Why I Don’t Trust Doctors (or Most “Experts” for That Matter…)

In bioethics, politics and law, oftentimes we must rely upon the opinions of so-called “experts,” particularly those in the medical professions.  But as anyone who has ever dealt with doctors knows, they are frequently wrong — but almost NEVER admit it.

The problem is, their arrogance can get people killed or cause serious harm. That’s one of the reasons why you should never trust doctors or any other expert. Or rather, you should follow Reagan’s Dictum: Trust… But Verify.

Take this recent case from Australia. A woman, Kate Ogg, delivered twins and was told that, after 20 minutes of resuscitation efforts, that the male child wasn’t going to make it. The hospital staff lay the lifeless body of the premature infant on the mother’s chest so she could say goodbye.

The problem is, the baby began to stir. “Just reflexive movements,” the doctor sniffed dismissively.

The parents trusted the doctor knew what he was talking about — always a problematic assumption — and continued to nuzzle the baby as it squiggled around. They assumed he was dying.

They kept asking the doctor to re-examine the baby, but he refused. Repeatedly refused. He had decided. He had made up his (arrogant) mind. Too busy filling out his forms to bother taking another look. This attitude is rampant in medicine.

Here’s what happened next as reported on MSNBC.com:

Jamie [the baby] continued to come around as he lay across Kate’s chest. He began grabbing at his mother’s finger, as well as his father’s. And when Kate put a dab of breast milk on her finger, Jamie eagerly accepted it.

Kate finally began to believe her baby was actually alive. “We thought, ‘He’s getting stronger — he’s not dead,’ ” she said. But the family wasn’t getting any encouragement from their doctor. While the Oggs urged hospital personnel to summon him, they were repeatedly told what they were seeing was still just reflex from a baby already declared dead.

Kate Ogg told Curry they had to “fib” to get the doctor to return to her bedside. “We kept saying, ‘He’s doing things dead babies don’t do, you might want to come and see this,’ ” she told Curry.

But the skeptical doctor still didn’t return. “So David said, ‘Go and tell him we’ve come to terms with the baby’s death, can he just come and explain it.’ That made him come back.”

Kate Ogg told the London Daily Mail the doctor was in disbelief when he arrived back at the bedside. “He got a stethoscope, listened to Jamie’s chest and just kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ ”

The problem with experts is not that they don’t have expertise. It’s that their expertise blinds them to what is right in front of their eyes. Their expertise actually creates a bias.

I don’t mean to pick on doctors. My brother is a doctor. I have friends who are doctors. But I take almost everything they say with a gigantic grain of salt… especially when it’s really serious. The parents in this case now worry that the arrogance of this particular doctor may have resulting in their child suffering unnecessary brain damage. Had the doctor bothered to listen to what the parents were saying, the hospital staff might have been able to administer oxygen and take other measures to help the struggling baby.

Trust but verify indeed.