OT is JT OK?

I agree that there is lots of variation - I did say my numbers were pulled out of the air.

To be honest, I had not thought much about the cost issue - I am used to sane health systems where doctors get paid for their time and treatments are paid for by taxes (or a similar system). If you live in a country where patients or third-parties pay for the treatments and doctors get a cut of that fee, then I can appreciate they could be tempted to pick expensive and unnecessary treatments.

You know a condition for which millions of random folk on the internet know better than the average doctor? That sounds hard to believe.

Agreed. But it is unlikely that a random guy off the internet can give significantly better advice on where to look than anyone else can get with careful searching. Remember, "it worked for me" information, websites, or remedies are /not/ helpful - what you want is "this is a reliable source of information with a statistically significant chance of increasing the likelihood of patients with this malady or symptoms getting better treatment". "I know someone who had that problem, and they found help here" does not cut it.

It is also a condition where people are sometimes worse off because they try things they find themselves, rather than following the doctor's suggestions.

With many conditions - including many cancers - there's a fair amount of luck involved. That includes bad luck when the doctor picks the wrong treatment, and good luck when the alternative treatment happens to work (or, often, is completely irrelevant to the patient improving due to other factors). The fact that a particular alternative has happened to help in other cases does /not/ mean it is a sensible idea for any other case.

That is why scientific medical trials are so essential - despite the costs and efforts, despite knowing that some people involved are not getting the best treatment possible.

Now, if you know of newer medical trial evidence and your doctor is out of date, it's a different matter - as noted before, doctors are still fallible humans.

Reply to
David Brown
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Methinks you have left out what I suspect is the biggest cause of medical mistakes. Lack of time for the doctor to make a proper diagnosis. I've had my share of major medical procedures and emergencies in about the last 17 years. There were plenty of medical mistakes made, most of which could have been prevented if everyone hadn't been in such a hurry. For emergencies, of course speed is tremendously important. For stable conditions, much less so. Anecdotal examples on request.

I once did some digging on how the medical mistakes statistics were collected and tabulated. Lots of little problems, but the big one is that is assigning the blame solely to the doctor. Most doctors have a fairly extensive support staff, any of whom are perfectly capable of killing the patient. I had a minor experience with how that works. Since the doctor is ultimately responsible, the mistakes by staff, outside labs, outside treatment centers, pharmacies, rehab, etc tend to be attributed to the doctor. For example, one doctor tried to save me some money by asking the lab to use a somewhat obsolete method of tabulating the results of a needle biopsy. The lab tech was unfamiliar with the old test and screwed it up just enough that the numbers were usable, but wrong. My treatment was based on those wrong numbers. The doctor should have spotted the problem, but it was really the lab that made the mistake. I was suspicious, but didn't want to burn the doctors precious time on mere suspicions.

Dunno. Offhand, I would say it's about equal. I have examples of both the doctor, and the internet, producing a proper diagnosis. However, once the problem has been determined, I've seen far more successful treatments by doctors, than by internet pundits (like me).

Maybe an analogy will help. Take a product that you worked on a few years ago and haven't seen for a few years. Kinda like a patient who gets irregular checkups. The product is still in manufacture but something has changed and gone wrong. It does weird things and no longer passes the QA testing. Whatever has changed needs to be fixed immediately. An appointment is made for you to inspect and test one or two samples of the failed product. You are not allowed to compare with a working product, but can look at past production and test histories. You may NOT visit the product (or patient) in their native surroundings because doctors and some troubleshooters no longer make house calls. You have a large staff of technicians and consulting engineers available which can run tests and ask embarrassing questions.

Just one little problem. You only have only 15-30 minutes with the product before the next product (or patient) arrives and requires your undivided attention. You are allowed to have other troubleshooters verify your diagnosis, but they usually don't have much more time to look at it than you do. What odds would you give for a successful analysis and repair under such conditions? In many cases, one might do better relying on experience and guesswork instead of careful analysis, detailed (lab) tests, and exploratory surgery.

Ok, the analogy isn't perfect, but close enough to illustrate the real problem. Troubleshooting and medical diagnosis take time to get right. When there isn't enough time to get things right, the doctor and technician are both forced to shoot from the hip, with predictable levels of screwups.

I know nothing of Jim's present condition, but can only pray that his doctors are not in a hurry.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Three really bad, one good. I helped get the worst one fired.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

Bodies are very complex and there is a huge range of individual variation. Doctors don't spend much time with each patient, so they diagnose what they think is the most likely cause of a problem. Their experience and confidence let them make the diagnosis quickly. They are wrong a lot.

I have found and fixed problems myself, by doing some research and experimenting, or by getting another doctor. I have a lot more time to work on my body than my GP has.

Pick a popular drug and look up its side effects. Some have dozens, including death.

Doctors are great, properly managed.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

I was talking with someone about the land being depleted and they told me that plants can get the nutrients right from the air.

Hopeless.

Reply to
jurb6006

onsdag den 8. august 2018 kl. 22.47.54 UTC+2 skrev snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com:

some sorta can

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Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

They can get CO2, no?

I've always wondered about some plants sold as "air" plants. They need a light misting once in a while. I suppose they don't live forever this way, without soil. Like you say, while they get CO2 and water, they still need minerals and such.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

te:

e:

te:

ation on the causes & treatments of disease - and it wouldn't be too hard t o gather. Then a lot of currently dubious ideas would be proven or disprove n by the numbers on a massive scale.

of medical questions, saving great numbers of lives & suffering. Yet a gre at deal of it is simply not gathered.

rather than collecting data on sick people and the consequences of trying t o treat them.

f data, but it takes time and money (which could have been spent on treatin g more patients, or treating the same number of patients more intensively).

w to treat a patient and discourages rumination about how a different a tre atment might have worked better - doctors are prone to suicidal depression, and losing a patient can be a depressing experience.

r causative factors are and what treatments do & don't work, we can

atments

ve treatments

etc come close but start developing epigenetic difference before birth.

Of course it does.

o. That stuff can be added if/when available for even more info.

So somebody is going to go back to every participant in a mass trial, and g et the individual genomes, and add them to all the data that was collected for each participant? It's theoretically possible, but impractical in the r eal world.

The fact is that current practice is dictated by the cost of human genome s equencing which used to be very expensive and still costs about $1400 for a single draft sequence.

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There's no question that it ought to be done, and will eventually become st andard when it gets cheap enough.

Arguing that it isn't necessary because we haven't been doing it is roughly like arguing that vaccination isn't necessary because we've only done in f or the last few hundred years.

y sequence the genome of each patient to find out why some treatments are m ore effective for some patients than others.

The proposition isn't one I've invented - it's widely accepted.

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You may not have heard of it, but that's your problem, and representative o f a lot of your difficulties.

le following advice that's far from sound or proven.

clinical trials don't include any women at all, and the test subject pool u sed to be drawn from relatively young people.

le data.

You miss the point that large scale studies ought to cover the whole popula tion - studying all the eighteen year-old males who get conscripted for mil itary service, which was a popular way of doing large scale studies - doesn 't tell you anything like as much as studies of a more representative popul ation

ough informed to consent to anything sensible.

If you want to be informed enough to fully appreciate what your doctor coul d tell you, you've got to soak up all the information that a six year medic al course instills into your doctor.

Keep on failing to miss the point - you are remarkably consistent about fai ling to understand points that don't suit your argument.

shit would work on you.

It strikes me as a more plausible hypothesis than any that involved you get ting properly informed - after all you do seem to miss the obvious remarkab ly frequently

shit their patients, and thus always read up on the topic first, unless not physically able.

t as little as you can get away with.

'd like to be.

above other people's heads. My impression is more that he's rather more tra nsparent that he likes to think.

o say so.

You aren't the only one who comforts himself with that delusion. It doesn't put you in particularly impressive company.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

e:

:

e:

practice to dubious opinions culled from the web.

cases where dubious is as good as it gets. Whether & when that occurs the ' patient' would be wise to know.

tion on the causes & treatments of disease - and it wouldn't be too hard to gather. Then a lot of currently dubious ideas would be proven or disproven by the numbers on a massive scale.

of medical questions, saving great numbers of lives & suffering. Yet a grea t deal of it is simply not gathered.

ts. We need data that can be used to help clarify the quality of that data. And we need it on pretty much everything.

el, > > > >etc.

The human genome is time wasting bullshit?

NT clearly hasn't invested any of his time on thinking about its implicatio ns.

and certain heritable differences do make

me needs to be optional, and the doctors involved should not see the data p rovided by the patient under any circumstances, unless the patient voluntee rs it.

misation/

nstream & alternative that need assessment. Nowadays there is no reason to not collect the lot, at least when people are willing. Doing this in one co untry alone could answer many important questions.

consistent sets of data costs time and money. Somebody has to pay for it.

ide perspective

ect, it would save a ton of money. Also deaths & suffering.

There are lots of investments that promise to save tons of money in the lon g run. Discounted cash flow calculations discourages realists from putting money into most of them.

You seem to have entirely missed the point I was making, which is that spen ding money now on a scheme that might pay off in the long run isn't a parti cularly attractive proposition. Investors tend to go for more reliable inve stments that pay of earlier.

lt.

ks for & extracts patterns is entirely affordable.

It's only as good as the data it extracts the patterns from. Garbage-in gar bage-out is a well known problem, and the lament of every data collector is that they always seem to have failed to collect the one crucial piece of d ata.

ht thing, the lies can be less harmful than telling them some kind of unpal atable truth that puts them off getting the treatment they need.

oes discourage the doctor from harming or injuring the patient.

stern medicine.

The Wikipedia article did point that out.

You seemed to want to argue that it was unethical for doctors to lie to pat ients if it was in the patient's best interest (looked at purely from the m edical point of view). This doesn't seem to be accepted in standard medical ethics.

You don't have the rhetorical skills to construct a counter argument, so yo u chose to ignore the point - which does seem to be your preferred substitu te for rational argument.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

ote:

symptoms are routinely not checked by the psych people.

So where is your evidence to back up this claim? Are all the many cases you 've watched near relatives? Or do you drive your all friends to madness?

symptoms, but it's well known that they ought to be, even if they aren't n ecessarily all that cooperative.

onstructive.

't routine - it's a crime - and doctors that are demonstrably guilty of mal practice get disbarred.

edestal, rubber stamping anything they say.

im.

Your comment that "courts have a habit of putting docs on a pedestal, rubbe r stamping anything they say" didn't have any qualification about it only h appening when the courts knew that the doctor was innocent.

live as long as they do

th better medical care we'd live longer.

sly they are 2 separate things. You only need to look at US healthcare spen ding, much higher than the UK's, but they have higher infant mortality, to see that. Fairly basic stuff really.

The basis difference there is that the US spends twice as much per head as the UK on health care, but only on the medically insured - which was only 8

5% of the population until recently, though it's now up to 91.2% with Obama care.

It's the uninsured that degrade the US public health statistics. You have t o pay attention to the distribution of health care spending - just looking at the average amount spent blinds you to what is actually going on.

The more general point was that life style choices, government attention to air quality and water quality, and a bunch of other stuff outside the med ical establishment all have effects on public health statistics.

America's epidemic obesity doesn't do anything for their public health stat istics, and the lead-in-water-supply scandal in Flint, Michigan is indicati ve of the other ways Americans wreck their public health statistics.

I should have realised that I'd have to spell out the point to you, rather than leaving it implied.

it's frustrating. If you happen to stumble on what I have you get to see w hat a mess it is. The issues are not trivial in nature, nor trivial to solv e.

ior medicos who set their personal interests ahead of everybody else's. The y aren't trained as administrators, and go out of their way to subvert effe ctive administrators who won't do what the senior medico's want.

airly close to it when I was working on medical ultrasound at EMI Central R esearch from 1976 to 1979 and it looked worse from that perspective than th e Dutch system appeared when I was living the Netherlands, though I didn't get as close to the Dutch system. On the other hand a bunch of Dutch heat s urgeons in Nijmegen did refuse to cooperate with one another to an extent t hat got them all fired (but not disbarred)in 2009. My aortic valve got repl aced in 2010 by people hired to replace them ...

rtunately there's no really effective way to separate medical treatment fro m profit. One has to go in eyes-open.

Greedy people with power are always a problem. They can be greedy for thing s other than money - sexual harassment is a problem within the NHS and the Australian medical establishment.

Politics of various sorts creates problems within every kind of organisatio n. Medical organisations do seem to be worse than most - they've a very lon g history, and feudal thinking does seem to persist.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

NT clearly has some some specific condition in mind, which he's never going to identify because it would expose him to informed criticism, which he doesn't like and can't cope with.

He much prefers to make airy references to stuff that only he knows about, or thinks he knows about.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

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It looks more as if you are clueless.

What may work for mice doesn't seem to be all that effective in human beings.

Biologically speaking we may be giant mice - which is to say that we are both mammals - but our most recent common ancestor lived of the order of 100 million years ago, so we've have plenty of time to evolve individual differences.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Nitrogen, yummy.

Reply to
jurb6006

."I've always wondered about some plants sold as "air" plants. "

Some plants don't need very much really. They don't move, have balance, see and hear, coordinate movements and think. We do.

There are minerals involved in photosynthesis, but if the plant starts out with enough in the seed and doesn't adsorb it then the plant can live. Piss poor eating, but alive.

Reply to
jurb6006

What??? You are suggesting you can start a seed with nothing more than water and CO2? You don't under stand cell growth.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

It wasn't me claiming that. I just mentioned that some things are incredibly easy to grow, they need almost nothing. I have no idea how they start those air plants or whatever. I've never seen one.

I admit botany is not my forte', I know what pith is, photosynthesis and that they're trying to duplicate it in a lab with limited success, but really the only thing I can grow is mold.

I know about plants taking minerals out of the soil and we eat them in the converted form which can be metabolised, and I also have personally noted a slight correlation between flavor and mineral content.

I got the concept of why certain things grow certain places and not others even with identical climates, it is the soil. Jimmy Carter grew peanuts, cashews pay much much more but they are grown in India or whatever.

Reply to
jurb6006

water and CO2? You don't under stand cell growth. "

bly easy to grow, they need almost nothing. I have no idea how they start t hose air plants or whatever. I've never seen one.

that they're trying to duplicate it in a lab with limited success, but real ly the only thing I can grow is mold.

e converted form which can be metabolised, and I also have personally noted a slight correlation between flavor and mineral content.

s even with identical climates, it is the soil. Jimmy Carter grew peanuts, cashews pay much much more but they are grown in India or whatever.

You know cashews are grown on a tree in a tropical climate, right? They ar e also grown in Brazil, in fact they are native to Brazil. Interesting tha t the tree makes another fruit called the "apple" which is much larger than the nut which grows at the end of the apple in a drupe. Essentially this is like a peach, but the fleshy part does not grow around the nut!

I wish they could be grown here. We don't get the fleshy cashew apple beca use it doesn't travel well. A friend who visits Vietnam says they are good .

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

I know for a fact that you can. Go to the grocery and buy some bean spouts. Then look on the internet on how to spout beans.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

ote:

when you've not grasped the necessity & value of the basic concept.

Your basic concept seems to be to collect whatever information is available without thinking what might be useful.

In other words you haven't got a clue about what makes big longitudinal sur veys expensive.

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you do have to add quite a bit of data on each of the patients in the surve y, and that can involve ethical questions, getting patient permission and s o forth.

stem.

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Trying to make a silk purse longitudinal study out of the sows ear of what is essentially accountant's records is the kind of proposition that deserve s respect.

d claimed that they supported your point of view, when in fact the content didn't have much to do with your point of view, and certainly didn't suppor t it.

lue of "natural" vitamin supplements, ostensibly to support your claims, wh ere the information presented in the link had very little to do with what y ou appeared to be claiming, and certainly didn't support it.

You spent a good while arguing with yourself over it. Lol. You will never b e much good at rational argument until you resolve your ego problem.

vitamins are well-defined chemical substances, and we do know enough about the chemistry of every last one of them that we can say how much you will a bsorb from a particular source - which may deliver precursor compounds whic h you can metabolise to the active vitamin, or the active compound itself.

l virtue which made them better than the same compounds made in a factory.

Really? Yet you seemed to be perfectly incapable of accepting that we do kn ow what vitamins are - from a chemical point of view - and that we could de fine an effective dose based on the measurable chemical content of what was being administered.

Sadly, the idiocy was all yours.

ccepting that you got completely the wrong end of the stick.

You do seem to have persuaded yourself of this interpretation.

I've never had any doubt about it.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

imes work when the docs' approach fails. It's a shame more people don't get more informed.

Cancer is one of those conditions where the sufferer's immune system can su ddenly start recognising the cancer as a foreign tissue, and get rid of it.

It doesn't happen often, and when it does it is called "spontaneous remissi on" by doctors, a "miracle" if the patient has made a pilgrimage, and evide nce that some alternative treatment has worked (once) when the patient has been suckered by some alternative medicine rip-off artist/nut-case.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

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