The increasing distrust many Americans have in modern medical advances is probably mostly due to our failing Healthcare system.

Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Apytele@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

It’s easy not to trust a system associated with charging you $500 for Tylenol. Much easier (and occasionally even safer) to just smell some lavender and hope that helps. Go to an ED and you could just die of a stroke or heart attack in the waiting room or even get run over by somebody who died of a heart attack while driving and just plowed through the waiting room because they couldn’t afford an ambulance. And the Healthcare system is largely failing because of insurance companies. Burn inhumana and united quacks to the ground 2k24.

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fubo@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Personally, I blame the people telling the lies; e.g. the antivax campaigners, the tobacco companies, etc.

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- Revan343@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Blame the politicians they own
  
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- ChexMax@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s tough when doctors have been liars too, like those who are hired to push a certain narrative by corporations, or those who participated in unethical studies, or basically all doctors to women saying all our problems are emotional and in our heads while ignoring objective medical facts/symptoms.
  
  When I see how differently men and women are treated in medicine, it’s hard to trust doctors to be objective. They’re just not.
  
  I’m doing my best to be a good little Democrat and look down on those who don’t trust doctors but geeze, experiencing a pregnancy and then giving birth in America makes it real hard to give doctors the benefit of the doubt.
  
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- muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  We will always have liars about literally everything you cannot blame the liars for being successful fix the system that let them defeat truth.
  
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  - ElmerFudd@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You absolutely can, and should, hold liara accountable. The “don’t hate the player, hate the game” excuse simply doesn’t fly for everything.
    
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  - lemonmelon@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Any system capable of countering a determined attempt to spread misinformation would by design attach penalties to such lies, and those penalties would be enforced on the liars. What successful fix could even be proposed that withholds blame?
    
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- cymbal_king@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The tobacco companies? Telling lies? Why I never!
  
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themurphy@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There’s so many things wrong with the Americans healthcare system, I don’t know how to find the most absurd one.

But also the fact that you can advertise for medicin, and that the patient actually has a say in what they get at the doctor, is insane.

Why would you trust those guys, if the medicin they sell is sponsored?

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- Tinidril@midwest.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just wait for what’s coming. The ACA set us up for monetization of healthcare on steroids, and it’s just about to hit critical mass. I think anyone engaged with the healthcare system today can see the enshitification accelerating.
  
  For just a sampling of what’s to come, there is a projected shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036. It seems like doctors aren’t interested in joining the rest of us in working for slave wages to benefit Wall Street.
  
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  - Uranium3006@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    lack of residency spots by design and high student loans make becomming a primary care doctor a losing proposition. specialize to survive
    
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- buzz86us@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can have insurance and still be expected to pay thousands of dollars
  
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  - jettrscga@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    With the joy of high deductible health plans you can pay thousands of dollars in network, because they can get away with it.
    
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  - possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I wish the insurance companies encouraged better life styles.
    
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- Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Advertising if prescription medicine is illegal in my country so it’s crazy visiting the US and those are like half of the ads
  
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- Fal@yiffit.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is a terrible take. Advertising medicine makes a ton of sense. People don’t always know what symptoms are actually something that has a cure. They see an ad for a drug and think “oh shit, I have those symptoms, let me go the to doctor”. Otherwise they just live with what they think is normal.
  
  But further, DOCTORS don’t even know what new drugs exist. Patients advocating for themselves is a HUGE benefit. So a patient might come in and ask for a drug that the doctor has never even heard of so never would have even considered prescribing it even if it was the right drug.
  
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  - BallsandBayonets@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think you have the terrible take. Untrained people shouldn’t be self-diagnosing based on hearing a list of symptoms, the brain is too good at tricking itself and it is too easy to even give yourself symptoms you don’t have.
    
    And I don’t expect any one doctor to know of every treatment that exists for every illness, because that’s what collaborative knowledge bases are for. A carefully moderated medical Wikipedia that can be contributed to by doctors and researchers.
    
    But all of this wouldn’t make the pharmesutical companies as much money as peddling to hypochondriacs so instead we have ads.
    
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- Drusas@kbin.run ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The patient doesn't really get a say. Only the shitty doctors given to their patients demanding medications they don't need. Which isn't to say it doesn't happen, but it's not standard.
  
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  - themurphy@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Must be pretty widespread since there’s so many ads for drugs and medicin.
    
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Akareth@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
From a non-American’s perspective, I think part of the mistrust comes from Americans have been through high-profile lies perpetrated by government agencies.

For example, a more recent one in the last few decades is the Food Pyramid/MyPlate that was/is promoted by the US government’s agriculture department. This has led to Americans in the late '70s/early '80s to start a war on saturated fat and cholesterol, and the rapid adoption of carbohydrates in the average diet. What has happened in the decades following is a rapid increase in metabolic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and mental illnesses — all of which were rare in human history prior to the '70s. While I’m glad Americans are waking up to the realisation of the mass brainwashing of what constitutes “healthy” food, I’m still upset that — due to the influence of America on the global stage — my own country has followed suit in adopting the US’s dietary guidelines to the detriment of our own health.

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- stringere@leminal.space ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And that’s just one example.
  
  The most glaring generator of mistrust for decades now is the thing citizens discuss all the time but is never addressed: our out of control military budget.
  
  We could solve every one of our country’s financial issues multiple times over by reducing the military budget, and not even drastically so.
  
  Our military was tasked with an audit to reign in waste and spending. They couldn’t pass an audit so they were just given a free pass, no penalties or repercussions. The first audit was 2017 and they failed to pass. They failed two more since then. Senator Sanders intoruduced a bill in 2021 and again in 2023 which required an audit and was supposed to impose penalties for failure, it’s been introduced so we’ll see how that goes.
  
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  - Apytele@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    [deleted]
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Etterra@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I suspect the GOP and gullible citizens have a bigger impact.

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- chuckleslord@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Conservatives correctly identify the location of anxiety, but not the source of the issue. So, a mismatch of anxiety over healthcare costs leading to mistrust of healthcare is, like, textbook conservatism.
  
  Take the anxiety over one thing and use it to stoke fears related to that anxiety.
  
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  - intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    And failure to differentiate that landscape into something requiring more than five bits to represent is classic leftism.
    
    Healthcare costs are ridiculous, and a serious problem. They are following the same pattern as the other “free markets” which government has entered with the provision of money to “help out”. Whenever that happens, costs skyrocket and supply dwindles.
    
    See also: housing, college education
    
    Also, as a separate but equally dangerous problem, the pharmaceutical companies made enormous profits by pushing dangerous (as in, not covered by longitudinal studies and therefore skipping a good chunk of the safety process we use for medicines) MRNA “vaccines” onto our entire population with the help of government agencies. Their combination of enormous profits and political power brings up very serious questions about the set of incentives involved in the political process that brought these not only to market. but into a thousand types of soft tyranny. Generally speaking, nobody had a gun to their head to take these shots, but many people were forced to choose between their career and their bodily autonomy.
    
    But go on. Build your straw men and tear them down instead. Not like we’re playing for enormous stakes or anything here.
    
    All of the issues I listed above are issues a liberal should care about. I myself am a liberal. But I hang out with conservatives because they’re the only ones who will discuss the above problems openly. Leftists these days are lock-step self-censoring to the point they actually believe their own trimmed-down version of their thoughts.
    
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- intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Right. We distrust the rushed-to-market-and-mandatory vaccines because we’re gullible. Totally what that word means.
  
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  - Glytch@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    “Rushed to market” after decades of research and development on that type of vaccine? Do some actual research and not just YouTube and Fox News next time.
    
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  - PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thank you for the demonstration, you may now return to your horse paste
    
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Uranium3006@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
a big part of it is how conservatives have a privileged position in the discourse, and since conservatives are predominantly rural they have distruct because rural areas get the worst doctors and other professionals so it affects how they see the professions.

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scoobford@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Medical ethics in the US are not and have never been great. A few decades ago, they were bad enough to intentionally infect patients with syphillus (sp?) without their knowledge or consent. Maybe a decade or two ago, doctors were bribed into over prescribing opiates and starting the opiate crisis.

No shit people don’t trust the medical establishment. They may act appropriately most of the time, but that just isn’t good enough to be trustworthy.

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freebee@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not the reason. Lots of distrust in Europe too, where you can buy a box of paracetamol for just a few euro.

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- Tinks@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can do that in the US too, but if they give it to you in a hospital the line item charge is much higher.
  
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- ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Places where it’s sold over off the shelf in supermarkets it costs pennies.
  
  It’s also now harder to buy good vinegar in smaller supermarkets. They’ve replaced most of their options with cider vinegar, due to idiots falling for the drink cider vinegar for your health joke.
  
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  - intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yup. Whenever medicine is brought to you by the truly free market, it’s not expensive at all.
    
    You can get inserts for shoes, reading glasses, recently hearing aids (props to Biden for deregulating that), knee braces, vitamin supplements, basic painkillers, anti-inflammatories, anti-allergy stuff, stool softeners, eye drops, prebiotics, probiotics, marijuana, mushroom extracts, sunblock, gauze, adhesive bandages, antibiotic ointments, etc for quite cheap.
    
    All of those things are free market goods.
    
    Things that should be cheap but are priced very expensively are the things that you can’t just buy, but by law require a doctor’s consent along with your own: insulin, psych meds, serious painkillers, vision-correcting lenses, hearing aids until the recent deregulation (again awesome work Biden), x-ray imaging, oral antibiotics, anticoagulants, blood thinners, pulmonary surfactants, etc.
    
    Everything on both of those lists are dirt cheap to produce. But acquiring the first list — the free market ones — is actually cheap for consumers. Acquiring the second list — the ones that cannot be exchanged on the free market — is ridiculously expensive to consumers.
    
    Capitalism is not the problem.
    
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- intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Free market medicine is perfectly fine in the USA. It’s the highly centrally- controlled aspects of medicine in which prices are skyrocketing.
  
  Paracetamol, which we call acetaminophen or the brand name Tylenol in the US, is still quite inexpensive.
  
  If it were a prescription-only drug it might still be cheap in generic form, but getting the prescription would cost well over $100
  
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usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Nah, we have plenty of anti-vaxers up in Canada too.

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- Aggravationstation@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  UK too. Some I’ve met who are old enough to remember life before the polio vaccine and still claim it isn’t needed. It’s purely stupidity.
  
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- sajran@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  US has a huge influence on the entire world. Could it be that it started (or got amplified) in the US due to poor healthcare and then spread out to the rest of the world? I’m not trying to put all the blame on US of course, but it doesn’t sound that unreasonable that it could be partially responsible.
  
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  - Aggravationstation@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Maybe the prominent anti-vax campaigns in the US and their proselytizing on the internet have contributed to the sentiment worldwide but there’s always been mistrust of vaccines around the world. Most of the current anti-vax rhetoric about the autism link was first put forward by a British doctor www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/…/fulltext
    
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  - PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The modern Antivax movement was literally started by a British doctor anal probing kids to prove the jab doesn’t work, but don’t let that stop you from making everything America’s fault!
    
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GladiusB@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s because it’s a pro profit business that inflates it’s prices in an open market for the insurance companies. This bit of knowledge undermines ALL other truths. No matter how much you try and argue people believe that money is the world’s biggest motivation because they desperately need it and see it being idolized.

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DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The healthcare system isn’t even close to failing. If the country has a problem, it’s that we can keep boomers alive for too long.

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Sam_Bass@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
And/or the price gouging of the providers.

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Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Intentional heroin overdose.

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