Schrödinger's physiatrist
7 Aug 2021 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI recently read quite a long and clearly carefully thought-out fanfiction novella that was mostly epistolary and consistently misspelled 'psychiatrist' as 'physiatrist' the entire time.
The story didn't say explicitly that it was or wasn't beta read, but this is a spellcheck-level error anyway, although a physiatrist IS a thing (but not, I think, the kind of thing that would be in a spellchecker dictionary? I mean given the hundreds and hundreds of real words they fail to recognize). Of course, the physiatrist is a practicing doctor too so it introduces another element: could this character actually BE a physiatrist?
I only know what they do from wikipedia, but this character seems to just do various normal talk therapy and prescribe standard depression and anxiety meds and I can't see how it could fit. But it's not actually IMPOSSIBLE that the character's job could be filled by one: physiatrists are rehab specialists, but it's usually physical injury and disabiliy rehab, and the one in the story was just doing addiction counseling. Occam's razor would normally dictate a typo, but when it's consistently spelled that way the whole time that's impossible, plus the rehabilitation specialist doing (apparently the wrong type of) rehabilitation is probably too much coincidence for that. Or rather, not too much coincidence to occur at all, but too much coincidence to be on the side against you when using Occam's razor, maybe?
We're definitely not looking at a piece of writing from someone with dyslexia who hasn't had it spellchecked or proofread, going by the low level of such mistakes in the rest of the text. And it was quite good! So I'm still thinking about this more than a day later.
...This type of mystery is actually one of my favorite things about fandom. They crop up much less in published work.
The story didn't say explicitly that it was or wasn't beta read, but this is a spellcheck-level error anyway, although a physiatrist IS a thing (but not, I think, the kind of thing that would be in a spellchecker dictionary? I mean given the hundreds and hundreds of real words they fail to recognize). Of course, the physiatrist is a practicing doctor too so it introduces another element: could this character actually BE a physiatrist?
I only know what they do from wikipedia, but this character seems to just do various normal talk therapy and prescribe standard depression and anxiety meds and I can't see how it could fit. But it's not actually IMPOSSIBLE that the character's job could be filled by one: physiatrists are rehab specialists, but it's usually physical injury and disabiliy rehab, and the one in the story was just doing addiction counseling. Occam's razor would normally dictate a typo, but when it's consistently spelled that way the whole time that's impossible, plus the rehabilitation specialist doing (apparently the wrong type of) rehabilitation is probably too much coincidence for that. Or rather, not too much coincidence to occur at all, but too much coincidence to be on the side against you when using Occam's razor, maybe?
We're definitely not looking at a piece of writing from someone with dyslexia who hasn't had it spellchecked or proofread, going by the low level of such mistakes in the rest of the text. And it was quite good! So I'm still thinking about this more than a day later.
...This type of mystery is actually one of my favorite things about fandom. They crop up much less in published work.
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Date: 7 Aug 2021 01:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7 Aug 2021 03:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7 Aug 2021 03:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7 Aug 2021 05:18 pm (UTC)