Rabbinic Advice

A guest post by JS:

After reading DB's post below, "Should the clergy practice medicine?" I wondered if he had gone far enough. While there certainly are cases of people asking their rabbi about cancer treatments, it is too easy to write these people off as being a few eggs short of a dozen. I'm more interested in the nearly daily decisions frum Jews make based solely on rabbinic advice when medical advice, financial advice, or even common sense would dictate a different course of action.

Things I see all too often:
1) Pregnant women fasting on yom kippur, tisha b'av or other fast days and often forcing a doctor to give an OK based on a rabbinic p'sak.
2) Couples going off birth control because a rabbi says they need to start having children regardless of economic situation, emotional situation, education situation, etc.
3) People going off prescriptions for pesach or shabbat due to concerns about chametz or taking medicine on shabbat.
4) People buying chalav yisroel, pas yisroel, gevinas yisroel, etc or buying into other chumras when they can barely afford to put food on the table due to rabbinic p'sak.

I invite people to post more example in the comments.

Please when you post don't berate me on how not all rabbis are like this. I am well aware of this. But there are far too many who think they stand in the place of God or those with actual specialized knowledge. And there are far too many rabbis who tell everyone "have faith in God, have bitachon" but are nowhere to be found to pay a tuition check for another child, or to grieve with parents if they lose a pregnancy or a loved one due to following his nonsensical advice.

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