[conspire] 45's treatment oddities and why men are dying at much higher rates

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Nick Moffitt (nick at zork.net):

> Yeah, I think the situation is that they reformed a lot of
> institutions, and wanted to keep them running.  Someone explained it
> to me as "You know how there are all of these Orthodox Reformed Modern
> Messianic Baptist Methodist University of Medicine type institutions
> around the US?  And how basically nobody on the faculty or staff
> except for maybe like two octogenarian trustees is actually part of
> that religion?  That's *kind of* what modern Osteopathic Medicine is
> like now...maybe?"

Duncan visiting at the moment, and you may recall that his now-ex wife
is a physician, so he hung around her colleagues for a long time.  He
commented that physicians, like most fields, have an implicit social
pecking order, and the field's stereotype about osteopaths is that they
were the football players, angling into a field of medicine where their
big, clumsy hands are an asset and it matters less whether they're
generally with it.

Inherent problems with stereotypes hereby acknowledged by reference.

There's an issue within the field of chiropractic practice, and I
wouldn't be surprised if it applied to osteopaths, too:  Chiropractic
practitioners distinguish their colleagues as either 'straights' or
'mixers':  A 'straight' is someone who gives temporary relief of pain
and related problems through careful spinal and other neuroskeletal
manipulation.  A 'mixer' is one who, in addition to offering that
service, also offers other fringe-medical treatment modalities like
reflexology, iridology, colonal irrigation, and many stranger and more
alarming bits of woo-woo.

Suffice to say, I urge that anyone needing, say, back work by a
chiropractor beware of the crazy ones.   And also, I am sadly obliged to
add, beware of ones who take risks by taking dangerous actions, e.g.,
there are far too many cases of people ending up paralysed because a
chiropractor damaged the patient's spinal cord.

> Also, are we *sure* he's not actually Dr. Leo Spaceman from 30 Rock?
> The resemblance is *uncanny*!
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlBQqJh46_M

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