Ultracrepidarian

It’s my favorite word since I heard years ago.

Oxford defines it as

a person who expresses opinions on matters outside the scope of their knowledge or expertise.

You can use it as a noun or an adjective to describe assholes that often do exactly what the word describes them to be.

Just had word that my swab test result turned positive for Covid and now I’m thinking shit. The office will now have a party and did I just make an entire department lose 3/4 of its manpower?

There was this Flu vaccination drive, not covid vaccination but the normal yearly flu vaccination I was required to go through to comply with health standards. A day prior some of the participants there had a close contact with one of the medical technologist that became symptomatic. After being tested positive, risk assessments are done and as per protocol, all that had in contact with me needs to be quarantined.

But most of the people that are in contact with me are the core team that makes up half the Pathology department, and some medical technologists that were on duty during that time. It’s not the first time this happened (is this is a repeat of history). A year ago the entire department and lab had to close down temporarily due to having most of the staff on quarantine. I’m still waiting for the results of my colleagues to see if they tested positive and boy that’s going to be a riot if they did as that meant more names are going to be attached to the list.

Karma can be a bitch when I made a joke to a fellow resident betting on which one of us is going to be the pandoras box that makes that incident happen again. Good thing I didn’t bet on it for kicks and giggles.

Remember the good old days when a sneeze and a cough would get you the ‘Bless you’? now doing that may make one have their lives flash before their eyes and some death fantasy interim. Everyone seems to become an expert on an area where they haven’t really allocated years of studying.

This got me thinking, why are the poster characters for the covid is not real campaign have to be average people with professions outside health care? And why is it that whenever they do include a health care professional, the person is somehow not specifically involved in a particular field they are commenting on.

I don’t care if you believe that virus is real or not. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. Diseases don’t care about your belief system. If the variant somehow managed to evolve into making the body produce more vesicles just like what you’d see from the small pox, maybe then people would see how real it is. The fact that some people can have the disease and manifest only as a mild flu doesn’t help with the virus reputation. So the virus needs to up its game to be taken seriously like making more symptoms unbearable to look at.

If two random strangers walked alongside you at the sidewalk and one is an HIV carrier while the other has Diabetes, can you tell them apart when they don’t show any signs of being unwell? There’s a psychological effect on seeing the problem physically manifest for real.

It’s not real until you get it yourself. Now, I’d wish it wasn’t but them I’d do a disservice to those patients that struggled to breath until their last. It would be a fucked up joke if I whispered to their ears “some people in the world think your disease isn’t real, so wake up and this is all a dream”. Yeah that’s a fucked up fantasy I’d never carry out but it made me appreciate how far my dark humor can go and it’s barely scratching the surface.

I went to the Covid Ward and to no surprise, I see the place packed like a sick party. I shaggily moved my way to nurses station asking for the working diagnosis of patient X to correlate with some lab results. The hot nurse pulled up the snazzy chart and like a cat in heat my eyes trailed at the most interesting parts of the ward, an entire row of patients gasping for air even when their oxygen flow rates are already at maximum.

How many years have I dedicated my life in health care to know this phenomenon happened years ago? SARS happened and if it got worse back then due to failed quarantine measures, we would have have what we have now years ago. SARS being the first pandemic of the 21st century. Years of studying the subject still got me thinking, fuck I don’t know this shit and the field is evolving as is down to the molecular level where the books aren’t keeping up with the pace.

By the time an established reference book is published, the research material it shares have been outdated due to the pace of research happening across different fields of medicine. Of course anyone who isn’t studying in the field can’t appreciate that, why read thousands of pages of complicated medical jargon when you can have google search you articles simplified to suit your research in minutes and come out like you’ve known this stuff for years.

So why is it the majority of the most opinionated ones are often those who aren’t in the field of research specifically figuring out this piece of hell? When I read a thesis paper supporting my claim, I read the abstract, and the fucking rest of the paper. Not just taking snippets of what proves me right. Anybody who has done research would be familiar with the “Scope and Limitations” portion, because that part explains a new dimension to interpret the data. The next is figuring out how to process the related literature section, then methodology then the fucking rest of the paper.

In the end, I would question the validity of the paper by comparing some studies related to it with the mentioned bibliography section. But nobody ain’t got time to analyze that shit, instead we just have people copy pasting video links to reputable people tape recorded talking about the subject saying he says she says they say. And of course some links to papers where people have studies proving their points that conveniently difficult to validate.

Just because they have an MD on their title doesn’t necessarily mean they know the subject they’re talking about. Medicine has different subspecializations and each field is like a rabbit hole, we can look at the same conceptual disease but still approach the subject from different angles as what we have been trained to do.

We got general practitioners here who advocate being an anti-vaxxer and there are people actually following them. So when 9/10 of the convent’s population got infected with the virus, and a few died believing their anti-vaxxer ideology, who bears the burden of spreading that information? I don’t care if you are an anti-vaxxer, go rock the world and preach as much as you want, that’s your freedom just remember to put a disclaimer and encourage people to do their own research at the end of your preach.

Another small detail about being a professional is the weight of using your signatures on official documents or giving professional opinions. When we use our signatures to release a lab result, a diagnosis, or opinion, we are accountable to what happens with those results. Ordinary people who give opinions away freely especially about health matters don’t have that weight of responsibility, so they can just market a snake oil or herbal supplement with non FDA approved therapeutic claim freely.

We got that plenty over the radio. Just listening to herbal supplements curing hypertension and diabetes is a daily source of facepalm. But hey, it’s not like these people would have a legal binding document attaching their entire name and reputation on the line for a small opinion. I have yet to meet a patient that thanked their herbal supplements for making them live long on their hospital bed. Because when these herbal supplements are being showcased, you’d see healthy looking people sporting them, not the sickly looking ones in their natural morbid environment.

Everyone is still entitled to their own informed opinion about the subject but facts aren’t opinion. I only manifested the typical flu like symptoms with a low grade fever and chills. No cough, sore throats, or any dramatic signs the media portrays. And this is the first I got sick for the year, and each month I get a swab test for health care personnel monitoring. Why did I suddenly became positive after I got sick? I don’t know maybe Bill Gates and his world domination has something to do with it or maybe it’s just the nature of work I got where I have one of the highest chances of being exposed to the virus.

I could still get the common cold but I know if it’s a common cold, it’s going to test negative. Entering the molecular lab department where RT-PCR is being done makes me think, shit, all this stuff looks complicated? How exactly am I going to dumb this concepts down to make a shitpost about viral strains and what the kits are detecting for a shitpost. But then the whole point of a shitpost is making people believe they’re reading good content. This is still a shitpost.

It takes 3 weeks minimum to get acquainted with that particular lab setup and during that time, a lot of concepts get shoved in while you navigate the lab. But one can just copy paste a snippet from some random site aided by Google telling RT-PCR doesn't do anything. And you know what? I can't say much about that claim, haven't even busted the small technical details in operating the machines here and there.

I just know that I don't know stuff and it's better to just shut up if it's not my field to talking about. Everybody has an opinion about something but not everyone can have that consciousness of separating their own opinions to facts nor habitually question the validity of what they don't or already believe in.

Do normal people do that? asking whether what they already know is still a fact or has the game changed already? I know the nomenclature for some microorganisms and disease often change as more research results get published yearly but on a macroscale where most people don't concern themselves on the field of microbiology, none of this hardly matters. Just saying facts can change too and it doesn't care about your opinions.

Still thanking my Astrazeneca shots earlier this year, I’d probably be at the ICU right now uncomfortably thinking how to shitpost this stuff while on a ventilator. The only reactions I got from taking those covid vaccines were mild flu-like symptoms. I was expecting my affinity for ice and earth magic would have pumped. Maybe when they install 5G near my area will those latent powers actually kick in.

If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.