10/23/2021

 posting here:

...it at times pains me to admit this, but it is entirely true.

over the summer, i took on the task of teaching a therapeutic ethics/clinic safety course at the acupuncture school. it was the first time i had taught the course (and indeed, i hadn't even taken the course at my school, because it hadn't been offered). i had decided early on that i wanted to make the ethics portion of the class open-ended; although i would share the ethical codes of different governing bodies and entities, i tried to maintain that the ethical realm was fundamentally personal, and therefore, subject to interpretation...

bad idea. or, rather, good idea, but wrong context.

it quickly became apparent to me that there were (and are) many in the acupuncture community that hold an anti-vaccine stance. there are many reasons for this, some possibly legitimate (...possibly...); but in many cases, it boils down to a distrust of "the medical industry" or "big pharma." i completely understand this, even if i don't entirely agree with it (or rather, i don't generalize it to the point of distrusting it in all instances). it is the motivation that drove many to alternative medicine in the first place (practitioners AND patients)...

i guess things came to a head (somewhat) when i got to the clinic safety portion of the course. i had to share information about different infectious diseases, and the precautions we had to take in order to prevent transmission to patients. and, of course, i had to talk about THE communicable elephant in the room, so to speak: covid. as soon as i started talking about masking precautions and about vaccination, i began to hear strong objections: questioning of fauci, questioning the cdc guidances, questioning whether it was even really as bad as the "fake" media claimed it was... i was somewhat at a loss as to how to respond. it's one thing to hear these sorts of conspiratorial slants when talking to people in normal, everyday contexts (it's why you never give away anything about yourself nowadays)... but to hear these sorts of objections in what is ostensibly a medical context?

it was extremely difficult for me to proceed.

i found (find) myself the only consistently masked individual at the school... i am probably one of only a few who are vaccinated...

i love and respect my colleagues and students, and i know them to largely be caring, compassionate individuals. but in regards to these matters, i must say that an opportunity to demonstrate an ethical and professional stance with regards to covid has been missed... it's ironic, but my insistence that ethics be fundamentally personal was precisely the weapon i intended to be used against the present wave of conspiratorial, anti-institutional nonsense... instead, that weapon was taken to further entrench people in an "i decide what's right" mentality...

ok, that's my rant to some aspects of my profession...