Providing Data for a world that makes decisions based on beer can labels
Reimagined and Revamped. Fighting the spread of nonsense often feels like a Sisyphean task. However, the joy is in making the information available, not the hope of conversion.
I dont usually have a lot of crude language on this blog. But sometimes there is simply no other word that fits someone.
In case you haven't been following the Shorty Awards (I never even heard of this thing). Both Dr. (cough) Mercola and Mark Adams from Natural News were ahead in the health section. The skeptic community got together and moved Dr. Rachie ahead. She is now winning both from this push but also from the fact that a huge number of the votes for both Mercola and Adams were fraudulent, i.e. Twitter accounts created to vote for them.
I was going to take apart his post, but I have to admit that not only did Tom Foss beat me to it, but he wrote essentially what I would have.
Well I guess I could alway shoot at second worst with his utterly whiny facebook entry.
This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs
Really now. Its virtually the same thing as Adams Rant. The skeptic position is simple, it doesn't matter what you are claiming, chemotherapy or Aloe Vera:
I saw these news blurbs about a man in Belgium who allegedly was awake for 23 years although the doctors thought he was in a coma. This story brought so many thoughts ot my head I though I would try to get them down.
I have a living will that tells my loved ones to pull the plug if I go in a vegetative state
I think we are going to see more and more stories about medicine going wrong in countries with socialized health care
This sort of thing give more inflated, uncouched ammunition to CAM practitioners
I'm not convinced that this guy is actually saying anything.
Living Wills and Vegetative states I am an engineer, not only by trade but "by life". When I see things that are cool I want to know how they work. But more importantly, I get an large amount of joy when I build something, write something, or perform something. I love life, I love my abilities and to use them (even if I bitch and moan sometimes during the process). My biggest fear in life, is to come out of a long coma, which unlike in the movies, people do not come out of the same way they went into. It is crippling. You only need to look at the video above.
It's not like losing a hand, or an eye. I could probably deal with that (both hands would be extremely debilitating to me though). Its an all over muscular loss. I simply do not want to live like that. And no, hearing about the one or two people who not only come out of a long coma but also regain mobility and speech does not provide any comfort to me when that is the extreme exception.
Socialized Medicine We've already seen it from Fox in some respect when they did some ridiculous reporting about how The Netherlands are in a state of anarchy, reveling in a mire of smut and drugs, implying that this is what we can expect if those damn liberals get in charge. I expect we will see more and more of isolated cases where medicine went wrong (as if that has anything to do with how the medicine is paid for) on the news as we move towards, you know, a new healthcare system that is also not socialized.
Strengthening CAM I also bet we are going to see cases like this used to strengthen the canard of "Doctors don't know everything". You see, the "logic" goes like this, if doctors screw up somewhere on the planet, then homeopathy works. Isn't that clear as day? Take a look over at NaturalNews or HuffPo in the next few days, I have little doubt that this case will be made.
Is he really writing? Before I actually read any of the articles about this case, I saw a few tweets from Michael Shermer.
So, I thought "What is Michael yammering on about?" So I saw the video above. What the hell? Is everyone credulous? Would it have been so offensive or so unethical to actually put some headphones on the woman moving that mans hand so we could determine if this is real or not.
I'm not saying that the guy is not awake, I'm not saying he didn't suffer for 23 years. I'm not a doctor, I didn't diagnose him, I haven't seen any of the data suggesting he is not in a coma. I'm saying that it's bullshit that he is typing out these words, that fast. Isn't it just as unethical to force words down his throat in the form of typing things he may not actually be saying?
I do wish some modicum of skepticism would enter the media the first time, and not at the end of weeks of hype.
I've thought about writing this post for a while, but I keep bailing on it because I thought no one wants to hear about my health problems. And you may not. But this is a happy story, at least to me so I thought I would write it. A recent post by Tom Foss is what made me reconsider.
For as long as I can remember I've had stomach problems. Without getting too graphic, this is an intense pain in my gut, that stays there until I make two trips to the bathroom, with each trip lasting 10-25 minutes. Its gross, its embarrassing, and its a pain in the ass (lol a pun!).
There was a time, when I was very young and my parents were away for work and me and my sister were being taken care of by my grandfather, who was Danish and spoke no english. My stomach acted up, it hurt so bad and I couldn't make him understand me. I called 911 and got myself into a hospital where, no surprise here, they found nothing wrong.
Later that same week (this was 5th or 6th grade), a girl at school (Wow I still remember her name, Alex) was mentioning to someone else that her housekeeper was having stomach aches and then her teeth started falling out. I made a phone call to a dentist out of the yellow pages as soon as I got home that day.
These exact pains continues through high school, college, grad school, even now I get them. They happen when I am home alone, they happen when I go to parties, they have happened when I am stuck in the world most disgusting bar. It's truly inconvenient and as I said, often very embarrassing. One of the first dates with my current wife was accompanied by one of these attacks. It's good thing she is awesome.
My father also suffered from the same thing. He told me on many occasions that he can not eat garlic or onion because it gave him stomach aches. In time, I thought that not only do I have the same pains, but its likely that it was due to the same thing garlic and onions. So while I absolutely love garlic on and in my food, onions too, I avoided them. My sister has it too.
When I still got stomach aches, I would think "hmm, I must have had garlic by accident", or "hmm there must be something else that also causes the pain". I noticed I would get the pain often when in social situations (yeah that was really great). I was always nervous when in a situation where I don't know anyone (I now over compensate for that by being very loquacious), and it was these very times when my stomach would erupt in a frenzy of pain and cramps, with the end result with me claiming the bathroom as my temporary home no matter where I was.
There are drugs for the pain. The oldest and previously most common for it was a drug called Donnatal. It's a combination of a barbiturate (phenobarbital) and the herb belladonna (deadly nightshade). Yeah, thats a pretty ironic thing in retrospect. I thought it worked.
In time, I got sick and tired of it. I went to the doctor who diagnosed it as IBS. There are some recent treatments for it, like a drug called Protonex. I have no idea if it works. I was on it for a while, but since the pain doesn't come regularly, it felt like I was taking a pill for no reason. I was told to move to a high fiber diet. That too may work for all I know, but I already eat pretty decently. Then my wife noticed that I would be keeled over when I ate meat.
Hey! Perhaps I can't eat meat for some reason. So I swore it off for almost a year. No meat, steak of course being one of my favorite things to prepare and eat. But the pain returned.
Only in the last couple of years did I get into this skepticism stuff. I finally decided to point my skeptical beam at my own belly. I noticed that I had pain when I didn't eat garlic. I noticed that I had no pain when I ate cloves of garlic. I noticed that I had pain sometimes when I ate meat, and sometimes I didn't.
I also noticed that when I took a Donnatal, my stomach would feel better after two trips to the bathroom. I noticed that two trips to the bathroom would relieve the pain without the drugs.
Basically I noticed I had fallen into the same traps as people who think homeopathy works. I had decided something was the cause (garlic, meat), then ignored the times when I had pain without those foods, and only noticed the times that I did have pain when I ate those things. I thought I had a treatment (Donnatal), I ignored the fact that the fix happened in the bathroom whether I took the drug or not, but I would ascribe the relief to the drug, and not to the toilet.
Here is what is clear now: It doesn't matter what I eat. The pain comes and goes and there may be no trigger at all. If I am going through a time when I get pain, I can eat rice and it will still hurt (in fact, the other night I had 'harmless' crepes and I found myself keeled over). Also, Donnatal is likely to be placebo.
It's a great feeling to gain this knowledge. It's awesome to know that I don't have to deprive myself of foods that I love. It's freeing to know that I don't have to worry about taking a drug with me wherever I need to go, or stressing out if I forget it. IBS is not well understood, but skepticism let me gain control over it.
This post is sort of a response to a post a Vjacks. For some reason my long comments there weren't getting through (perhaps he hates me?), but I thought perhaps they were good enough as an actual blog post anyway. I think the very largest problem with this so-called debate about healthcare is that a huge amount of conflation keeps happening...on both sides.
Health care technology is not the same thing as a health care system.
Its that simple. Seems obvious, so how come these morons can't keep the debate focused on the right thing? The debate should only be about the latter and should not include the former.
Health Care Technology There is little doubt and little debate (at least amongst Americans) that America has the best health care technology in the world. Better than that, we export, and make tons of money on this very technology. This technology with respect not not only life saving procedures, but also effective drugs and treatments for non-life threatening issues like chronic stomach pain, restless leg syndrome, impotence, etc.
I don't want to ignore the contribution in many areas that come from other countries, I do recognize some amazing work that comes out of France and Japan that I am familiar with. I'm sure significant contributions come from other countries, I am just only familiar with these two (sorry if I left your country out). Even my vasectomy that I had, was done with a Thai procedure (but I got it here).
But in the end, I think we can safely say that America does in fact, provide the world with more of what we call "western medicine" than any other country. We also can say that we have studied the efficacy of this work (from USA and other countries), and found that we have made great strides in cancer treatment, prevention of transmissible diseases, and other health areas.
Even if the science was attained through completely unethical means, and the efficacy of the treatment is proven, it is still healthcare technology and not part of the system under debate. That is not an endorsement of unethical behavior, its simply a fact that if a treatment is verified to work, its simply a fact that it does, which is a different issue than the means by which this fact was attained.
One more fact about our medical technology that is almost universally considered unsurpassed. The great majority of it was developed through a so-called 'socialist' mechanism. Yes folks, I'm sorry to say you have this wonderful healthcare technology due to a giant wealth redistribution system that takes money from citizen and aims billions of dollars of it towards medical research to the tunes of tens of billions of dollars annually.
More than 80% of the NIH's funding is awarded through almost 50,000 competitive grants to more than 325,000 researchers at over 3,000 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions in every state and around the world.
The CDC awards nearly 85 percent of its budget through grants and contracts to help accomplish its mission to promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability.
The Health and Human Services has a budget of 76 billion.
The HHS grant portfolio is the largest in the federal government with more than 300 grant programs operating under its annual grant budget that amounts to approximately 60% of the Federal government's grant dollars.
These tax dollars get doled on in a competitive peer reviewed process (as do grants for the DoD and DoE etc) in the form of phased grants. Sometimes the a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. Sometimes they are grand challenges, and sometimes they come in other forms.
Compare these values to the paltry 10 billion or so dollars that venture capitalists invest every year. Conservatives seem to think that venture capitalists can do this, but I have sad news for them. Basic research rarely pays off directly, but it forms a foundation for the items that do pay off. VC tend to invest after the preliminary work has already been done, when the product has been fleshed out, even when some early units have shipped. They have almost no tolerance for the very early work. There are exceptions: Drug companies do invest lots of money in a new drug for example, but they get their returns in getting a formula retweaked as long as possible rather than doing the basic research for something truly novel (Viagra was found by accident and will get tweaked as the patent's time limit arrives, much like you see Claritin coming in a new form).
To sum up this part... The healthcare technology in the USA is possibly the best in the world. It also got this way through largely socialist means (but not totally) while the money is being made through capitalist means.
Health care system A health care system is the mechanism by which the technology gets distributed to the people. Most, if not all, countries with longer lifespans (we rank 50th or 35th depending on where you look) and greater healthcare satisfaction (17th) have a socialized healthcare system. The citizens are taxed, the money is pooled and healthcare is delivered to everyone in the nation.
Our healthcare system works by letting companies compete to provide better healthcare to their customers. At least that is the theory. In reality healthcare costs for customers of any of these companies average out to be far higher than in any other country, without the benefit of longer lifespans or better satisfaction.
Liberal like me can't see how we can expect a company, with an inherently smaller pool of customers than a socialized system would provide, can possibly deliver competitive costs with respect to other countries. Never mind the fact that the profit motive necessarily raises costs even if it as little as 3.3%. Never mind the anti-trust issues and unethical recision and all the other bad practices that they do, each company necessarily has a miniscule insurance pool by which to couch the payouts. Insurance works best when you have lots of healthy people paying into it. The whole country as an insurance pool is better than breaking it up into 50 smaller pools.
Anyway, regardless of my opinions of our system. The debate would go a lot easier if we stuck to discussion about a health care system rather than the state of our health care technology.
Here is a video going around. Both of these men perform the very conflation I am talking about.
