I used to listen to Pacifica stations in SF Bay Area, then in NYC, then Washington/B'more where I now live - so my opinions are based onwhat I heard. But I'm not compulsive obsessive enough to keep record of everyhing I do or hear, so I do not know what is the exact share of newage health quackery in their total reporting.
>i'd say you ought to read up on the sociology of the medical profession
>because incompetence and arrogance is nurtured by medical training, itself.
>and, moreover, the very structure of medical practice--with its extreme
>specialization--is part of the problem.
>
"You should read ....." is an example of the intellectual commodity peddler arrogance, basically saying "If you do not read what I have, I will not bother to talk to you." So pleeeeze, make an argument instead of dropping citations.
And yes, I am aware of the lit attributing arrogance to medical training, but these are mostly ethnographic anecdotes rather than systematic comparative anaylyses. A systematic comparative analysis would first distinguish three possible sources of doctor arrogance:
1. high level of information asymmetry (patients do not know what doctors do) 2. the need for strict adherence to the treatment regimen of the part of the patient 3. high social and professional status (which includes training)
Only the third source produces undesireable arrogance, #1 and #2 are merely authority based in superior knowledge and merits of the treatment.
Then it would attribute the objectively measured level of arrogance to each of these three sources, and finally compare doctors to other professions on each of these three points. Only then we can say whether doctors are more or less arrogant than other professions.
BTW, my un-scientific, impressionistic, biased, anecdotal and selective observations suggest that doctors' arrogance (source #3 above) pales in comparison to that of economists, journalists and IT consultants.
wojtek