There are no guiltless factions

• Feb 16, 2015 • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

There are a lot of ideological factions in health care. Even my relatively small area of interest — musculoskeletal medicine and pain science — is amazingly factionalized. Sometimes it’s really hammered home when I get email from friends trash talking each other, both trying to recruit me, even while they are being very polite to each other publicly.

The longer I do this job, and the more incidents like that I observe, the more I believe that there are no guiltless factions — everyone is getting some stuff right, and some stuff wrong, and treating some ideas fairly and giving others short shrift. It just seems to be how human minds work. Confirmation bias everywhere!

Don’t get me wrong, though: some people are still a lot more wrong than others. 😜