She’s a doctor, she must know all the inner secrets! Except…she’s not a real doctor. She’s a chiropractor.
I don’t think I’ll need to change anything about what I teach.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Is not “doctor” a protected title?
I know she would get into legal trouble in Sweden.
specifically a promoter of German New Medicine, which holds that all illness is psychosomatic and thinking can cure cancer! https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ryke_Geerd_Hamer
Reminds me of another doctor, a micropaleontologist and not a very good one. She used the title to claim that vaccinations caused sudden infant death syndrome, (SIDS). She aggressively promoted that message aided by an uncritical media who constantly repeated her lies despite being warned about her, including by her own daughter who was actually a medically qualified doctor.
No. “Doctor” is an advanced degree. You can legitimately earn one in many fields, not just medicine. I have one. Then there are people who are called “Doctor”, but may or may not be actual doctors, such as Dr. Demento and Dr. Dre.
Perhaps you are thinking of ‘physician.’
Then what is? Blood certainly gets pumped around the body by something.
Indeed, Doctor is both a title for an advanced degree and an honorific. I remember when pharmacists were referred to as doctor.
If we were to protect the title of doctor by restricting it only to licensed physicians, we’ve then removed the ability for PZ from using his doctorate in his professional signature. While some may not find that of particular importance, it does lend greater gravitas in professional communications in their chosen field of expertise.
And becomes dangerous when the honorific is abused by a bone cracker, whose word should only ever be trusted in matters of physical therapy.
Especially when every one of her claims are refuted by millions of videos of everything from pumping hearts to white blood cells destroying pathogens.
Still, that looks like a Twaddle interface, making me even more happy that I deleted my account some time ago.
This person is an idiot and a fraud, even by chiropractor standards. My first wife had a far better experience with chiropractors who were both more knowledgeable about medicine in general, and more honest about the limits of their profession.
“The new medicine?” Sounds more like very old and obsolete medicine (with lots of old religious morality), dressed up in new-old-timey bullshit.
IIRC, the mentor of one of my grad school professors held the gel theory of cells (as opposed to a membrane with an aqueous interior). Ironically, my prof did electrophysiology!
Not just a doctor (chiropractor) but a mind wellness coach too.
Talk about the blind leading the blind.
This is the kind of “education” and “educational process” we can expect when we have the Daily Salinases of the world dictating what can and cannot be taught in schools.
It’s like Idiocracy brought to life.
This is how it starts.
Snake-oil salesmen have been a thing since forever. It’s almost as if it pays off somehow.
Medical “doctors” are johnny-come-lately’s in the doctoring biz, not even getting that title until something like late 18th century.
Go back to the 12th century, for the first universities, and there’s only THREE types of doctorate:
Theology (worthless)
Law (negative worth, on average)
Philosophy (where all the good stuff is shoehorned into, now)
@2 Mixed with a massive dose of racism…
In Germany, “Dr.” is a title you can’t use without having earned one. Though, if you’ve earned one why would you need to tout it?
@1
Wrong, stupid. Only “doctor of medicine” is protected in Sweden.
You know, it wouldn’t be so bad if this Dorftrottel had only two views. But more than 67000 ?
Who listens to (and follows) this rubbish? Tell-me-who.
OT
Today I learned…
House Republicans betray their promise to back veterans again by cutting billions from the act providing medical treatment to veterans exposed to toxic compounds.
@6 wzrd1 —
Chiropractors practice chiropractic, not physical therapy. If a chiropractor says they are doing PT, but are not licensed for PT, that’s a violation of ethics and of the law.
All that chemistry, biology and human anatomy – physiology I learned to be a nurse. after 40 years as a Registered Nurse with 25 years working in hospitals, mostly ICU and the Cardiac Cath Lab, I have seen the connection between the things on that list and how the body works. That list is the exact opposite of what is real, so I can only deduce she said those things intentionally to get attention.
Huh. Didn’t know the human body could function without a brain for….how old is this woman, anyway?
@wzrd1
“Indeed, Doctor is both a title for an advanced degree and an honorific. I remember when pharmacists were referred to as doctor.”
Technically they are; a 4-year Pharmacy degree is a PharmD, equally valid to call them a ‘Doctor’ as a PhD.
If the heart isn’t a pump, then WTF is it? A magical piece of meat that wills the blood to move?
One wonders what she’ll say when she develops type 1 breast cancer or catches the next serious virus to come down the pike? Will she still hold to these garbage “theories” about medicine or will she run to the nearest (actual) medical doctor and beg for real medicine to fix the problem? Inquiring minds want to know (but we already pretty much do know the answer, now don’t we.)
If she’s a doctor, then she’s a quack!
wzrd1 @6
Nope, I’ll take an actual PT over a bone cracker, thanks.
@stwriley #21
If that happens, she’ll likely chose to ignore all the advice given by qualified professionals and die. Those German New Medicine types are rather stubborn. There was a case in Germany involving a child with a giant tumor and the parents of said child chose to follow their messia Ryke Gerd Hamer (who passed away from …..wait for it………cancer in 2017) and fled their home country as the CPS threatened to take the kid into custody for treatment. Only after a lengthy search they could be located and the child be treated. So I’d guess she’d rather chose to turm her body into fertilizer than being treated. Well, dipshits gonna dipshit.
She is very likely to go alt med for treatment and die.
I’ve seen that before.
Patient was 33 years old with stage 1 breast cancer.
At this point, her predicted 5 year survival rate was 98%.
She went alt med instead.
And died at age 34 from metastatic breast cancer.
We see this often with the Covid-19 virus deniers and the antivaxxers.
They can end up in the ICU and still deny that the Covid-19 virus is real or claim that the vaccines are part of a UN population reduction program.
They will post antivax memes until they die. If they survive with significant health damage, they will post antivax memes from their rehab nursing home.
It’s not unusual in antivax families to have several family members die from the Covid-19 virus and they still don’t get it.
My chiropractor is a lifesaver when my back is in spasm and needs realignment, but she doesn’t pretend to have magical powers, or deny the enormous body of established medical science.
In decades, centuries, to come, Pharyngula, with posts like this and the previous one, will be a source for analysing the decline and fall of the American Empire.
@23 In all fairness, I had a really good chiropractor who helped my a lot more than the PTs did, but she never tried to sell me quack treatments or supplements and it should be noted she was also a licensed EMT. Most of her practice was treating firefighters’ back spasms and the like. She was also an excellent X-ray technician and I’ll never understand why she just didn’t move to a larger clinical practice. Her standard MO was to do an X-ray on the affected area to be certain that it wasn’t a broken bone that was the issue. She found a hairline crack in one of my family member’s arm & refused to treat until said relative got the break seen by an orthopedic specialist. She did excellent work within the limits of her field.
@21, 25 Chances are that she will post pictures on social media with a suppurating open wound on her breast and tell the world (or at least her idiot followers) that the treatment is “working”. Because yes, that’s out there. (Don’t Google it. You will be sorry.)
The Better Half’s extended family (one branch of it anyway) went full-on anti-vaxxer–wouldn’t mask, wouldn’t socially distance, wouldn’t get vaccinated (also were Trumpistas. Yeah, I know–that’s your shocked face).
Naturally they all got Covid 19 and the oldest of them died from it.
To this day, they still refuse to acknowledge that any of them had Covid 19 or that one of them died from it. They insist that the dead guy died from “old age”. (Naturally, none of them went to a doctor or hospital either. Because, you know, nothing was wrong.)
You can’t make the delusional believe in reality, or at least the commonly acknowledged version of reality.
(We don’t talk to any of them anymore. No point and I certainly don’t want any closer contact.)
Re: doctor as a protected title
[1] It varies from country to country
[2] In most places it is considered an honorific, so pretty much any health practitioner can call themselves doctor
[3] But if anyone tries to claim or imply any specific qualification, they’d better have that qualification
[4] Historically, ‘doctor’ referred to people who had completed a doctorate at university, originally only in theology but later in other disciplines. Strictly speaking, the decision by American medical schools to call their undergraduate degrees ‘MD’s was itself a fraud to make US graduates look more prestigous than their European counterparts. Most MD degrees, despite the doctor in the title, are not doctorates in any academic sense of the word. Outside the US and Canada, medical degrees are MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) or MBBCh (Ch for chirurgie — again, trying to look all fancy-pants by using a French word even for English-speaking universities) with a few rare variants, and an MD was an actual doctorate that required submission and defence of a thesis — basically a PhD in the medical faculty. All this is changing and now most medical schools around the world call their grad program an MD as schools around the world bow to the power of American culture (everyone now expects their health care doctors to have MDs because of TV), the allure of the supposed extra prestige for recruiting students, and to be frank, the continuation of the deception as these are still not remotely equivalent to doctorates from any other faculty.
The big difference is the MD program is now a graduate rather than an undergraduate program. Essentially they’ve split the old medical degree into two components, called the first component a BMedSci (Bachelor of Medical Science) which used to be an extra program medical students did if they were particularly interested in science and was awarded as a separate degree alongside their MBBS or after another 1-2 years of study. The second component is the clinical teaching in a hospital setting. This allows the schools to act like they’re doing an undergrad program, then a grad program that allows them to call it a doctorate…but it’s really the same as the old MBBS split into two degrees, and there’s still no thesis or defence.
There are some good reasons for structuring the program this way, for instance it allows students to leave halfway through with a BMedSci which can be helpful for getting into other programs, while under the previous system anyone who left after five years of the six-year program would have nothing to show for it…which is not just bad for the students, it’s bad for the profession. But it seems pretty clear to me that the main reason for this restructure was to sell an artificially upgraded qualification title to compete for overseas students.
I was going to add, the spread of MD grad programs throughout the world is an excellent example of Gresham’s Law.
OT, but years ago I worked as a clinical coder at a small regional hospital. I was the only clinical coder on staff there.
There were regular senior hospital management meetings that I was often delegated to attend because the main hospital campus was a 3-hour round trip drive, so the actual head of the Clinical Coding Department was not always able to attend.
During one such meeting, attended by the hospital General Manager, the head of medicine (consultant physician), head of surgery (consultant surgeon), nurse manager, statistics officer, facilities manager, and some others, I witnessed an odly acrimonious argument between the consultants.
The gist of the argument was:
Consultant physician to consultant surgeon, “you just want to excise the disease”.
Consultant surgeon to consultant physician, “and you just treat it’s symptoms”.
A general awkwardness then ensued among the rest of us.
At the same hospital I suffered an episode of acute ulceration at the pylorus leading to my hospitalisation. It turned out that the ulceration was iatrogenic, being caused directly by medication I was taking for another transient condition.
During a conversation with the attending consultant GI surgeon (not the head mentioned above) whom I had known for some years, I asked him about any dietary regimen that may aid in my recovery, to which he replied, “You are a vegetarian, you will know better than I”.
I have never since conferred on physicians and surgeons the same level of deference as I once did.
As for chiropractors making broad statements such as this idiot, well, lets just leave it a that.
chrislawson @30:
It’s not fancy-pants French. It’s fancy-pants Latin; Medicinae Baccalaureus, Baccalaureus Chirurgiae.
Rob, the degrees I’ve seen spelt it Chirurgie, the French version, not Chirurgiae, the Latin. I’m not saying this is universal, but I’ve only seen the French spelling myself. My experience, I should say, is from seeing these hanging on the walls of clinics I’ve visited, not from any systematic investigation. There’s also weird examples like the University of Auckland that calls its medical degree ‘Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery’ and yet shortens it to ‘MBChB’ for some reason. Presumably they enjoy the thought of their graduates explaining themselves a lot.
birgerjohansson @ 15, Memorial day was yesterday and now is over, so it’s back to business as usual for them.