And don’t call me in the morning.

I don’t care what your MRI shows, take 2 aspirin and all will be well.

Your labs show things I’ve never seen before, but then I’m not a doctor.  Take two aspirin and all will be well.

You can’t bend over/look up/raise your arm/blink your eyes/swallow, etc.,?  Take two aspirin and all will be well.

Trust me.  Though I’m not a doctor, I promise you all will be well.

The New England Journal of Medicine is now spouting off more garbage that makes the medical profession look about as trustworthy as various levels of law enforcement (stop ambulances mid-run, break in the wrong doors on no-knock warrants, tase handcuffed subjects, etc.,)  Thankfully I have the care of selected medical professionals whom I trust, but then I still do my research, too.  I’ve found the wheat among the chaff, but the NEJM certainly speaks to the chaff. 

Via Handguns, Health, and the Second Amendment — Leonard H. Glantz, J.D., and George J. Annas, J.D., M.P.H. the NEJM is now in the gun control business, or at least it is serving as a mouthpiece for that movement, and despite having lawyers on the team, when they venture into the “guns are a public health issue” arena they still can’t get their facts straight on the twisted path to supporting their views.  Views, mind you, not factually based  evidentiary findings.  Interestingly, here is no abstract available, only the first 100 words for non-registered folk.

Thanks to The Smallest Minority (and thanks to AD for the tip) there is some sanity still around, though apparently not at the NEJM.

It’s scary to think that even my doctors may be reading the factually deficient crap the NEJM puts out — it may well be mistaken for good advice and applied to me in a clinical situation.

Lawyers are not in the business of dealing with the whole truth.  Instead, they deal with carefully selected information designed to carve out their position with which to convince others the position is the best deal.  In short, lawyers deal in the world of partial truth, selected facts, self-serving logic, skewed statistics, and purposeful distortion — all to create the illusion of the whole truth.

I would have thought a medical journal would be hard ground in which such demon seed should be willfully planted.

But I’d be wrong.