Okay ladies and gentleman, the time has finally come for Mr. Garvin's mega Don't Go To The Doctor thread ❌🩺❌ 🧵

"But Mr. Garvin, aren't you a medical student?"

Yes! And the more I learn about the medical system the less I want to interact with it!

Lame disclaimers:
1) not medical advice (I am a guy on the internet lol)
2) "don't go to the doctor" doesn't literally mean to never ever see a doctor under any circumstance. There are good ones and sometimes you need them. But as you'll see, you should be quite careful about it

I'm gonna break this down into roughly four sections:
1) General effectiveness (and risks) of medical intervention
2) Declining standards in medical education
3) Physician Conflict of Interest
4) What you should do

Part I: Effectiveness and Risks

In this section we're going to ask two questions:

1) When a doctor does something for their patients, is it usually helpful?
2) Do doctors harm their patients?

The answer to 1 is "sometimes", and the answer to 2 is "often"

The most important concept to understand in this section is that of "medical reversal". Medical reversal is when a treatment (a drug, surgery, anything) gets widely rolled out into medical practice, only to be shown to be either ineffective or harmful later.