What is delusion?
Truth…. Have you ever been afraid to face the truth? Or, have you ever known someone who they were just afraid to face the truth, so afraid that they refuse to? From a personal perspective, have you ever been on a diet, but you didn’t want to get on the scale? Or, someone studying for the boards…are you afraid to take a graded pre-test because you don’t want to know if you’re as bad off as you think you are? It’s a very true entity, not being willing to see the truth. And when you get really defensive about that process, it’s called a delusion. When you don’t want to face the truth and can’t face the truth, you put up a wall that as soon as someone tries to bridge that gap, to help you to see the truth, you get very defensive, you defend your position. I’m unable to, unwilling to, it’s a psychiatric problem. It’s a delusion. So, whenever you bring up something to someone and they immediately get angry, that’s a delusion. So, if you work in medicine and it is pretty routine that I would see it, where a parent would come in with a kid who was sick from a pulmonary problem. And I would say, “Ooh, does anybody in the house smoke?” “We smoke outside. We never smoke around our kid.” When people are protecting, typically an addiction, they do it with delusion, where they believe something that is not true. And if you try to get them to see the truth, they get very angry. They’re uninterested in facts because they cannot face the truth. They’re unwilling to face the truth. Psychiatrically, they are unable to access the truth. And these people will lie to you, but they don’t know they’re lying. And that’s why they’re so sick. For a while, I covered a hematology oncology floor and people with pancreatic cancer, they don’t want to hear that this is most likely a terminal disease, “Don’t you take away my hope. Don’t take away my hope and don’t take away a possibility of a miracle.” Delusion is what I want to talk about today.
COVID-19
If you think about the state of our nation with COVID right now, it’s a scary, scary thing. It’s scary for me. I’m not a full-time frontline worker, but I’m a part-time frontline worker. I work in emergency room and I see the patients. I look up and I see their O2 saturations. And I see the CAT scan, where their whole lung is whited out. I know it’s a very, very bad disease and with everything I know about medicine and guys, I’m a humble physician assistant. I don’t have immunology down. I don’t know anything about that, but I know enough that if I don’t know I ask questions and I research. Everything I have found with the research says this immunization is a good thing. I have interviewed infectious disease doctors. The one doc’s been around for 48 years. And the immunization, from my belief of the data, is it’s very protective and it’s very safe. And at my hospital that I work at, in Daytona, 85% of the people admitted to the hospital with COVID, they didn’t get immunized. And people all around me that I know, first or second hand, they’re getting sick. And they’re like, “Oh, I’m not getting immunized.” And I struggle with that. But then people have delusions. People make up their mind at times and, “I made up my mind.”
Premature Closure
It’s called premature closure, but they don’t take in new facts. They don’t take in new information. And then they form a delusion around it. They get dug into their position and I’m finding people are so dug in to this immunization question, similar to people dug in about politics or religion, “Don’t you dare challenge my thinking.” And if I wasn’t on the frontline, seeing people that were very sick, maybe I wouldn’t have such a visceral response to it, like people, they have a right not to get immunized. People have a right not to wear their seatbelt. People have a right to run with scissors sticking up.
Behaviors Have Consequences
I guess the only difference is, if you don’t wear your seatbelt and you crash your car, I mean, your risk of significant injury goes up tremendously. I mean, you’d be the quadriplegic. Now maybe there’s analogy that’s similar because I guess what I’m going to say is, our ER is overwhelmed, we’re gridlocked. If you’re having a heart attack, we’re going to have to scramble to move a bed, so you can come back. If you’re having chest pain, you’re going to sit for a while. We just don’t have the resources. We just don’t have enough beds because they’re so filled with unimmunized COVID patients. Not all, 85%, so I’m not saying all, but our health system is overwhelmed. And I guess what I’m saying is, if everybody drove without their seatbelts, well, a lot of people would just die on the scene, so we wouldn’t need a bed for that. But if you’ve got a quadriplegic, you’ve got an intracranial hemorrhage, fractures, then I guess you might overwhelm the system. Or running with scissors…if you run with scissors and you drop it, stab yourself in the heart, I guess that maybe that would overwhelm the system. But people’s behavior have consequences. And right now, it’s really difficult for clinicians, who care about patients, to come in and see how sick they are. And guys, we don’t say, “I told you so. You would have got the immunization, you wouldn’t be here.” That’s not my heart. I don’t think it’s anybody’s heart in medicine. It’s just, we’re sad. This is a preventable disease. And ladies and gentlemen, we don’t know of any person who’s died from the immunization, not one from the Pfizer or the Moderna. It’s not a live virus, so you don’t get live virus. You can’t get it from the immunization, it forms antibodies. And we’ve had lots of experience with immunizations, very similar to this in the past. If you’re in a delusion, if your patients are in a delusion, the facts are irrelevant because they’ve already made up their mind and that’s the nature of delusion. Don’t think for one second that you don’t have delusion. We all have delusion. It’s the things that we don’t want to talk about. We’re not going there. We’re going to ignore it and not talk about it. If someone brings it up, we get angry, “Don’t you dare go there,” so we all have delusion. Right now, there’s a lot of delusion surrounding the COVID vaccine. And these are the people that are overwhelming the ER, for the most part, not 100%. And this video is not about trying to cause an argument, insight anything other than understanding, I don’t want conflict. I’m really sorry that people are getting sick. Do I believe people should have a right not to get immunized? Yeah, they should. They do. And then it made me think, well, what if the government said, “If you’re not immunized and you get sick, you’re responsible for your own medical bill?” I mean, that would open up a seething cauldron of debate. Okay, well, what if you’re a diabetic and don’t care for your diabetes and you get a heart attack, you’ve got to pay for your own bypass? Okay, clearly that’s not reasonable. But to my colleagues out there, this will get better. We have gotten over 100% of the pandemics that we’ve ever had in the world’s history. We will get over this. I believe there will probably be a second, clearly we’re in a second wave right now, but doesn’t this make sense? We had precautions that were in place, the social distancing, the masks, and we got immunizations and… our numbers went down. So all of a sudden it’s like, woo-hoo, we’re done, we’re done. We’ve fixed this except for the people weren’t immunized because we went back into society and the people weren’t immunized, the precautions were gone and next thing you know, they’re getting sick.
Third Wave?
In My Experience I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a third wave of this, where we recover from this wave and then… we’re done. And then we go back to nightclubs and comedy clubs and social interaction, and then there’s another wave, so what do I have to understand as a clinician? People have delusions and people are going to believe what they want to believe and it’s pretty hard to change my mind. So I know it’s really hard to change other people’s minds. So, to my colleagues out there, try to keep compassionate, try to keep tolerant. That’s my best advice under these circumstances. I believe that when someone’s living in delusion, facts are irrelevant. It’ll just upset them. One of the ways that you can help, have a conversation here. Speak from your own experience. If I’m talking to someone who may be in delusion about immunizations, where they’re like, “I’m not getting one,” for whatever their logic is, they’re not getting an immunization. I’ll just tell them my experience, “My experience is that I got it. I work in the health field and I know there’s long-term side effects of the disease. There’s no long-term side effects of the immunization that we know of but this immunization is new. But it’s very similar to other immunizations, but there’s not long-term side effects, but there are very long-term side effects of COVID. So my experience is that I felt it was important. And if you don’t want to get it, I respect that, but I’d really encourage you to social distance.”
That’s my advice. So good luck. God bless. I hope this was helpful. Stay tuned for next month’s Q-wave.
