“The internet gave everyone a microphone before it taught them how to think.” ▌

There is a unique kind of exhaustion that comes from arguing with someone who believes a Facebook meme carries the same weight as your professional education.

Not disagreement. Medicine has always involved disagreement. Patients questioning things is normal. Asking questions is healthy.

What changed was the internet convincing people that confidence and expertise are interchangeable.

Suddenly every guy with a podcast became a medical authority. Every influencer became a nutritionist, immunologist, epidemiologist, and pharmacologist simultaneously. A woman selling essential oils on TikTok somehow became more trustworthy than people who spent decades studying medicine.

And God help you if you tried to explain nuance.

Because nuance dies immediately on social media.

Medicine is complicated. Disease is complicated. Human biology is unbelievably complicated. But the internet demands simple answers to complex problems because simple answers spread faster.

“Vaccines bad.”

“Natural good.”

“Doctors lying.”

That’s easier to digest than understanding immunology, risk stratification, statistical significance, or evidence-based medicine.

The problem is that eventually healthcare workers stop feeling like professionals and start feeling like customer service employees trapped in an argument with Yelp reviews.

You spend years learning differential diagnosis only to hear:
“Well this guy on YouTube says mold causes depression.”

Cool.

Fantastic.

Outstanding contribution to modern science.

And eventually the fatigue becomes emotional. Not because people ask questions, but because expertise itself stopped mattering.

The pandemic didn’t create that problem. It just exposed how bad it already was.

Now we live in a world where someone can genuinely believe a vaccine caused a disease identified decades before the vaccine existed, and instead of being laughed out of the room, they find entire online communities reinforcing it.

That is the terrifying part.

Not ignorance.

Ignorance can be fixed.

Proud ignorance wearing confidence like a badge of honor is a completely different beast.

And honestly?

That’s one thing I do not miss about medicine at all. ▌