When the doctor is wrong, the patient gets worse

Shortly after arriving in Korea, I developed an ingrown toenail and went to a hospital.

“You’ve got an ingrowing toenail,” the doctor said. He was right. The bloody thing was burrowing into my big toe, which was red and swollen. I assumed it was caused by tight shoes.

He offered to take it out there and then. I won’t describe the procedure in full technicolor, but it was quick and sanguinary. The hospital was the cheapest one downtown, and the doctor was a young man with a mop-top fringe. As he leaned over my foot, needle in hand, I wondered if he could even see what he was doing.

A few months later, the toenail was back, resuming its downward trajectory. This time, he proposed removing only half of it, a remedy that halved the time before my next visit.

After the third removal, I tried a more expensive hospital. There, armed with the intelligence that the nail had been taken out three times already, the new doctor suggested a novel solution: roll up a bit of toilet paper and place it under the nail to train it to grow upward.

That did the trick. Except that my toe remained red and swollen. Finally, I was diagnosed with gout. By then, however, I had lost some faith in the medical profession and tried to diagnose myself regarding what caused the gout. That foolishness delayed for years the discovery of a proper solution.

Anyway, enough about my toe. My point is what I learned: Misdiagnosis is the mother of failure.

When the doctor gets the diagnosis wrong, even the best medicine will fail. Or worse, do harm.

The same is true of politics and society. When we misread the causes of our problems, we end up with policies, arguments and public moods that deepen our national ailments.

Now that social media has turned us into reporters, without the rigorous training that real journalists receive, we see this everywhere. There’s a rush to blame and condemn, and before you can say “you’ll feel a little prick,” we’re proposing surgery that leads to deeper division and cynicism.

Take the recent prosecutorial investigations of politically active pastors. Their flocks and supporters immediately framed the arrests and detentions as evidence that the government of Lee Jae Myung was “pro-North” and bent on suppressing religious freedom.

I’ve written before on this, so I won’t labor the point. But let me just note that these pastors were outspoken supporters of the previous Yoon government. That makes the real issue obvious: this isn’t persecution of Christianity, but of political opponents.

So what, you might say? It is natural for those close to an issue to exaggerate. True. But two problems follow. First, truth matters. Especially, you would think in matters of religion and justice.

Second, exaggeration backfires. This misdiagnosis by people here with friends abroad led some American conservatives to view Korea’s new president as a pro-North, pro-China, anti-Christian leftist. Once they realize that is untrue — which is happening now — they no longer trust their friends in Korea. Thus, the attempt to leverage American political pressure against Korean prosecutors becomes lose-lose for everyone involved.

For another example, take the housing crisis. Many commentators frame soaring rents and unaffordable home prices as a moral tale of greedy landlords, speculative developers and corrupt politicians. But that moral diagnosis misses the underlying structural disease. The real causes are decades of speculative incentives embedded in our tax and land systems, a shortage of public housing, and a culture that equates property ownership with adulthood and respectability.

It’s no wonder, then, that successive governments have prescribed the wrong medicine: new restrictions here, temporary subsidies there. None address the root causes. The patient — our housing market — is going downhill fast.

A third misdiagnosis example concerns the disillusionment of young Koreans. Every election cycle, politicians describe youth anger as a “generational rebellion.” Young people are portrayed either as entitled or as victims. But the real diagnosis is that young people are losing faith that effort and talent lead to fair reward. Their frustration is logical, not some generational consequence of too much TikTok. By treating it as a “youth problem,” leaders prescribe cosmetic cures — job fairs, catchy slogans, short-term handouts — instead of the real medicine: economic reform and political renewal.

What connects these examples is our national habit of reaching for moral or ideological explanations before empirical ones. We diagnose by instinct or prejudice, not by evidence. That’s dangerous because in a democracy, decision-making is not solely in the hands of competent policymakers — it is by us, the people, egging them on.

The way we replace clear diagnosis with moral accusation only clouds our national vision and sickens our society. If we fail to upgrade our public conversation, no election, policy, or protest will cure what ails us.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.