Why Does Your Mom Love Alternative Medicine?
Added 2019-12-01 04:26:50 +0000 UTCI’ve been wanting to remake this video for a while and hitting 200k subs seemed like a good time to do it. Thanks for your support!
Comments
Anxious mothers often resent at some level a doctor's advice if it results in the mother's needing simply to wait-- in addition to whatever medical course of action he recommends. Many are so anxious and determined to be DOING SOMETHING-- anything! that they will fall for these quack "options" simply to avoid the horrible feeling of "nothing left to do" and the helplessness of having nothing left to DO to make her child well again. Of course, if the child so much as survives the illness, often the mother will credit the recovery to whatever "extra" steps she took in addition to or in defiance of medical advice. It's profoundly irrational, but women in general and mothers in particular are praised for the strength of their feelings, not their rational detachment, and the marketers of snake oil take full advantage of that. Once her doubts about the quack remedy have been assuaged by the recovery of her child, "it didn't hurt him" turns into "I was right all along!" which gets magnified greatly depending on the degree of her resentment towards medical authority and wish to brandish the authority of maternal feelings and "I know what is god for my baby" to defends choices and beliefs which are essentially about her, not her child. Quack remedies for children ought truthfully to be called remedies for maternal anxiety-- the placebo works on her even better than placebos usually work on suggestible patients.
Judith Bradford
2019-12-04 01:02:24 +0000 UTC
