What you don’t know can, in fact, hurt you

‘What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

It’s an interesting maxim, accurate in some settings.

But equally accurate might be, “What you won’t know, can hurt you.”

The last few years of politics — particularly in the United States but in other places as well — have been remarkably fractious and absolutist. You’re on one side or the other. You choose who to listen to, and what to believe in. People you don’t agree with are obviously stupid.

And in some cases, the fact that some people have specific expertise — have trained in science and medicine, have done extensive research, have followed particular illnesses for years — is given as the very reason they can’t be trusted to know what they’re doing. Because, obviously, they must be bought and paid for by Big Pharma or Big Something Else.

But here’s a question: what happens to individuals when they choose to write off the value of science and medicine?

Well, there’s a cost to that worldview.

And as the saying goes, chickens can come home to roost.

A study titled The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA, published May 14 in the journal Nature, notes that human behaviour has taken a look at the differing health outcomes for Americans on the political left and Americans on the political right.

And the lefties seem to be doing better.

Here are some details from the study.

“Public health disparities provide an important lens for understanding social and political change in the (U.S.) Using individual-level medical data and death records, this study shows that conservative Americans experienced worsening health and higher mortality than liberals during the 2010s. Here we find evidence consistent with two potential mechanisms. First, demographic realignment within political coalitions brought less healthy individuals into the conservative camp.”

Fair enough: in the 2010s, the conservative camp saw their overall health worsen as less-healthy Americans joined the fold.

But, then, the study argues, things changed.

“Yet by the 2020s, demographic change, public policy and COVID-19 do not fully account for the widening gap in mortality rates. Public opinion data are consistent with a second mechanism: declining trust in medical professionals among right-leaning individuals, including lower willingness to seek care, follow clinical advice or believe in medication effectiveness, even for issues unrelated to COVID-19.”

“These patterns suggest that growing ideological divides in health behaviours are leaving conservative Americans increasingly vulnerable to preventable health risks.”

And it doesn’t look as if that situation is likely to change. The study points out that conservatives have less faith in their physicians and are less likely to take their doctors’ advice. “We also find that people on the right with chronic illnesses are more skeptical than people on the left that medicines to treat those illnesses are safe and effective,” the authors say, adding that the direct causal relationships between people’s views and their mortality needs more research.

“(P)olitical beliefs, by shaping trust, engagement and adherence to medical advice, have become an important social determinant of health,” the study says. “Liberals and conservatives differ more today in their health outcomes than in decades past and these differences are poised to persist as attitudes towards seeking and trusting care — factors that affect health outcomes — now divide the political left and right.”

It’s a physical manifestation of ideological differences: “Although many institutions have lost the trust of Americans in recent decades,” the study says, “the case of medicine is a particularly stark illustration of the consequences that can follow when politics leads people to divest from institutions that promote their welfare.”

In the land of maxims, this whole editorial may represent a textbook case of whistling past the graveyard. Why?

The people who most need to read and consider the results of the study are poised not to believe it anyway.