Why Listening to Experts is Dangerous For Your Health

The article where I hallucinate, halt a war, and piss off etymologists

Let’s play Two Truths and a…Why (no Lie):

True story #1

Once, I had a terrible bout of bronchitis that lasted several weeks. My doctor prescribed me an inhaler, two doses twice daily, to get rid of the awful cough that wouldn’t stop lingering. After another week or so of the cough showing absolutely no signs of improvement, I went back to the doctor. No problem. The dosage was probably just too weak. She prescribed an even stronger inhaler for me to also use twice daily, in addition to the inhaler I was already using. Two different inhalers, for a total of eight doses a day. By doing this, she assured me that my cough should go away. My lungs should heal.

I probably wouldn’t have had a problem with this if it had worked.

But it didn’t.

As I mentioned, this illness lasted several weeks. I think that cough lingered for more than a month. And we’re not talking a little cough here and there to get rid of something stuck in your throat. I mean the kind of ugly lung cough that you can literally hear coming from your very unhappy, crying bronchi. Coughing fits that get triggered when you try to speak, or happen to breathe just a little bit wrong. Imagine weeks of this, on end, with no end. By the time I was prescribed that second inhaler, I was extremely frustrated, very unhappy, and crying, just like my bronchi. I just wanted to get better. I just wanted to breathe without coughing. I had no idea how beautiful it was to be able to breathe normally, until I couldn’t for what felt like an eternity. (P.S. I’m doing it right now. It feels amazing.)

But when I started taking that second inhaler, guess what happened?

My cough got worse.

A lot worse.

Let me tell you, at this point, I had had it. With my cough. With my inhalers. Why am I still coughing? Why aren’t you making me better? I raged at them. Because we suck and doctors suck and the world sucks, they laughed at me. (I may or may not have made up that last part.) (Can inhalers cause hallucinations?) (Is there an inhaler I can take for that?) (Also, how many parenthetical asides can I make until they lose their humorous appeal?) (Answer: Probably about this many.)

(Anyway.)

The point is, I was done with it all. The doctor is supposed to know best, but this just couldn’t be right. These drugs were supposed to be making me better, not sicker. So I did what any person on prescription drugs would do if she were in a movie that involved her being irrationally fed up with her prescription drugs: I flushed them, dramatically, down the toilet.

Okay, I also made up that last part.

I just stopped using them. Both of them.

Guess what happened?

My cough went away.

After several days of zero inhalations, of zero drugs, of just trying to listen to what my body was telling me, and just letting it be, my cough went away, and my lungs healed, and I could breathe normally again, and I had found God and cured cancer.

Seriously, it was that good.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

My lungs never did fully heal.

In fact, now I have slight asthmatic tendencies and every time I get sick, I get a bit of that same ugly lung cough that lingers for a while after everything else about me has healed. I never had that problem before. Maybe the bronchitis left my lungs ravaged, maybe the inhalers did more lasting damage to me than good, or both, or something else entirely. For now, all I know is that when something wasn’t helping me get better, giving me more of that thing just made me get worse. Too much help hindered. All it did was get in the way.

To this day, I wonder what would have happened if I had listened to my doctor and kept going back for more of the wrong medicine, or medicine I didn’t actually need. Maybe eventually she would have found the right potion. Maybe eventually I would have gotten better. But how long would I have been sick for when I didn’t need to be? How much sicker would I have gotten before finally getting well? Would my lungs have been left in even worse shape?

This isn’t an article about how drugs are bad and doctors suck yadda yadda yadda, though. As with most things, they are neither all good nor all bad. This is about the danger with listening to experts. Which I’ll get to.

But first, I’m going to tell you another story.

True story #2

Like many people, I had braces when I was a teenager. I also had a retainer. I also still have that retainer. I also never use that retainer. Mainly because it doesn’t fit anymore, but really because I’m lazy and that’s why it doesn’t fit anymore.

Fortunately, I had a very good orthodontist who knew I would never use it properly after watching me lie through my teeth (get it get it get it?) for two years about wearing my elastics. Of course I wear them everyday. My teeth just move really slowly. That’s also why I’m late for my appointments. They take forever to get ready. So my orthodontist did a very smart thing: she put in permanent retainers. A wire behind my four bottom front teeth, and a plastic (?) attachment behind my two top front teeth. (I’m not an orthodontist, okay?)

A couple of years back, I happened to bite down a little too hard while rabidly tearing the meat off some ribs with my (still perfectly straight) teeth. I felt my upper retainer move, but didn’t think much of it (Nom. Ribs.). At least, not until the gums behind those two top front teeth started getting so swollen that they began to hurt, so much that I could no longer bite or chew anything in that area without wincing pathetically in pain. Now, I’m pretty tolerant of inconveniences, but when something gets in the way of my eating like that, I know I have to fix it. Life is too short to not enjoy eating.

So I finally get the nerve to check behind my teeth with a mirror and holy shit my gums are eating my retainer. The little plastic (?) attachment had apparently trespassed up into non-teeth territory and pissed off my gums and now my gums were all like Oh you wanna play like that? and went to war by invading non-gums territory and taking no prisoners—or rather, taking my retainer as prisoner, because half of it was now trapped under my very angry, swollen gums that showed no intention of retreating, and every intention of swallowing it whole (get it get it get it?).

I booked it to the dentist and told her about my predicament. After a careful analysis of my angry gums (Tell me about your childhood. Did your mother ever tell you she loved you?), she told me that she didn’t think there was a problem with my retainer and food probably just got stuck under my gums, which caused the irritation. I almost meekly accepted this, because after all, she was the dentist, not me. She was the expert, therefore she should know better, not me.

But the possibility of having a plastic (?) contraption trapped under my vicious gums foreverandever was not one I particularly liked. And the possibility of not being able to eat with utter abandon for who-knew-how-much-longer was something I really didn’t like. I needed to take all measures to make sure that didn’t happen. Somehow, I managed to insist that my dentist look again and please pretty please just take out the retainer. And she did, and you know what?

I was right.

My retainer had moved, and it was stuck under my gums (bad gums, don’t you know that plastic (?) is indigestible?). And if I had listened to her, and not listened to my gum, er, gut instinct, I could have ended up with a much bigger problem than the one I already had.

The Why

The moral (get it get i—oh wait I was thinking of molars my bad) is how you can take control of an outcome in your life by doing something as small, yet important, as that: A tiny act of disobedience. A gentle pushback and resistance towards authority. A small doubt or challenge of what you’re told. A quiet No, I don’t agree with you and I think there’s something you’re not seeing, please look again.

You see, sometimes experts won’t know better. Because sometimes, experts actually don’t know better. As much as they might be experts in their fields, they are not perfect experts, and they are not experts in everything, either. Experts will always be limited by their own personal scope of education and experience, by their conscious and unconscious perspectives and biases, and by the same very human, very flawed judgment that we all have.

Most importantly:

Experts are experts in their fields,
but they are not experts on you.

YOU are the expert on you.

YOU cannot outsource your instincts and your own personal scope of education and experience on you. YOU cannot outsource the telling of your own truth, the acting upon your own truth.

This isn’t about self-delusion, or only seeing what you want to see. And this is not at all about being right. This is about truth. More often than not, other people will simply be unable to see your truth, will only know their truth, and will therefore only speak their truth. And their truth includes what they think is your truth. Which means that you have the responsibility, the obligation—not to others, but to yourself—to tell your truth.

Two reasons:

1. Because telling your truth is the only way you can heal the sickness in you.
   Sickness that persists because something still isn’t quite right. Sickness that persists because you need to change how you’re trying to fix it, what you’re trying to fix it with. Or maybe you just need to stop trying so hard to fix it, because all you’re doing is meddling and getting in your own way. Sometimes, the answer is less, not more. Sometimes, you need to ask what you can take away, not what you can add. And sometimes, you just need to let it be and give it the time it needs to heal itself.
2. Because telling your truth is the only way you can halt the war happening within you.
   A war you may be unaware of. A war you may have learned to live with. A war you may have dismissed, or taught yourself to ignore. But the war exists within you nonetheless. Left unchecked, a war can destroy more of you than you realize, and you might find yourself in the midst of an even bigger war that you never wanted to fight in the first place. A war you didn’t stop because someone else told you a war didn’t exist. A war you didn’t stop because you didn’t trust yourself enough to stand up for what you knew about it.

See, the danger with listening to experts isn’t that they’re human and fallible and just as prone to errors in judgment as everyone else. We are all human and fallible. That’s just a part of life we can’t escape. No.

The danger with listening to experts is
when we start only listening to them,
and stop listening to ourselves.

We learn to ignore our truth, our sickness, our war. We stop asking ourselves questions, and ask the experts instead. We start to think that all the answers are outside of us, that the healing happens outside of us, when the truth is the answers are within. The healing happens within.

We are all broken in our own ways; some of us more than others, and some times during our lives more than others. We all want to be healed. That’s what we need experts—or simply other people—for. To help heal us. By using their knowledge and experience and perspectives. Ones that we don’t have. But we also have to help heal ourselves. It is a two-way street. And it starts with a di-a-gnosis.

Diagnosis.

The word diagnosis comes from the Greek diagignōskein, meaning to discern, to distinguish. Dia-, a prefix meaning apart, through, across (e.g. diagonal, diameter), and -gignōskein, meaning to perceive, to determine, to know. To come to know, through knowing.

Here’s where I’ll piss off etymologists everywhere. Because in this context, I’d like to break the word down a little differently:

di: two (e.g. dichotomy, diverge)
a: without (e.g. amoral, agnostic)
gnosis: knowledge (hear the gno in know?)

Two-without-knowledge. Di-a-gnosis. Di-agnosis. Di-agnostic.

You’ll recognize the word a-gnostic. One without knowledge. A person who doubts the certainty of an answer to a question.

I like to think of di-agnostics to mean
two people who doubt the certainty
of their answers to a question.

Two people, neither one with All The Answers,
seeking answers, together.

Because in order to come to the most correct diagnosis—the closest to a truthful answer to your questions, the best way to heal your sickness, halt your war—you have to trust that it lies somewhere within two wellsprings of knowledge: the expert’s, and yours. One knowing from the outside. One knowing from the inside. Both knowing more together than alone. Experts know what they know, and yes, sometimes they can tell you things you didn’t know about yourself. Yes, sometimes you will be wrong about yourself, too. But no expert will ever know you quite like you do. No expert can answer your deep questions, your deep longings, for you. No expert can tell or live your truth for you. No expert or outsider alone can heal you, for you must do your part to heal yourself.

Ultimately, as much as this is about truth, this is also about trust. You must trust the experts. But above all, you must trust yourself. Trust your truth. Enough to listen to it. Enough to stand up for it.

Trust that your truth matters, that what you know matters, that your understanding and experience of life matters, even if it isn’t perfect, even if it isn’t everything. The experts don’t know everything perfectly either, remember? Nobody ever does.

Trust that your very human, very flawed truth is important enough to stand up for.

Because YOU are important enough to stand up for.

Flawed, fallible humanity, and all.

That is the only way you will ever, truly, live your Truth. That is the only way you will ever, truly, live your Why.

You must trust your Truth
in order to tell it.

You must tell your Truth
in order to live it.

Because your only other choice

is to live

a lie.