Johnson & Johnson Comes Out As Pro-Superstition?

I’ve watched many nurses help many people in many ways. The nurse in this video saying she “believes in stacking the deck” to me expresses what I have seen in good nurses–they will use anything that might help, and all the more so the more grave the situation. Whether that’s the utterance of false consolations to ease anxiety or capitulation to someone’s superstitions, it’s not for a nurse to THWART the beliefs or hopes of the patient but to use them. The shamrock in the video belonged to the patient–maybe it was given to him by his kid? maybe it’s something he’s had since he was a kid? it’s meaning–even qua ‘superstition’–may involve all sorts of investments and psychic dispositions besides the mere “falsehood” of superstitions about “luck”.

That said, btw, I deplore J&J’s real-life wrongs in the name of Splenda, which has been the horrifying deaths of 12K dogs.

I think your term ‘ambiguous’ is the key here; I don’t see the commercial as asserting that she believes in superstitious means. That would be more clearly the case had they not made SURE that we saw the shamrock come out of HIS clothing, and put it into HIS hand (given the theories, for which there is some evidence, that those who are less-than-conscious-looking can experience subtle signalling especially via hands). I see it as offering him something familiar–and thereby strengthening–in the midst of the terrifying depersonalization of the emergency room, where you are literally and figuratively stripped of your normal trappings/clothing/and most importantly, control.

A shamrock stands for luck. It does not stand just for “personal item”. It is an unambiguously iconic representative of lucky charms and also, therein, a stand-in for superstitiousness itself. Devoid any further story context, its primary symbolic connotation is its assumable meaning. I’m not reading anything into its choice and it’s illicit to read the superstitious connotations out of it when there are no further contextual explanations of its meaning that would do so.

This is especially true when a distinct discussion of her belief in science prefaces her remark about “also being human” and embracing an unambiguoulsy superstitious item as a tool for engaging the patient.

And good science is the antithesis of superstition. Learning how to sift our innumerable inferences to figure out which ones are the good ones and which the bad IS the advent of science. To murky that and just put in the bin of “scientific” all our patterns of induction–even the ones that were and still are counter-productive to developing actually truth conducive methods and habits of thought–is to be seriously unhelpful.

Whatever the stumbling process by which we refined our methods from the superstitious to the scientific, we have clarified pretty well the distinction between the two and should encourage a 21st Century understanding of the world in the 21st Century. I don’t blame 12th Century people for thinking like 12th Century people. I blame modern 21st Century people for thinking like 12th Century people.

Now, again, I understand that nurses’ jobs are different than that of philosophers and other critical thinking educators. I understand that to a certain extent there is room for them morally to put the psychological comfort of patients over those same patients’ critical thinking skills. Nonetheless, there is no need to imply that nurses sharing patients superstitions themselves is a chief signal of their humanity and concern. The contrast that doctors are cold, inhuman, uncaring practicioners of efficient science but nurses are well-rounded people who participate in the scientific side but also can “stack the deck” or go the extra mile in caring for patients by incorporating the “spiritual” where spiritual is equated with the expilcitly superstitious, is just uncalled for.

It’s not the end of the world of course. But it’s still irresponsible, counter-educational, and promotes regressive values and stigmas against science and critical thought in general.

I meant that being human in the historical perspective has and therefore does involve mythological-type thinking, or thinking that is not limited to what we call “facts”.

Did anyone notice that the lucky charm came out of the patients pocket?! This has nothing to do with superstition. The lucky charm belongs to the patient, this is obviously important to the patient and the nurse is the patients advocate and non-judgemental. I would do the same thing.

nurse tom