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This is probably the most serious symptom. When this symptom manifests itself, the afflicted person
tends to read something in a popular book, email list, newsgroup or website and take it as the literal truth,
without checking facts. It's worse when combined with blind trust of the so-called "elders" who have silly
names like "High Lady Stuffandnonsense" or "Lady MoonroseHaven". Their names literally sound like
they came out of a Pagan Name Generator and are begging for ridicule.
Basically, Lady Stuffandnonsense decides to write an article about the healing qualities of Foxglove and
throws down on the article all that she knows about the plant, without ever bothering to look anything up.
Thus, you have an article that talks about the soporific qualities of Foxglove, how beautiful the flowers
are, and how magically it can be used to help the person sleep. A tea may be included in the recipe to
allow the person reading it to have a good night's sleep.
Here's the problem: Foxglove is a poison. It's known as Digitalis, and is used in minute qualities as a way
of preventing heart attacks. Does High Lady Stuffandnonsense know this? She may, but since she doesn't
write it down, the people reading this post don't know it. Do they look up the facts on this plant? No, they
trust the information Lady Stuffandnonsense has put down and would never dream of questioning it.
What happens?
Someone who actually knows what Foxglove is who reads the same list, takes it upon themselves to
correct many of the misconceptions and inaccurate statements in the article, including that it's a
poisonous substance and should only be used by someone who knows what they are doing. The other
people who are reading this list, who have not seen this person post before, get upset at the supposed
"attack" of the second poster upon Lady Stuffandnonsense and decide to make a few dozen (thousand)
cutting remarks about the second poster.
Now, at this juncture, Lady Stuffandnonsense could dissolve the entire problem by checking with a few
***** pharmacopoeias or herbals, and discovering that the second poster is right, correcting her own
facts and moving on. Is this what happens? No. That would require work.
It's far easier for High Lady Stuffandnonsense to write another article making disparaging comments
about the second poster, and to cite her years of knowledge that have been accumulated by her ancestors
and how this is all out of her family's hand written book of Shadows which has been passed down for the
last 4 centuries to her. It's easier to declare in sonorous tones that the second poster doesn't have the
background to know what Lady Stuffandnonsense is talking about and that the second poster is just
WRONG.
All of which leads the Wiclets who look to Lady Stuffandnonsense for education to be encouraged in
their attacks on the second poster. It does not matter that the second poster has a PhD in Herbalism and
Pharmacology (and is a practicing pharmacist and homeopathic doctor), the second poster (obviously,
according to the list) has absolutely no knowledge of what Lady Stuffandnonsense is talking about. (You
may laugh, but this scenario actually happened at one point, and I've toned it down quite a bit.)
At which point our Doctor gets ticked off and tries in vain to educate these people before they overdose
with Foxglove and kill someone. Which leads to an escalation of the resistance to that education, and so
on, ad neausium.
If Lady Stuffandnonsense had looked a couple facts up before writing her article, had she looked the
facts up after she wrote and posted her article, had she been mature and not had her ego invested in being
right, all this could have been prevented. Nor is she alone in the blame, all those who decided that a
correction of facts was an attack, because they refused to see that anyone else could offer anything of use
to them are guilty of perpetuating this scenario too. Finally our Doctor who posted the correction is
somewhat guilty, by answering the Wiclets who attacked her and her facts (although this is completely
understandable, and laudable, in her attempt to not be witness to an accident waiting to happen.)
(A perfect example of this is the above section. In the first draft of this essay I had confused Datura,
Foxglove and Henbane as the same plant. While all are poisonous, each is a separate species of plant. I
posted this first section to a list I am on, and when I was corrected, I ADMITTED my mistake, looked up
http://www.pathwalkers.net/interactive/modules....ame=News&file=index&catid=&topic=1&allstories=1 (51 of 284) [12/25/2005 12:22:21 AM]