In which I wax Rhetorical (badly)

I became so intrigued by a recent facebook discussion (32 comments long!), that I was more tempted than I ever have been before to participate in a facebook discussion. However, my own generally introverted, cooler head prevailed, and instead, I write here, in my ivory tower of blogging--I much prefer it this way. Real disagreement, real confrontation, I still can't handle.

So anyway, here are a few observations I make--the subject of which you will possibly be able to discern before I am through but which I actually refrain from coming out and declaring my own position on. (Although I began this blog committed to keeping my own discussion respectful and entirely logical, as I progressed, I became more and more impassioned, and as a result, my rhetoric suffered--even in an unknown blog, the dialogue disintegrates.)

1. You will never convince anyone who disagrees with you of anything over facebook. Try as you will, you will only devolve into correcting someone's grammar--they must be wrong, if they confuse its and it's; their, they're and there.

2. Personal experience will nearly always trump anything else. Those who have read about or experienced the exception will cry out that information in dark corners of the internet, attempting to drown out the overwhelming majority of the rule. 

3a. Because of the vastness of the internet, you can find information supporting virtually any claim you were so inclined to make. So, with "proof" to be found everywhere, how do you decide what is credible and what is not?
 
3b. I have not done a lot of research on this particular subject--mostly because generally I trust the authorities which some say I cannot trust under any circumstances. But I can tell you, that if I were to begin doing a research project, I would begin with credible sources--credible meaning scholarly, research-based, peer-reviewed journals grounded in the presentation of scientific evidence.

3c. In short, as a teacher of rhetoric, you will never ever convince me that the British Medical Journal is a less reputable source than an individual's private blog. Just as I hope that no one would ever quote anything that I say on here, I would trust a peer-reviewed, scholarly source far above the words of an individual vomiting his or her own opinions into Blogger or Wordpress and publishing them for credulous people to quote on facebook.

4. As the daughter, sister, cousin, friend, and (most importantly) wife of quite a few doctors and doctors in training, not a single, solitary one of them has ever come home and said, "Hi--today I learned that I should lie to my patients  in order to get a payout from pharmaceutical companies." And, while I don't know all the doctors in the world, I would venture to suppose that the majority of them are well-intentioned people, committed to "do[ing] no harm," which includes obtaining the best information possible about the preventative care they recommend their patients. Doctors are taught "evidence-based medicine" in schools, which means that they distill all the research that has been done to determine the best treatment or preventative treatment.

5. Not every researcher, not every doctor, not every medical school, not every government health agency is in the pocket of a pharmaceutical. Indeed, that would be a vast conspiracy if they were. Most researchers are committed to finding the truth--and they generally publish their discoveries in peer-reviewed journals--so that they can get tenure, as opposed to vast payouts from large corporate entities.

6. But if we truly cannot trust the guardians of our health--if we cannot believe what decades of education, research, and regulation have proposed to be the truth, we really are in a sad state of affairs. If we spit in the face of those who have worked hard to prove their trustworthiness, and instead turn to untrained individuals who sneak under the gatekeepers of printed publications, no one will know anything for certain. It would be dizzying and debilitating.