The medical establishment often dismisses skepticism of vaccines and treatments as irrational fear. But, as Katherine Furman argues, it can sometimes be rational to trust your friends and neighbours over distant experts – for example, in cases when one lacks information about the aims and values of those experts. Instead of manipulating people into compliance or emphasising the authority of expertise, the real solution lies in bringing scientists and medics closer to the communities they serve.
1. Trusting friends and neighbours
We often share healthcare information and advice with our fellow non-experts. We don’t just talk to our healthcare providers about health; we also talk to our friends, neighbours, and that guy at the coffee shop. A study in France found that mothers who are undecided or uncertain about whether to vaccinate their children would trust a healthcare provider’s advice on vaccination, but only once the provider had been recommended by other women. We value peer-testimony – information we receive from people we judge to be the same as us. And we include that testimony in our medical decision-making.
There are classic examples of relying on those we judge to be similar to ourselves when making healthcare decisions. In the 1970s, a feminist collective in Boston put together the handbook, Our Bodies, Ourselves, which provides a collection of information, often anecdotal, on how to navigate the healthcare system. Their message was simple: we cannot rely on the doctors and we need to share this information between ourselves to survive. Our Bodies, Ourselves has been repeatedly updated and reissued to keep pace with women’s health needs, with the most recent version published in 2011, indicating the longevity of this self-reliance intervention.
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