Struggle sessions

On some issues, can we simply agree to disagree?

My husband Kirk and I were guests on a webinar this week. It was truly a mostly lovely experience, but have you ever heard the advice, “Don’t read the comments”? Don’t read the comments. Even though I tried to ignore them and simply engage the current conversation, I could still see some comments flash across the screen demonstrating disdain from people supposedly on “our side” in the medical freedom movement. I doubt they were the majority and they didn’t surprise me, but they did make me reflective.

Kirk was on a second podcast this week where he talked about the fact that we live in forced polarity (I really liked listening to him on this podcast because he was interviewed by people mostly on the “other” side, who engaged him respectfully). Are you conservative or liberal? Pro-Trump or anti-Trump? Pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine? Pro-allopathic medicine or anti-allopathic medicine? Choose a side! There may be some issues where you have to take a side, but we’ve found that in medicine there is a whole lot of nuance. We are pro-do not harm. We are pro-informed consent. We are pro-patient and parent autonomy. We are pro-use whatever means necessary or available to provide the most benefit to the patient with the least amount of harm. But he and I are trained in allopathic medicine. Though not a perfect system, that is the system that we work in. Though we can all point to evidence of harm in this system, there is still an incredible amount of benefit. Kirk is a pediatric cardiologist and I’m a pediatric anesthesiologist. There are just some conditions that affect children (and adults) that need the specialty care of allopathic medicine. We cannot totally reject or destroy that system, nor do we want to. The medicine and therapeutical interventions exist in this system, so we need to understand the risks and benefits associated with them so we can be informed physicians and adequately inform our patients.

Yet when we talk with people in the medical freedom movement, there are often seeming “gotcha” questions to determine if we are orthodox enough. Do you know about this? Have you read that? You still participate in what? You mean you used to think that? There is often little mercy for a change of opinion if you once held a condemned opinion. How do we propose to win people to our point of view if we reject them when they get there?

We’ve spent a lot of the last six years preaching to the choir, speaking with people who agree with us on medical freedom issues. On matters that I think are true and consequential, I’m less interested in reaching people that agree with me than those who don’t. On this webinar, we were talking about how you present and discuss data and evidence of risk versus benefit within the system in which we work. We have to engage those within the system in the way they are used to being engaged. There are certain sources of information they will simply refuse to engage. Though the system for sharing data and evidence is imperfect, that is the system we have and must endeavor to improve.

There are a lot of issues over the course of my lifetime about which I’ve changed my mind. I ponder often how I got there, and, therefore, how others might get there. For me, critical rejection of my failure to endorse a set of authorized opinions and behaviors is not an inviting atmosphere for discussion and deliberation. It seems counter to the freedom of thought we profess to strive for.