Re: Art, your favorite source of information is in danger



On Sun, 6 May 2007, alexy wrote:

Straydog <asd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, 5 May 2007, alexy wrote:

Or, as a minister friend of mine says, if a new strain of flu evolves

^^^^^^^
to be transmittable to humans, you will probably hope that your
physician believes in evolution!

In the historical record, vaccines were known well before evolution was
presented by Darwin. Some of those vaccines did cure people, too.
Interesting. I didn't know that. But I was referring to the evolving
strain of flu, not the treatment.

Irrelevant. You made a reference to mutation making a non-human host specific disease into a human host disease (which almost no one cares to know because they just want it blocked if it hits them) and the "probably" prediction that I will hope my physician believes in evolution (which is also irrelevant since there really was significant progress in medical science BEFORE evolution was presented to the world--and accepted by a large fraction of the world--as a viable alternate explantion for the
origin of life).

Evolving strain of flu? It might interest you to know that mutability is highly variable in life. Histone sequences almost don't "evolve" at all. Detoxifying (as in DDT detoxifying) enzymes "evolve" (mutate) like mad.

I don't care what my doctor believes in as long as he gets the diagnosis correct and it would be nice if the guy actually listens to me talk about my symptoms (There's a book just out about this, and in terms of human progress, I would say that today's doctors are not any better than they were 50 years ago; I read, back then, they also ignored a lot of what patients told them). It would also be nice if the doc considers what _I_ think is best for me rather than what _he_ thinks is best for me.

And, just as a bonus for all, here is the colonoscopy quote from back a while (disclaimer: I have not checked the details of this quote):

---------------------------------

From Business Week, June 10, 2006, page 57:
This series of pages contained responses to an earlier article (Medical Guesswork cover story) about the effectiveness of medical treatments and care and how the financial interests of doctors may lead to you getting bad advice and the doctor getting enhanced income. On page 57 is one response I found very interesting:

quote:

"In your cover package, you say; 'Surgery can cure early-stage colon cancer.' This seems to advocate currently popular routine colonoscopies, which I'm personally biased against. According to my research, colorectal cancer occurs in 24 of every 100,000 people aged 40-49 and in 48 of every 100,000 people aged 50-54. Assuming that all of those would be discovered and cured by routine colonoscopy is a stretch. Moreover, we will never know how many benign polyps are precancerous unless someone follows untreated polyps in a large group of patients for a long time. In simple terms, if my local gastroenterologist performs three colonoscopies a day, or 1,000 per year, at $600 per exam (a reasonable assumption), he earns $600,000 a year. In 10 years, he will have prevented between 2.4 and 4.8 colon cancers. Mindful of the recognized procedural colon perforation rate of 0.2%, he will have perforaed 20 colons, i.e., he will have seriously injured many more people than he will have helped. Many men will die of old age harboring prostate cancer. At least in the old days, they never knew they had it. Medicare has it partly right: They'll only pay for one colonoscopy every 10 years for average-risk individuals." signed by Jay G. Selle, M.D., Cornelius, N.C.

There were several other responses pointing out that the medical profession's preference for encouraging decisions that seem to lead more to moneyharvesting for the doctors than good advice in the patient's best interest.








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