Wait, is that actually what they call it? The Q-tip paradox? That's kinda perfect honestly. I remember my grandma always telling me to clean my ears with Q-tips after a shower because the steam loosened the wax. But then I saw this video where an ear doctor used a tiny camera to show what really happens and it was disgusting. The wax wasn't being removed at all, it was just getting packed down into this hard lump against the eardrum. And people go years doing this every day thinking they're being hygienic when really they're creating these massive blockages that can mess with your hearing. What's wild is that the box even says not to put them in your ear canal but nobody reads that part. You basically have to unlearn this thing your parents taught you that seemed totally logical.

Was he like that about other stuff too or just the tent?

Yeah but I've seen how these QME doctors operate and honestly most of them are pretty biased toward the insurance side from the start. My buddy went through this in Fresno and his QME spent more time looking at old surveillance photos than his actual medical records. Just feels like the system is set up to minimize payouts no matter what your own doctor says.

You know what, I used to be the guy who would pull up the calculator and insist the numbers were right until I was blue in the face. But then I had a job making these little aluminum brackets on a old Mori that just wouldn't clean up no matter what the feed chart said. Old timer walks by, stops, and says "sounds like you're fighting the machine" and taps the RPM down just a hair by ear. Fixed it in about two seconds. Now I start with the numbers but I definitely listen first and adjust from there. There's something about that sound that tells you more than any calculator ever will.

I had a similar thing a few years back with a report from a site in New Mexico. The radiocarbon dates on some charcoal were coming back at 8,500 BP, but the ceramic sherds in the same layer were clearly from a much later Pueblo period. I went back to the original field notes and found out the lab sample was taken right next to a rodent burrow that nobody marked on the map. That kind of sloppy context control makes the whole report useless unless you dig into the raw data yourself. It's like people just trust the number and move on without thinking about how it got there. I'm with you, it's maddening when the story the dates tell doesn't match the dirt.