Political Polarization of Professions

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

6 points·luu··2 comments

It's a rough deal if you want someone you can trust. Picture a conservative trying to find a psychiatrist or pediatrician. Getting one who won't be hateful and threatening is a gamble. There are going to be opinions on family structure, child discipline, education, religion, and so much more. Normal conservative behavior can be viewed as neglect or abuse.

While it can theoretically go the other way, with conservative psychiatrists and pediatricians viewing normal leftist behavior as neglect or abuse, the lopsided political orientation of those professions makes that an unlikely occurrence.

Doctors are just there to give you the best evidence based advice to help you with your medical problems. They work with patients that believe vaccines cause autism and manage to do it professionally and without abusing them or forcing them to convert to their beliefs even when they are making decisions that aren't backed up by facts.

Doctors don't treat people differently based on that patient's political identity and doctors don't disclose their own politics to a patient. Medicine has a massive oversight structure and they would lose their license if they made decisions because of who a person votes for.

Abuse is also not relative depending on who you vote for. There is abuse behavior and non-abusive behavior not left behavior and right behavior. Professionals like doctors only make decisions based on the best available evidence and separate their political beliefs from what science says.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com