Originally Posted by
CommanderFun
The SSC certification is meaningful because it has a very substantial fail rate. I also imagine if they encounter someone with the certification going out into the wild and doing a bad job, they will probably withdraw it. Medical doctors, on the other hand, do not seem to encounter similar rigor. There are terrible, stupid fucking doctors out there. And you can even encounter a situation where the majority of doctors in a particular field of medicine are dead fucking wrong with their take. I have. Anecdote incoming.
In my mid 20s, I was diagnosed with a condition called keratoconus. Basically my corneas were being degraded by...something (they really haven't nailed down WHAT causes it yet) and began to deform slightly, having a negative impact on my vision. The first doctors I saw insisted it was "chronic eye rubbing". If you ask anyone I spend a lot of time around, I do not "chronically eye rub". Every one of them told me the treatment was going to be large, rigid contact lenses (you know how they have those "barely there" kinds for people with normal vision problems? The opposite of those), until the condition got so bad I needed a corneal transplant. A corneal transplant is taking your corneas off, and replacing them with corneas from a dead person, in case that wasn't obvious. The surgery has an 85% success rate and something like a half year recovery time. You generally only find out you're in that 15% that it doesn't work with until well into that recovery period.
Family and I decided to do some research, obviously, because this was not an ideal solution to this problem. I found that the rigid contacts they insisted were the fix can actually CAUSE keratoconus from wearing them too long. For the record, I did also try wearing them, I couldn't. I was ripping at the upholstery in the arms of the chair at the doctor's office when they were put in. I couldn't wear the fucking things.
I did discover there was an interesting treatment that reinforced the collagen of the corneas that hadn't caught on in the US but was being used in other countries already. Discussing it with these doctors, they didn't merely say they didn't know about it, or that they were wary of it because it was untested, but they straight up told me IT DIDN'T WORK. That was the opinion of these "experts", it didn't work. Thankfully, we managed to find a guy in California who WAS practicing the procedure and the family helped me get out there to get it done. It didn't reverse the condition, but it has prevented any further degrading since, exactly as advertised. Here's what's really crazy though. A year or two after I got it done, the procedure underwent FDA testing. Today, ten years after I was diagnosed, it is part of THE STANDARD TREATMENT for keratoconus. The procedure that "didn't work" according to "experts" I saw 10 years ago, is now what they basically do to EVERYONE who's diagnosed. So no, I do not place overwhelming weight on the opinions of "experts". I am skeptical of everything and everyone, and you should be too. I don't even give the statements of Starting Strength Coaches absolute weight (though the amount I do give them in my view is considerable). No one is immune to the universal human failing of being wrong about things.
On top of that, there is no such thing as an "expert" on COVID-19. It hasn't been studied long enough for there to be experts on it. The closest to experts are probably the Chinese researchers who created it.