We read lately of persons improperly self administering a livestock medication, a de-wormer called Ivermectin, as a supposed Covid-19 preventative or remedy. Poison control centers and the FDA report terrible consequences of such medical misconduct.
Please see:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/21/mississippi-ivermectin-covid-surge-livestock/
However, with Covid-19 aside, I have seen other examples of people doctoring themselves and I've wondered about those persons' well being as a result.
Case 1:
I met this fellow who was working as a cashier at a local grocery store and in the short times we'd speak together, he told me he was under treatment for heart issues. Having had four heart attacks of my own, I took special notice. His doctor had put him on a medication called lisinopril which I myself had once been on at my own cardiologist's direction.
This fellow told me one day just as I was just ready to leave with my groceries and another customer was loading the conveyer belt, that he was thinking of not taking his lisinopril because he wasn't feeling any better with it than when he'd begun taking it. Then he turned to address that next customer and I never got the chance to speak up.
That also happened to be the last time I ever saw him. He seemed to no longer be employed at that store. My concern for his medical welfare remains to this very day.
Case 2:
I was at a meeting of an IEEE affinity group. Just imagine a room full of highly educated, highly trained, highly knowledgeable, pleasant and affable people possessed of many virtues and with admirable open willingness to share their experiences and information. It was an ideal place for anyone to find oneself and just absorb all kinds of information. Think very carefully about where THAT was.
Then I heard something.
One person announced that he'd decided to stop taking a statin medication which his doctor had prescribed for his cholesterol issues. It seemed that this fellow had done some reading on some reputable medical websites and concluded that he'd be better off without that medication than with it. Disregarding his doctor, he'd made that decision for himself.
This was someone with much engineering training but no medical training at all. Then three other people announced their own intentions to do the same thing. There was hearty agreement among this group of their collective wisdom with none of them having any medical training what so ever.
Case 3:
Think now about the utter rubbish regarding the COVID-19 pandemic as was spewn forth at the behest of Donald Trump by radiologist Dr. Scott Atlas who had no training at all in epidemiology.
Summary:
In each of these cases, life-critical advice was being offered and life-critical decisions were being made by persons who were not qualified to make them and having then been made, that advice and those decisions were acted upon at great peril to the affected persons, both as peril to themselves and as peril to others.
Thinking further of Linus Pauling extolling megadoses of vitamin-C for disease prevention and of William Shockley's bell curve representations of intelligence versus race, the tendency to pontificate outside of one's own areas of training and expertise seems to be a fairly common phenomenon.
Please do not fall prey to such. Please be sure to examine the credentials of whoever has something advisory to offer before taking that advice to heart and don't just act on something of your own like that first fellow I mentioned with the lisinopril.
I hope to live long enough to one day meet you in person. I want you to be alive, healthy and well enough to be there too.