Dr. Drew Defends Diagnosing Celebs

Dr. Drew has built a reputation of diagnosing mental conditions in celebs that he has never even met, and he’s taken a lot of criticism for it.

He finally spoke out to defend himself:

“It’s bizarre to me that you can have political commentators, sports commentators, weather commentators, but with medicine, people go, ‘You can’t do that.’ It’s like, if you show me a picture of a rash, I don’t have to know the person to tell you what that rash is. There are lots of medical conditions that you can diagnose never having met the person. Soon enough, we’ll have telemedicine and do it through the Internet ├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥ that’s the future.├óΓé¼┬¥

He continued:

├óΓé¼┼ôYou can educate people about politics, criminality, the law, but not about medicine? It’s just silly … I really don’t want to hurt anybody, but to say the truth and to offer words that might be helpful in understanding what some of these conditions are. I can’t see any reason not to do that. That’s changing things for the better.”

He does have some pretty good points.

The problem with him publicly diagnosing celebs is that if you don’t know someone and haven’t spoken to them, there’s no way for you to have any sort of nuanced diagnosis of them. Sure, you can look at a rash and call it a rash, but what about deep-set psychological conditions?

Those are more complicated than red bumps on your skin.

We’re not saying he absolutely shouldn’t publicly diagnose celebs, he should just remember that they are COMPLEX PEOPLE, and assuming that you can break down their psyche without ever having spoken to them seems naive!

Just sayin’.

[Image via WENN.]