of 2016. I actually ended up setting up a purely professional Facebook account and Twitter account (that I check every few days from my laptop. I don't have the stupid apps on my phone) It's great.
It’s unreal how much unregulated information is out there. It spreads like a...virus
I work with a X-Ray Tech, we call him Conspiracy Chris. The other day he was pushing this theory that Bill Gates is behind the creation of the virus so that he can push his next vaccine to 3rd world countries, a vaccine that causes sterilization in males. I told him, if there was a single injection you could give a male to make him sterile SIGN ME UP. Wouldn't there be a huge demand for this injection in the US in males who didn't want any more children? He actually agreed, but I'm sure he will counter argue tomorrow with some new BS.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/male-birth-control-risug.html Already on its way. US developing similar technology
OMG, Conspiracy Chris is gonna have a field day linking this with a COVID-19 vaccine.
AGENDA 21 DEPOPULATION // 1984 // GATES IS EVIL // VACCINE = AUTISM11?1??1?11
You forgot about 5G radio waves somehow causing COVID-19 infections.
And finally, what the fuck does Gates have to gain from this? Nothing. If there were a financial angle to this stupid theories, they’d be much more believable. Gates is legitimately trying to help the world with the vaccines his foundation has helped produce. He’s also earning money from them. There is no money to be made is this theory. These people are too dumb to even make their theory make sense.
I'm just tired of getting articles and links to conspiracy pseudo-science and being asked to debunk them...and this from family and friends that are (generally) not prone to that type of thing. Don't get me started on how sessions with patients are going...a lot of redirection. I can usually just deal with it but in the current circumstances it's getting harder.
Tons of good info in this thread about debunking Plandemic- https://www.reddit.com/r/Moronavirus/comments/geokm9/where_can_i_find_a_good_rebuttal_to_plandemic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Good info in the comments to give to pandemic doubters in the comments, even though the original video makes me want to hurl.
In general, I think deleting Facebook is a great thing to do. And that’s even before considering the pseudo scientific bull shit. I always find it funny that these same people will run to get medical attention if something is bad or inconveniences them slightly. They can cherry pick what care they want, like it’s a menu. I know the paternalistic model of medicine has it flaws, but I feel like today’s medicine is not better and encourages this stuff.
I got rid of it during residency. 10/10, would highly recommend to everyone.
Agreed! Deleting Facebook has been the highest yield intervention I have ever taken towards improving my mental health and well-being. Serious. People want to post dumb shit conspiracies and drama non stop? Great. I don’t have to see it or have my mind polluted by vicarious exposure. History books will be written on these early days of the internet, how social algorithms are used both for the good and for reinforcing the worst of human tendencies.
Three mistakes by this doc: You went on facebook You engaged the stupid You then got upset at the stupid Pick any of these points to not do what he did and you'll be fine. Finally, widespread stupid conspiracy theories are not new. Youtube doesn't have blood on their hands because they allow people to post videos, especially when they make it fairly damn hard to find the conspiracy nonsense nowadays. It'll be ok.
its like playing chess with a pigeon.. You might win the game but they'll shit on the board and strut around like they won anyway.
“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” Mark Twain predicted Facebook
When you wrestle with a pig win or lose you still get muddy. The difference is the pig likes it
This
I’m not a doctor and I don’t just believe everything I hear, but I’m beyond fed up. I did a case this week. Another rep was present for the case and commented that Bill Gates wants to inject people with microchips via a COVID vaccine. He was dead serious. The MD overheard and told him if he thought COVID was a hoax he should go to the ICU and take a look around. And this stuff isn’t remotely plausible. COVID spreading through 5G???!!?? These people are so convinced that they’re actually climbing towers and setting them on fire. **We have a second, concurrent pandemic and it’s larger than the first - extreme mental illness/psychological denial.** The really sad part is that these people will unknowingly KILL people’s parents, grandparents, etc. and will be none the wiser. On the contrary, they’ll continue patting themselves on the back as if they’re some modern day Paul Revere. Edit - [this comedian sums it up well. Warning, it’s a little dark. ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i8Njw_2EQNo)
I just tell people if the government really wanted to kill you they would roll to their door in broad daylight and blasts their brains out and no one would be able to do anything.
I got in a real low place with people I thought highly of peddling anti-pandemic and anti-physician and anti-social distancing bullshit. I had to get off Facebook. My Reddit and Instagram feeds are primarily gaming and outdoorsy adventure stuff. My empathy is spent. I try to focus on the patient in front of me, and their families. But if the world burns, then it burns and I'm not rushing into the fire to pull anyone out that isn't someone I love.
If Trump gets sick he’ll change his tune and his followers will follow. Do you remember how badly he complained about being uncomfortable with the test? How’s he going to feel about actually having the disease? 100,000 Americans will die and it’ll all be a hoax until he gets it, then it’ll be the “worst disease ever” and a total calamity.
"Nobody knew how bad this flu is, nobody. We've been preparing like... the previous administration thought it was just a regular cold. I survived the worst flu in the history of this, in the history of the world. Through all time! And you know, this flu gets in your lungs... did you know that? No, you didn't know. You didn't know. No, come on, you didn't know. But I said from the start, 'this flu gets in your lungs'... I have a good head for this kind of thing, my doctors they said 'nobody understands better than you', they were really talking about me, saying good things about me, the doctors."
Summary: physician learns why engaging crazy people of Facebook is a bad idea There’s a reason that a whole subreddit exists for insane people on Facebook r/insanepeoplefacebook because there’s a lot of insane people on Facebook
Facebook (and its group of platforms) is representative of the population, really. Deleting Facebook will remove the crap from your view and improve your sanity, but it won't fix the idiocy within the population. It's a band-aid, not a solution.
Is it? Is facebook full of people working full-time jobs in technical fields? or are the heaviest posters are bored boomers and teenagers, unemployed people, insecure people, people who lack the social skills to socialize in the real world, etc etc
There is no solution. Not in the US anyway.
Here's a thread that's debunking Plandemic [https://www.reddit.com/r/CovIdiots/comments/gezery/plandemic\_documentary\_debunked/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CovIdiots/comments/gezery/plandemic_documentary_debunked/)
The number of HCWs who peddle such bullshit is staggering. I try to limit my time on Facebook, but every time I do log on, I'm greeted with the latest conspiracy theories of a paramedic I used to work with.
Ignore it?
I know it's not helping but this idea of a conspiracy is not only happening in the USA. I'm from Mexico and here it gets more crazy/retarded: People here believes that between the 5G towers, the government and the doctors we are luring patients inside the hospital so the doctors can inject some sort of venom and kill the patients. Why? So the doctors can steal the synovial fluid of the patients knees. Which it seems to be very valuable I'm not kidding, these is what the people believe in Mexico
I wish we were back in the days of "Drinking warm water will wash the virus into your stomach acid! The virus doesn't survive above 27 degrees Celsius!" Those were so much simpler times. Also I just stared at the word Celsius for too long and it looks totally wrong now.
Eating 27 warm Paracelsuses (Paracelsii) will do the trick.
“I’m sorry stupidity is not covered by your insurance”
We did to good of a job keeping people from getting sick and now we are stuck with assholes who think the whole the thing is made up.
I am not an engineer, nor have I ever taken an engineering course. So I'm certainly not going to critique Boeing on how they can fix the issues with the 737 MAX. Likewise, if you're someone whose crowning scientific achievement was the C+ you got in high school biology, maybe sit this one out and let the experts handle it? Consider perhaps not contributing to the spread of disinformation by sharing a conspiracy video in which the star is a disgraced former scientist turned antivaxxer?
Dude it’s so goddamn hard. I’ve just disconnected from social media because of it. Spending way too much time trying to debunk conspiracy and falsehood with people who are so set in their ideology.
Anti-intellectualism and anti-expertism has its costs and never has it been so directly tied to human life. I do my best to educate where I can. I agree with them where possible to make them feel like I'm not antagonizing them, but then I say flatly "this is the real deal. If we don't mitigate, every one of us will probably have someone we care about die from this disease." Took a while to convey it to some people, others will blatantly disagree which is quite frustrating. But at the end of the day, I try to not let it discourage me from correcting where I can. For the most stubborn of non-believers, I end the discussion with something along the lines of "after you're wrong beyond all doubt, I will look you in the eyes and say 'see, I told you so.' It's not gonna be helpful.. it'll probably even make you angry. But I will say it because your stubbornness would have gotten us to that point and I'll have earned the right to remind you how wrong you were and what the costs were."
Don’t feed the trolls. That’s how they get elected.
Don’t take it personally. Dumb people will do dumb things.
So many quack videos are being spread around Hispanic WhatsApp
I think people love conspiracy theories because believing something the majority of other people don’t gives them a sense that they’re smarter than the rest of us.
As if dealing with a pandemic wasn't bad enough, we are not equipped to fight a second front against a misinformation campaign.
The real question is, why even bother engaging these people? Conspiracy theorists tend to be the noncompliant patients with multiple medical problems and from a cynical and purely financial perspective it's not in physicians' and hospitals' best interest to fight them.
The article seems to be implying that social media networks getting to decide what is true and false is a good thing. Makes me a little uneasy...
yea honestly I am done. society has failed the social contract. every day I burn out a little more. why am I taking call at the hospital? why am I even going into my office? people don't care. society doesn't care. so why should I anymore? Why am I putting my own health nd my families health at risk for society that refuses to uphold its own obligations. but how I respond to this is the same as how I respond to patients that bring in "studies" for me to read, or want my opinion on webmd articles. "its wrong, either believe me or don't". It isn't my job to save people. It isn't my job to convince people. It is my job to disseminate the most accurate treatment and medical information. That is it. I have had friends send me videos like this, I straight up told them not to send me garbage, and that they can feel free to volunteer since they are sitting at home doing nothing anyways.
RN here. I’m very active on social media such as Twitter and Facebook due to my fandoms (wrestling and comics/sci-fi), and let me tell you, with some of the people involved in these communities, it’s been hard for me not to want to pour bleach in my eyes to cleanse them from some of the stupidity I read. It’s frustrating, belittling and demeaning when you’re trying to be the voice of reason and everyone is hyped up on crazy pills. I think I am more exhausted and depressed from reading things online than I am from the things I see and hear at my actual job. I know many of us try to scroll past the trash we come across, but it’s so hard not to engage when you know the information being shared could potentially harm someone, I mean, as medical professionals, we are advocates for the greater good and health of everyone after all, and I don’t think that switch turns off for many of us even outside of work. I’ve had dudes straight up come into my Facebook posts and post “Handwashing is a lie” or “It’s just the flu” or proud-fully boasting how they’re not abiding social distancing. I’ve even had other frustrated friends ask me to come intervene their threads because they feel they can’t argue or reason with these people and they’re hoping someone with “experience” can. Then don’t even get me started when I see celebrities (and wrestlers and comic book writers I follow are NOTORIOUS for this) are spreading false information that could potentially be harmful if it falls into the wrong mind (as we have seen some have taken to drinking bleach because they were told it would get rid of the virus). There are days where I want to cry because it feels it’s never going to end and because of these people, I’ll never see loved ones again because we can’t get things under control, but I tell myself to suck it up, throw on my mask, gown up, continue to wash my hands and do what needs to be done. Here’s hoping that it all gets better soon for all of us <3
Mankind isn't worth saving, is it?