Talk:Sharon Mitchell/Definition

I think that her "doctorate" should have quotations marks around it. However worthy she may be as a person, she simply does not have any real credentials. Hayford Peirce 14:33, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

I had wondered about that, and checked. Her school is accredited by California for vocational training, and it does license some of its graduates as practitioners. It's more than your average fly-by-night, as it has a respected library and museum.

It's been a while, but I have had email conversations with her on antibiotic therapy. Now, you might claim neither one of us has credentials and a right to discuss that, but I will put my discussion points before any infectious disease subspecialist physician. There were details that I explained to her, but she also explained details about her patient base that I would not have realized.

Let's work on a compromise here. I'm perfectly willing to flesh out an article on the school, note that it is not accredited but has a state accreditation that allows lower-level graduates to be licensed California healthcare practitioners. We could work jointly on that article. Now, I'm not always comfortable with people with California licenses; I know a tattoo/piercing practitioner who is licensed but does kinky things that I consider far beyond her knowledge level. A damaged trigeminal nerve is bad enough; my recollection of your "ick" factor draws a discreet curtain over activities that might cause Fournier's gangrene.

I am trying to work with you, but not everyone in CZ governance has the same view of credentials -- I'm not referring to myself alone. Dana Ullman's MPH degree is from a legitimate school, but an MPH is not a clinical degree and he's apparently never been a licensed professional health care provider.

Doctorate in quotes really doesn't mean much. How about "alternative" or "nontraditional degree" piped to "doctor"? I'm open to other wordings, but she has a degree that's more than a paper diploma mill but considerably less than a medical school. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:03, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

You know much more about it/her than I do. I simply remember when she got her "doctorate" and I once wrote an indignant (unpublished) letter to the NYT about an article in which they seemed to take her more seriously than she deserved. She was, of course, a well-known figure around S.F. during the years I lived there. And it seems to me that a couple of years ago when there was an AIDS episode that popped up among L.A. porn workers that it came out that Sharon's place had been guilty of either gross neglect or major malfeasance in some relation to it -- ie, she had falsely certified the health of people she hadn't seen. I'll leave the article to you -- all I remember about her is that for several years she had a girlfriend named Tigr and that they were both major cokeheads. Hayford Peirce 16:21, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

PS -- any of your suggestions about how to deal with the word "doctorate" are fine by me, I just think that the reader ought to be aware that this is not the equivalent of having one in medicine from Stanford or S.F. State.... Hayford Peirce 16:21, 19 April 2011 (UTC)