Have you ever seen the look on the face of a mechanic who is presented with a breakdown where the vehicle owner has had a go at fixing it themselves ? Or heating engineer called into mend a boiler where the home owner has tried a DIY repair, or an Attorney picking up a legal case that their client has kicked off without taking advice ? Apart from the very obvious failings, in each of these cases the professional is faced with an implied undermining of their professions competence a devaluing of their years of study/practice/training and accumulated expertise because anyone can do this. Medical researchers have the same professional vanity being presented with a simple observation allows a researcher to conclude theres something interesting here without having to justify why a non expert may be mistaken. Submitting to rsearcher an uncontrolled, unsupervised test of an off prescription drug as evidence of something important, risks both sparking a vanity reaction at an amateur invasion of the researcher's professional purview, and horror at (in their perception) a bunch of internet cranks encouraging potential drug misuse.
Perception is everything if you want people to take you seriously, and while it may be galling to have to suppress expression of ones own intelligence and inventiveness flattering the professional egos of others is nevertheless frequently the best way to get heard.
IVI
Who cares what they think?
I have made a delibrate calculated decision to bypass healthcare professionals altogether. This is not a decision I reached lightly. However, I'm tired of being patronised, ignored, fobbed off, and being denied prescriptions for treatments that I wish to try.
The rules of engagement that underpin a traditional doctor/patient relationship are no longer acceptable to me. As a consequence, I'm forced to go it alone.
I now do my own research and, if necessary, use internet pharmacies to obtain drugs without a prescription. I accept there are risks associated with doing this. But that's my choice. If any doctors out there feel threatened by what I'm doing then tough. That's their problem not mine.
The reality is that I am calling the medical profession's competence (and ethics) into question and I don't care whether they know it. I accept that there are some individual doctors trying to help us. But collectively, the behaviour of the medical profession towards ME patients has been an utter disgrace. They've let me and thousands of other patients down over many decades.