All Hank, all the time.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Also, you're confusing medicine with public health. Public health is about treating populations and finding out what causes disease so it can be avoided. Epidemeology, the field of study that you've ranted the most against, is a public health discipline. It's the reason we drink clean water. It's the reason we pinpointed the HIV virus as a sexually transmitted disease. It's the way we track Avian flu.

Medicine is about treating individuals. It is completely anecdotal in nature, and it depends almost entirely on the individual patient. If you flip through a medical journal, say JAMA or the New England Journal, you'll find a lot of case studies and randomized trials. (This week, it's all HIV all the time, because of the AIDS conference.) If you show up at grand rounds in any teaching hosptial, usually the presentations are on various individual cases. Drug and other interventional trails are also based on randomized reports of individual cases. When the results of an intervention start to a) be beneficial and b) generate the same results in different patients with the same disease, the intervention is adopted as the standard treatment.

In some respects, public health is an attempt to avoid having to resort to medicine. The goal of public health is to keep the population healthy so that medicine is not needed. Once you get sick, the public health part is irrelevant (except, of course, you're now a data point for future public health research) and the medicine part kicks in. Your doctor isn't worried about what got you there; they're worried about how to fix you. He or she is going to tell you about what's going on with you personally and he or she is going to make treatment and diagnosis decisions based on your individual history (including family history, social history, lifestyle and your physical condition (height, weight, blood tests, x-rays, CT scans, and any other diagostic tools that he or she uses in his or her practice)).

So your rant is against public health, not medicine. I, for one, am a fan of John Snow, and I vaguely subscribe to the germ theory of disease. Your milage may differ.

My rant is against the misrepresentation of any fact to the public for any purpose, even keeping people healthy. If the public can't understand epidemiological data (which it obviously can't, since even the press, and an assumed educated sector of the public, seems incapable of understanding it), then it should be offered with caveats, such as:

"NOTE: MOST PEOPLE WHO [INSERT VICE OR UNHEALTHY BEHAVIOR] DO NOT GET DISEASE. THIS IS EPIDEMIOLOGICAL DATA, WHICH MEANS THAT WHEN WE SAY YOUR 'RISK' INCREASES TWOFOLD, WE MEAN IT INCREASES FROM 1 IN 100,000 TO 2 IN 100,000."

If people must read this kind of data, why would it be a bad thing for them to understand it? Couldn't it save us a good deal of hysteria about diseases? A person I worked with wore sunscreen every day, even in the winter, because she read somewhere that accumulated sunlight over a lifetime could give you cancer. The article, of course, failed to note that it was physically impossible to get a skin cancer from 300 years worth of two minute jaunts from the subway to her office building (which was about the extent of her daily exposure to the sun's rays). That's probably the press's fault, but I think the medical community has an obligation to make sure the press explains a story in full, instead of writing it in a manner to scare people. But no one does that, because they figure the hyper-vigilance of the deluded is good for the deluded's health. Seems like lying by ommission to me.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
so did the Nazis...........and the Clintons for that matter

To their credit, at least the Nazis won with a majority.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
Ty,

The Honourable Mr. Dingle from Michigan tells us that Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation..........please tell me you are not voicing support for a terrorist organisation in the middle of America's War on Terror???

I'm starting to think that your political . . . confusion . . . is a by-product of your poor reading comprehension and inability to reason logically. Iraq's government was democratically elected, and likewise stands accused of awful acts of terrorism. The two, sadly, are not inconsistent.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
To their credit, at least the Nazis won with a majority.

I do not believe the Nazis won a majority in a national election before Hitler became Chancellor. The majorities came later, after they arrested the Communists, etc.

eta: Check out 1932-33 here.

[Diane_Keaton]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
You posted the smear here, and you wouldn't have any idea what Dingell actually said if I hadn't responded.

No shit, but it's a slam dunk that he wants the U.S. to be an honest broker. [eta: That is the debate in U.S. foreign-policy circles about our overall policy re Israel and the Palestinians, which is why Dingell was speaking to it.]

I would think that your experience here so far would keep you from saying more about what Dingell thinks or wants, since you haven't tried very hard to find out.

Hate the terrorists, not fellow Americans. Stop dividing us.

I don't give a rat's ass what Dingell "really thinks" deep down inside when he isn't out there making dumb ass statements like that one. His remarks were astonishingly stupid and I expect more from my representatives, period. He fucked up, period. I'm glad he's written more on the topic, Ty, because he fucked up bad enough that it would have been some bad shit if he didn't follow up. Now.....admit the guy fucked up and move on. And by the way, whatever this "don't divide us" schtick is, it's kind of retarded. Sorry I couldn't put that more gently.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
To their credit, at least the Nazis won with a majority.

Uh, I think it was Bush who won w/o a majority, not Clinton.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Uh, I think it was Bush who won w/o a majority, not Clinton.

quick! delete this one!

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
My rant .......................
...................................
....................................
................................................

Sebby,

You know I love you like the alcoholic ex-inlaw who came to my wedding drunk and licked my motherinlaw-to-be on the neck and arm, but we have moved on from Healthcare. No one gives a rat's arse. People get old. People get sick. Are there no nursing homes, no assisted livings?

We are now trying to dissect why Ty hates America and supports terrorist organisations bent on the destruction of Israel and the fledgling democracies that CinC GWB has created out of whole cloth in the middle east. Please stay on topic.

Thanks,

Penske, the Moderator who supports the responsible exercise of freedom

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I do not believe the Nazis won a majority in a national election before Hitler became Chancellor. The majorities came later, after they arrested the Communists, etc.

eta: Check out 1932-33 here.

can you admit the German populance, at some point- any point, took a stance against Jewish people?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Diane_Keaton
I don't give a rat's ass what Dingell "really thinks" deep down inside when he isn't out there making dumb ass statements like that one. His remarks were astonishingly stupid and I expect more from my representatives, period. He fucked up, period. I'm glad he's written more on the topic, Ty, because he fucked up bad enough that it would have been some bad shit if he didn't follow up. Now.....admit the guy fucked up and move on. And by the way, whatever this "don't divide us" schtick is, it's kind of retarded. Sorry I couldn't put that more gently.

The guy is maybe inarticulate, but in no way fucked up. What is unclear to me is why you, Rush, Victor Davis Hanson, and other conservatives think it's OK to smear people like this. In Hanson's case, it's clearly a determined effort to smear. Is it some sort of panic about the fall elections? Get a fucking grip. Penske does it to stir the pot, but the rest of you seem to be serious.

[Diane_Keaton]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
My rant is against the misrepresentation of any fact to the public for any purpose, even keeping people healthy.

Okay, but second-hand smoke is bad for non-smokers and who really cares "how much" bad it is. If the majority of people in a particular place (maybe by referundum or whatever) want smoking banned, then so be it and aren't you supposed to be, like, "government shouldn't interfere" and stuff? Or does the libertarian thing apply to what each individual wants to do, but not to what the majority of people want to do? Would it be okay if the no-smoking thing was enforced by non-government people? Private business? Vigilantism?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I do not believe the Nazis won a majority in a national election before Hitler became Chancellor. The majorities came later, after they arrested the Communists, etc.

eta: Check out 1932-33 here.

And yet even after killing Vince Foster, and the Branch Davidians, the Clintons were not able to consolidate their power such that they could get a majority.

eta: interesting... Wikipedia has no entry for Arkancide. I know what I am doing with the rest of my week...

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
quick! delete this one!

Does he want me to delete it or edit it for accuracy?

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Diane_Keaton
Okay, but second-hand smoke is bad for non-smokers and who really cares "how much" bad it is. If the majority of people in a particular place (maybe by referundum or whatever) want smoking banned, then so be it and aren't you supposed to be, like, "government shouldn't interfere" and stuff? Or does the libertarian thing apply to what each individual wants to do, but not to what the majority of people want to do? Would it be okay if the no-smoking thing was enforced by non-government people? Private business? Vigilantism?

I have no issue with people passing referendums to ban smoking because they don't like it or want it around them, even if it weren't bad for people. People can vote to do whatever they like.

But the govt, and medical care professionals, ought to be honest with people about the risks of certain behaviors. We should not allow people to operate under misapprehensions that they're going to fucking die from everything, which the press loves to push on people, and the govt gets behind as a sort of "beneficial white lie." Epidemiological information should contain caveats similar to free stock market info... disclaimers that this is macro info, and "ymmv."

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
My rant is against the misrepresentation of any fact to the public for any purpose, even keeping people healthy. If the public can't understand epidemiological data (which it obviously can't, since even the press, and an assumed educated sector of the public, seems incapable of understanding it), then it should be offered with caveats, such as:

"NOTE: MOST PEOPLE WHO [INSERT VICE OR UNHEALTHY BEHAVIOR] DO NOT GET DISEASE. THIS IS EPIDEMIOLOGICAL DATA, WHICH MEANS THAT WHEN WE SAY YOUR 'RISK' INCREASES TWOFOLD, WE MEAN IT INCREASES FROM 1 IN 100,000 TO 2 IN 100,000."

If people must read this kind of data, why would it be a bad thing for them to understand it? Couldn't it save us a good deal of hysteria about diseases? A person I worked with wore sunscreen every day, even in the winter, because she read somewhere that accumulated sunlight over a lifetime could give you cancer. The article, of course, failed to note that it was physically impossible to get a skin cancer from 300 years worth of two minute jaunts from the subway to her office building (which was about the extent of her daily exposure to the sun's rays). That's probably the press's fault, but I think the medical community has an obligation to make sure the press explains a story in full, instead of writing it in a manner to scare people. But no one does that, because they figure the hyper-vigilance of the deluded is good for the deluded's health. Seems like lying by ommission to me.

OK, um, your responses on this seem mildly less stupid than what you have to say about pensions. But it may be just because I know more about pensions that health.