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"Could it be that perhaps the correlation between vaccination and NPAFP was because the surveillance was part of the vaccination programme and the temporal relationship was not inherently vaccination -> NFAFP."

You can speculate all you want, since the paper you cited was not designed to test your conjecture. It was an unrelated qualitative study, designed to "We conducted a qualitative research to explore care and support for children with AFP after their diagnosis." They merely interviewed "parents of children with polio (17), with non-polio AFP (9), healthcare providers (40), and key informants from community including international and government officers, religious leaders, community leaders, journalists, and academics (21)".

Some facts that contradict your speculation: It is the systematic AFP surveillance for 10 years before the polio vaccinations campaign in that very state Uttar Pradesh that established the 25-fold increase in AFP following these vaccinations, and 35-fold increase in another polio test state, Bihar. (cf. [1] pp.115-116).

Another interesting quote from the same paper [1] p. 116:

We have seen how polio, that was not a priority for public health in India, was made the target for attempted eradication with a token donation of $ 0.02 billion. The Government of India nally had to fund this hugely expensive programme, which cost the country 100 times more than the value of the initial grant.

So, the way it works is that Gates buys pharma stocks, then bribes few officials in India for $0.02 billion to make their country spend 100 times more on the program. Of course, the pharma makes big bucks not only on the vaccines, but far more on life-long "management" of the diseases they caused, all the while Bill's pharma stocks go up. Having been scammed of intellectual property by Microsoft in mid-1990s, I can see that Bill Gates hasn't changed his "ethics" one bit after moving into the "charity" business. It's same old Bill Gates.

-- Reference

[1] "Indian J Med Ethics. 2012 Apr-Jun;9(2):114-7"].
              (full text pdf found via Google)

Yeah, I knew someone would bring up that one guy who wrote a paper in the Indian medical ethics journal which contained no data to substantiate the claims.
Of course, you could look at another paper discussing polio vaccination and surveillance in India which says that "[t]he programme [of polio vaccination] includes surveillance of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) to detect and diagnose cases of polio at early stage. Under this surveillance, over 40,000 cases of AFP are reported annually since 2007 regardless of the number of actual polio cases".
Could it be that perhaps the correlation between vaccination and NPAFP was because the surveillance was part of the vaccination programme and the temporal relationship was not inherently vaccination -> NFAFP.

So maybe it is time to, as the paper suggests, move the fuck on.

Paper from: Indian J Med Ethics. 2012 Apr-Jun;9(2):114-7

Polio programme: let us declare victory and move on

"while India has been polio-free for a year, there has been a huge increase in non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP). In 2011, there were an extra 47,500 new cases of NPAFP. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of NPAFP was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received. Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated. The principle of primum-non-nocere was violated. "

The damage caused by cannabis alone is definitely nowhere near as unmistakable as tobacco. Pretty much everybody who knows tobacco addicts can see for themselves that their lung function fails over the years, but getting evidence of such an effect for marijuana is pretty iffy, even with sophisticated statistical analysis of good studies.
"COPD risk among people who smoked marijuana, but not tobacco, was slightly higher than among nonsmokers, but the increase was not statistically significant." Tan, W.C. Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 14, 2009.
(they found a somewhat greater increase in risk for smokers of both tobacco and marijuana than just tobacco alone; that's not too surprising, tobacco is synergistic for the bad effects of other substances, as it interferes with the lungs' ability to clear themselves of foreign substances)
"Given the consistently reported absence of an association between use of marijuana and abnormal [lung function] or signs of macroscopic emphysema, we can be close to concluding that smoking marijuana by itself does not lead to COPD" Tashkin, D. New England Journal of Medicine, 1976; vol 294; similarly http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2665954/
"Currently, the evidence that smoking cannabis causes emphysema and bullae is limited to these case reports and therefore remains anecdotal. Although Tashkin et al. demonstrated modest short-term decreases in gas transfer (DLco) among 30 men allowed to smoke cannabis ad libitum for 94 days,[15] none of the population-based studies have been able to confirm that cannabis consumption is associated with persistent impairment of DLco.[11,15,16] This is in stark contrast to tobacco smoking, for which a reduction in DLco is probably the most sensitive indicator of parenchymal lung damage. In Aldington’s cross-sectional study, exclusive smokers of cannabis were much less likely to show evidence of emphysema on high-resolution CT scans than tobacco smokers, suggesting that macroscopic emphysema is not a common consequence of cannabis use.[11]" http://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/747982_4
"Smokers’ lung function was worse, unsurprisingly (pack-a-day tobacco smokers had FEV1s 63 mL lower; 20-pack-year smokers’ FEV1 were 101 mL lower). But in marijuana smokers who had smoked up to 3,650 marijuana cigarettes (10 “joint-years”), FEV1 and FVC were higher than matched nonsmokers. At these common levels of marijuana use, there was a steady dose-response relationship: the more marijuana smoked, the better the lung function (FEV1 increase of 13 mL/joint-year). Even in the heavier marijuana users, FVC remained significantly elevated by 76 mL over nonsmokers. Only those smoking large amounts of marijuana every day began to display decreases in lung function. All these trends were highly statistically significant (p 0.001), and supported by the large sample size and body of spirometric data." Pletcher MJ et al. Association Between Marijuana Exposure and Pulmonary Function Over 20 Years. JAMA 2012;307:173-181.

Is schizophrenia on the decline in Canada?
The preliminary comparison showed a 42% decrease in the number of first-admission schizophrenia cases over 20 years. In the main study, the annual inpatient prevalence rates decreased significantly (52%) from 1986 to 1996 with no corresponding change in outpatient rates, regardless of sex. Although total major affective disorders increased, this was due to an increase in major depression, not bipolar disorder.
This is the first Canadian case-register study to support the widely reported falling rates of schizophrenia in other parts of the world over the last 40 years. Since this is a geographically limited prevalence study based on only 10 years of data, further research over longer periods of time in other regions of the country is required to support or refute these findings.

Canadian teens lead developed world in cannabis use: Unicef report
This is the second time in a row that the WHO study has ranked Canadian teenagers as the highest cannabis users, though the percentage of teens itself has dropped. In 2002, the same survey showed that 37.5 per cent of 15-year-olds in Canada had used cannabis in the past year.

Etc...

Haven't done any reviewed work in years, I kinda miss it! I'm not going to bother doing full citations, just title and link, if that's OK with you.

"With a 50 ng/mL cutoff concentration and following low doses of 10 to 45 mg cocaine by multiple routes, detection times extended up to 98 h." - Urinary Excretion of Ecgonine and Five Other Cocaine Metabolites Following Controlled Oral, Intravenous, Intranasal, and Smoked Administration of Cocaine, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3159558/

"In serum, in chronic users, benzoylecgonine (primary metabolite of cocaine, the standard screening chemical) (BE; LOD 25 ng/mL) was detectable for 5.1 days on average (maximum 8.6 days)." - Detection Times of Drugs of Abuse in Blood, Urine, and Oral Fluid, http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8480649_Detection_times_of_drugs_of_abuse_in_blood_urine_and_oral_fluid/file/60b7d52a213aab0fb

Wrong.

Actually your link appears to support the research in the linked article I provided, specifically:

"This paper is among the first to reveal that the use of marijuana may contribute to the changes in brain structure that have been associated with having schizophrenia."

Chronic marijuana use could augment the underlying disease process associated with schizophrenia, Smith noted.

"If someone has a family history of schizophrenia, they are increasing their risk of developing schizophrenia if they abuse marijuana," he said.

Heavy pot use linked to memory loss, schizophrenia link

Wrong.

[regulation] affected people of all sexes, races, classes, and ages

Read up on the current state of affairs.

Alcohol use fell greatly due to prohibition, and the rate of use took many decades to return to the previous level.

Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation

Are you suggesting that there would be the same or less drug use if it wasn't illegal?

You don't go into any detail about what you think the issue is with "guns", but I assume you've heard that ownership of them is a Constitutionally protected right. Some people think that a murder with a gun is a gun problem when it is a murder problem.

Study shows concealed-carry laws result in fewer murders

Prohibition is a complex subject, but it did result in a significant decrease in alcohol usage that lasted for decades after it ended.

Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation

I'd also never heard of them, but it does appear to be legit. However the full effects of the chemicals don't seem to be known: the research I can dig up in a quick search suggests that cafestol, for example, elevates cholesterol but also might reduce cancer risk. How that nets out in terms of actual net impact on lifespan doesn't seem to be known.

It appears these compounds exist in anything except paper-filter coffee: Turkish coffee, espresso, French press, etc.

I'd also never heard of them, but it does appear to be legit. However the full effects of the chemicals don't seem to be known: the research I can dig up in a quick search suggests that cafestol, for example, elevates cholesterol but also might reduce cancer risk. How that nets out in terms of actual net impact on lifespan doesn't seem to be known.

It appears these compounds exist in anything except paper-filter coffee: Turkish coffee, espresso, French press, etc.

Well, lets see here. First off, there are a wide variety of things done to improve crops, each along a gradient of genetic changes, including selective breeding, inbreeding, hybridization, interspecific wide crosses, intergeneric wide crosses, wild relative genetic introgression, radiation and chemical induced mutagenesis, somaclonal variation, bud sport selection, induced polyploidy, and various combinations of them that result in some only recently possible crop alterations. Was your cucumber produced via a doubled haploid hybrid? Does your tomato have any S. pimpinellifolium it it? Was your pluot developed using embryo rescue to overcome reproductive barriers? Did your pear grow on quince roots? Each of these changes the plants in different ways, and alters all sorts of aspects of the plant, including altering the levels of potential allergens, like PR proteins, as well as toying with the production of all sorts of secondary metabolites, some of which can be harmful, like the conventionally bred celary that was phototoxic or the conventionally bred potato that had dangerous levels of solanine. Now, you could say that they are just manipulating already natural forces (like crossing two wild peanut species, altering the ploidy level, and backcrossing it into a commercial line would just happen in nature) but so is genetic engineering...it is just a manipulation of horizontal gene transfer, which by the way is why you have viral DNA in your genome right now, and all sorts of other fun things that, in all likelihood, has already resulted in every organism on earth having foreign DNA.

So, we completely ignore all that, and focus on just one aspect of crop improvement. But do we tell consumers what it means? Hell no. Does a thing have a cpsB, or a Cry1ab, or bar, or a PRSV-CP gene, and what does that all mean? Nope, no information. And even if you did tell that information, it ignores the genes that might be changed in other crop improvement methods, like does your raspberry have the A1 gene, or tomato have the Ph-3 gene, or rice have the SD-1 gene? Who knows, but better not tell the consumer that genetic engineering is only one aspect of the whole picture, because information!

So, here we have this wide world of crop improvement, and you want to single out one thing, provide no information about that thing, do nothing to let people know that virtually every relevant expert on the planet agrees is beneficial, a thing that ideologues have been fearmongering for years about, and then call it informative? Bullshit, that's a weasel worded lie by omission. Even ignoring all this, there's still no reason to enforce mandatory labeling. Every other group that wants specific labels that are not provably essential has to rely on free market demand for specially labeled products and rely on their own education to know what to avoid...Jews, Muslims, Hindus, vegans, ect. Naturalism is no more deserving of being legally catered to than any other religion.

By the way, did you know that GE corn has lower levels of carcinogenic mycotoxins. Hmm, where is the push to force organic corn products to carry that information, I wonder? If Monsanto lobbied for that, would you support it? Hey, more information is always better, right?

It's definitely not healthy if only few companies control the food chain.

Which has what, exactly, to do with the technology those companies use? They also use marker assisted selection, tissue culture, induced polyploidy, inbred lines, and tractors, but no one is blaming them.

The companies are even happy to restrict the reuse of the seeds.

You mean the seeds that farmers haven't saved since the advent of hybrid seed in the 1930's, the ones that they sign a contract to get, the ones they are free to not use if they so choose? Not seeing the problem here.

Also the aim to create food for only human use (GMO crops that repel everything else) will have an impact on biodiversity.

There is an increase in biodiversity with GE crops. The GE crops aren't 'toxic to everything but humans' they are toxic to very specific orders of insect pests. Swapping that out for broad spectrum insecticides is a good thing. Unless you are talking crop biodiversity, which is a very big issue, but not one relating much to GE crops, unless you consider that the opposition to biotechnology is holding back those would wish to improve biodiverse crops to make them better able to be cultivated, in which case anti-GMO is very anti-biodiversity.

Diversity is the natural mechanism to cope with the changing conditions, and the lack of diversity will polarize the eco-system, which would as a whole weaken.

Which is why intensive agriculture is a good thing. Keep the farms productive and less land needs to fall under the plow.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mebendazole+cancer Looks like it is being actively researched.

I thought trans fat was only about texture and stability / shelf life (while being cheaper than animal fats). Do you have more info on the claim that trans fats were thought to help prevent heart disease?

Additionally, there are some natural trans fats too, but they do not have the same effect on heart disease as currently manufactured trans fats

I'd love to see a source, because I'm sure you're full of it.

Here's a source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23008968 Parent is full of it.

If one guy breaks his leg falling from a ladder, and another breaks his leg in a car accident, does the doctor treat that broken leg differently? Preventative measures for those broken legs may be different, but the result is the same.

Not really. If you land on your leg from a ladder and get a compound fracture, that's probably your bone being compressed. If you get your leg crushed in a car accident, that's probably going to break a different way. The bone will likely need to be set differently. With crushing, I think there's a greater chance of internal bleeding, can't remember where I heard that. The specific insult will lead to a different type of injury that necessarily affects the treatment, even if they both are very similar overall (like they both require casts).

Yes, it's a fruitful avenue of research to treat different cancer types with different methods. But that doesn't mean we should stop looking for broader methods than can treat multiple different kinds of cancers based on their numerous shared characteristics.

Uh, I'm pretty sure no cancer researcher in the world is giving up on curing ALL cancers if they can. I mean, you automaticaly win the nobel prize for sure, get assured to be put on a stamp, and free drinks for the rest of your life if you "cure cancer." If you cure "just" one subtype of cancer, you probably get tenure or plenty of grant money, but you probably won't get automatically laid by saying "I'm the guy who cured multiple myeloma!" in a bar.

They're focusing on specific types because that seems far more likely than any one treatment curing all types of cancer. For instance multiple myeloma cells appear to be more on the verge of auto-cannibalizing themselves, moreso than other cancers. Researchers got them to undergo unrestrained autophagy and die, that probably won't be the case for other cancers. If it even works in patients for multiple myeloma.

The meme that "cancer is a whole spectrum of diseases" is just that, a meme. Researchers who recite that meme don't believe it literally.

I, for one, do actually believe it. And I think it's more than a meme. I think researchers who pursue a grand cure might be modern day alchemists: trying very hard to achieve a goal which is far beyond the current technology. Modern chemistry came about from alchemists. Likewise, researchers who are attemtping to cure ALL cancers can definitely make important contributions even if they don't cure all cancers, so I'm not knocking them. But I do think we'll probably cure individual cancer subtypes before theres a big overall cure.

"Nutritional and Safety Assessments of Foods and Feeds Nutritionally Improved through Biotechnology" sounds rather on point.

No it doesn't. It sounds like a survey -- not actual testing of specific crops. And guess what? It is just a survey.

I only cherry-picked in that the articles were obviously pointless. But I only saw maybe two that looked like they were probably real testing based on the fact that they mentioned a specific crop (alfalfa) in the title. I'm sure there were more, but I'm also sure that it is a tiny fraction of the ~2000 listed.

If this was an OD due to illegal drugs, then it's likely that it wouldn't have occurred if the drugs were simply legal.

What a bunch of crackpot nonsense.

I guess Micheal Jackson would have been alive if just propofol would be legal??

Prescriptions now biggest cause of fatal drug overdoses

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-09-30-drug-overdose_N.htm

Simply the reason that something is NOT illegal, does not make it safe. How many people die of alcohol overdose each year? Too lazy to find out? Let me help you.

http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-1/110-120.htm

he annual average number of deaths for which alcohol poisoning was listed as an underlying cause was 317, with an age-adjusted death rate of 0.11 per 100,000 population. An average of 1,076 additional deaths included alcohol poisoning as a contributing cause, bringing the total number of deaths with any mention of alcohol poisoning to 1,393 per year (0.49 per 100,000 population). Males accounted for more than 80 percent of these deaths.

If only alcohol was a legal drug, right?? Right?

There are many reasons for legalizing illegal drugs (mostly to do with 3rd party risk mitigation), but overdoses have nothing to do with it.

Initial indications are of harm from glyphosate residues and retained b.t. toxin, at least in pregnant women in the latter case.

You are referring to this study. That study doesn't even try to attempt to find out where the Bt they claim to detected came from. It could have been from organic food, which also uses Bt. Of course, since the levels of Bt they found were below the detection limit of the test they used, among other flaws, I'm not convinced they found anything but an artifact. We do know the effects, at least for the commercially approved crops, and at least as well as can be know without proving a negative. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean people won't still spread misinformation and publish the occasional shoddy paper though.

You still don't think certified organic doesn't matter?

Ion exchange/nutrient absorption at the root level has been proven time and time again to pull in and CONCENTRATE industrial pollution in many plants....

Then, as science, data collection, and computer modeling advanced yet further... "Global Warming" has been called into question. So much so, in fact, that many of the climate scientists of today will not use the phrase "Global Warming", but have chosen the trademark of "Climate Change". It's back to "we're not sure what's going on but we're all gonna die!" "Climate Change" is a delightfully vague yet alarming turn of phrase, and a stroke of genius.

The term "climate change" has been around a lot longer than "global warming". For example "Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change" by George S Benton from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in October of 1970.

I have it. It's brutal. At the same time, there's this strange epicness to it. You see The Order as it was Written for better for worse. It's as if your ego is dispersed everywhere, and everywhere is providing you clues as to who You are. It could be self-produced DMT from the pineal gland. It could be dynamic real-time DNA plasticity (think of this as a psycho-spiritual "reboot" the person undergoes).

This is a one in one hundred disease. The folks who get the disease rarely reproduce. Darwinism would say that it should have bred itself out by now, yet it persists across all cultures with the same genetic lottery ratio.

Want to know what I think it is? Think about primitive cultures and the deity worship similarities between them (The Incas were the people of the Sun in South America, the Egyptians had Ra).

I think psychosis is a physiological human conscious response to electro-magnetic solar phenomenon. The craziest thing, is that there's already evidence that this theory might have legs.

It's like trying to download a much more advanced quantum consciousness into a limited RAM, standard binary human brain.

This is perhaps why some psychotics declare themselves to be Gods or Prophets or Angels.

As one guy in a nuthouse told me a long time ago, "Man, ain't nobody shown me any evidence--any scientific PROOF--that I ain't no angel after all."

Epic.

Even people that claim to be "educated" fail at science.

Last I checked, "Science" and "The Scientific Method" had numerous requirements. If you wish to claim that humans evolved from other primates, or dogs evolved from another species, or cats from another, we lack proof. This is why "Evolution" is called a "Theory".

Actually, no. An idea without proof is a "hypothesis." When you get evidence that confirms the hypothesis, it becomes a theory. No matter how much evidence piles up, it never graduates to anything else in practice. A scientific theory is only upheld if it is a way of explaining a set of observations. the more observations a theory fits or "explains", the more powerful and well supported the theory is. In this case, the facts are that people keep digging up fossils out of the ground. They can date those fossils by using many dating techniques, and can determine that they are very old. that the younger fossils show up higher in the strata than the older ones. When they put some of the fossils together to get a good idea of the animals they came from, it seems the animals are different at different times (the remains and fossils you find at different depths are from different kinds of animals.) There are for examples, many identified versions of dog-like animals, that aren't exactly dogs in the fossil record ( http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/otherprehistoriclife/a/Prehistoric-Dogs-The-Story-Of-Dog-Evolution.htm ), cats that aren't exactly cats ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae#Fossil_felids ) and yes different types of monkeys/gorillas/humans that aren't exactly like the ones we see walking about today ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_primates. ) These different types of animals show up in the same place at different times, based on their depth in the fossil record.

There is also that in many parts of the world there are species that are similar to, but different from other species which are in neighbouring areas but separated by barriers such as mountains or large bodies of water. Classic example here is the Galapagos Finches. They don't look like finches from the mainland, they are all different on each island, with the differences suiting type of food available. There is also the fact that humans have been able to make dog breeds over relatively short periods of time, selective breeding clearly can alter skeletal characteristics.

There is also the strange poverty of designs in large animals. They have the same types of skeletons, same number of appendages and limbs, and innumerable common features that lead to groupings of animals into hierarchies of similarity. Once genetics were discovered, these hierarchies of similarity were found to be reflected in the degree of similarity of species genomic variation. Humans have genes that are 98% identical to those of chimpanzees, but only 50% identical to those of bananas.

but we can go beyond fossils, taxonomies, and genetics into innumerable examples from the living world that make perfect sense through an evolutionary lens. take a look at this: ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22848088 ) where it shows how there are hundreds of different species of fig, and each one or two has a corresponding single species of wasp that pollinates it. Or the fact that our eye design (same design used in all animals with a backbone) is "backwards" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye#Evolutionary_baggage ) in that nerve fibres pass in front of the retina and all go to the centre whe

Seems as good a place to ask it as any.
What does /. think of:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21457072

http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7520940937

http://www.physiology.columbia.edu/MartinBlank.html
"
â EMR accelerates the reaction rate, i.e., electron transfer rate
â EMR competes with the chemical force driving the reaction, so the effect of EMR varies inversely with the reaction rate
â Interaction thresholds are low, comparable to levels found in EMR-cancer epidemiology studies
â Effects vary with frequency, and there appear to be different optima for the reactions studied: ATPase (60Hz), cytochrome oxidase (800Hz), BZ (250Hz)

These properties, in addition to stimulation of DNA in the cellular stress response, are consistent with EMR effects on many biological systems through interaction with electrons moving during redox reactions and also within DNA"

I ran into it a couple of weeks ago and it ran contrary to what I was expecting to find.
Curious if there's any problem with his work.

Here's one

It seems that if you are somewhat dehydrated already (such as from sweating while doing field work), alcohol loses it's diuretic effect.

Meanwhile, I didn't say medieval people didn't have the means to boil water, I said it was a pain in the ass compared to drinking a small beer.

Mostly, the small beer was valued for it's refreshment and nutritional value. They weren't chugging till they got the spins (which might be hard to do on a 3% ABV beer).

You — and others — seem to have misconstrued my argument to mean, the government simply can not do anything. That's not, what I said. They can do it — just poorly.

it's rare for conservatives to change their minds based on the facts

Is not it a little early in the conversation for ad hominems?

I base this on several years of the Wall Street Journal comments page, until I gave up on them. And I read lots of conservative articles on health care policy. There are conservatives who change their minds based on the facts, but in my experience they are rare. William Buckley is dead. The WSJ editorial page has turned into a Pravda for the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The military and Veterans Affairs medical centers give some of the best care in the world

Citation needed?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%22Veterans'+Affairs%22

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1007474

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7979780

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/86/1/121.abstract

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/93/12/2128.abstract

In case you're not used to reading medical journal articles (and most people aren't), the point of these studies is that they took the medical conditions that they most frequently treated, and were responsible for the most deaths, like heart disease, high blood pressure, and kidney disease, where different doctors treated the same patients different ways, and they did randomized, controlled trials to see which treatments worked at all and which were better. They also did studies of different VA hospitals to see which hospitals had better and worse outcomes. They tried to improve the hospitals with worse outcomes, and if that didn't work, they shut the departments down.

If you go to any major medical conference, and go to the sessions on important diseases, you'll usually hear them talking about the "VA study." That's because in many medical specialties, the VA did the major, best-designed study to find out which treatments work and didn't work. There are a few private non-government organizations, like Kaiser-Permanente and Blue Cross/Blue Shield, who do the same thing, but (not to disparage them), the VA does a lot more of these studies.

The National Institutes of Health also does big studies like that. Of course, with the budget cuts, they can't do as many, and they're being forced right now to decide which important ongoing studies will have to go, as Science and Nature have been reporting.

Everybody who follows medical research knows this. If you say, the government can't do anything well, they'll know that you don't know anything about the reality in this important field.

And as for those complaints about the bad outcomes in VA hospitals -- those are the kind of thing that happen in any hospital. It's easier to find out what happens in the VA hospitals because of their internal accounting and disclosure policies. You'll notice that the story got that information from the government's own review. Try to get that same information from private hospitals. What matters is when doctors who know how to compare hospitals compare large numbers of patients, to see whether there are any statistically significant patterns. When they do that, the VA hospitals usually do well. And when they don't, they find out why and how to change it.

Ronald Reagan got his colon and prostate su

You — and others — seem to have misconstrued my argument to mean, the government simply can not do anything. That's not, what I said. They can do it — just poorly.

it's rare for conservatives to change their minds based on the facts

Is not it a little early in the conversation for ad hominems?

I base this on several years of the Wall Street Journal comments page, until I gave up on them. And I read lots of conservative articles on health care policy. There are conservatives who change their minds based on the facts, but in my experience they are rare. William Buckley is dead. The WSJ editorial page has turned into a Pravda for the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The military and Veterans Affairs medical centers give some of the best care in the world

Citation needed?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%22Veterans'+Affairs%22

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1007474

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7979780

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/86/1/121.abstract

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/93/12/2128.abstract

In case you're not used to reading medical journal articles (and most people aren't), the point of these studies is that they took the medical conditions that they most frequently treated, and were responsible for the most deaths, like heart disease, high blood pressure, and kidney disease, where different doctors treated the same patients different ways, and they did randomized, controlled trials to see which treatments worked at all and which were better. They also did studies of different VA hospitals to see which hospitals had better and worse outcomes. They tried to improve the hospitals with worse outcomes, and if that didn't work, they shut the departments down.

If you go to any major medical conference, and go to the sessions on important diseases, you'll usually hear them talking about the "VA study." That's because in many medical specialties, the VA did the major, best-designed study to find out which treatments work and didn't work. There are a few private non-government organizations, like Kaiser-Permanente and Blue Cross/Blue Shield, who do the same thing, but (not to disparage them), the VA does a lot more of these studies.

The National Institutes of Health also does big studies like that. Of course, with the budget cuts, they can't do as many, and they're being forced right now to decide which important ongoing studies will have to go, as Science and Nature have been reporting.

Everybody who follows medical research knows this. If you say, the government can't do anything well, they'll know that you don't know anything about the reality in this important field.

And as for those complaints about the bad outcomes in VA hospitals -- those are the kind of thing that happen in any hospital. It's easier to find out what happens in the VA hospitals because of their internal accounting and disclosure policies. You'll notice that the story got that information from the government's own review. Try to get that same information from private hospitals. What matters is when doctors who know how to compare hospitals compare large numbers of patients, to see whether there are any statistically significant patterns. When they do that, the VA hospitals usually do well. And when they don't, they find out why and how to change it.

Ronald Reagan got his colon and prostate su

Still missing the point. The point was we're biologically wired to want different things - male brains and female brains are hardwired differently from birth. Advertising, social differences & behavior, pink vs blue - these aren't causes of the differences we see in boys vs girls or men vs women, they're tailored to what we're biologically included to do. Differences in brain development can already be seen at 26 weeks in the womb.

Even babies react differently depending on the gender. How are you going to pin these differences on nurture instead of nature?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2486497
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19334302
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10692611

Still missing the point. The point was we're biologically wired to want different things - male brains and female brains are hardwired differently from birth. Advertising, social differences & behavior, pink vs blue - these aren't causes of the differences we see in boys vs girls or men vs women, they're tailored to what we're biologically included to do. Differences in brain development can already be seen at 26 weeks in the womb.

Even babies react differently depending on the gender. How are you going to pin these differences on nurture instead of nature?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2486497
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19334302
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10692611

Still missing the point. The point was we're biologically wired to want different things - male brains and female brains are hardwired differently from birth. Advertising, social differences & behavior, pink vs blue - these aren't causes of the differences we see in boys vs girls or men vs women, they're tailored to what we're biologically included to do. Differences in brain development can already be seen at 26 weeks in the womb.

Even babies react differently depending on the gender. How are you going to pin these differences on nurture instead of nature?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2486497
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19334302
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10692611

Economic analysis shows that government spending, especially on safety nets has a net positive effect (each dollar spent increases economic activity by more than a dollar) on the economy. I was looking around for a good example of such an analysis, but there are so many, I'll let you pick the one you like best.

I like the one where you take your "economic analysis" and shove it up your fucking ass. You do not have the right to rob me at gunpoint to financially support faggots, drug abusers, and losers, no matter how many government funded studies you wave in my face to try and convince me it's OK. Fuck you.

Why thank you. I think that's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all day.

It's not *my* economic analysis. Heck, I didn't even cherry pick the links. I just did a google search for "Social Safety Net Economic Multipliers" and linked to the results.

I'd also point out that your homophobic remarks are pretty puerile. I'll even wave a government (NIH) study in your face that points up your latent homosexuality.

The so called medication your on is a dangerous brain disabling drug that causes a type of drug dependence. Psychiatric drugs used to treat the people psychiatric quacks label as schizophrenic disable the brain by blocking dopomine D2 receptors. The brain compensates by creating more D2 receptors making the person taking the drug more sensetive to mental health problems. The drugs are then required to block the D2 receptors pathologically created by the use of the drugs. See:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=seeman%20and%20Increased%20dopamine%20D2%20receptor%20binding%20after%20long-term%20treatment%20with%20antipsychotics

The drugs are brain disabling short term. Brain damaging in a few weeks or months and lead to irreversible tardive psychosis, tardive dementia and tardive dyskenesia. Any doctor who doesn't realize what's going on when some withdraws from psychiatic drugs is a stupid quack.

Part of the problem with corresponding with authors of papers more than 2 years old is that there is no good way to uniquely identify an author. If you know that you are interested in a "John Smith" who wrote a Nature paper i n1989, good luck figuring out which "John Smith" is the same one today (if he is still alive). Another good example is of how many papers are by "Z Huang":currently over 6,000 to date in pubmed.

Considering how we expect researchers to change institutions multiple times in their careers in order to advance, this only becomes more difficult of a problem over time.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9491253 .... but that's even without a spacewalk.

This study was done on people with "no nutritional deficiencies". Yet vitamins are intended as supplements for people with nutritional deficiencies. As such, this study doesn't really show what it appears to be showing.

Vitamin deficiency diseases are generally third-world diseases. The population of the U.S. has very little vitamin deficiency. It's not as if doctors see scurvey or rickets when they go out into the community.

When Americans do have vitamin deficiency, it's usually because of a disease, hereditary or acquired. For example, alcoholics get vitamin B deficiency.

The New England Journal of Medicine had a case of rickets a few years ago, and the patient was a mentally retarded child who ate a diet entirely of Pop-Tarts.

Here's another one http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMicm1205540 -- from the Ukraine. "In addition to a diet poor in vitamin D and calcium, the patient had a history of biliary dyskinesia, which may have contributed to poor absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, including vitamin D."

Here's another one http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1113996 Autoimmune gastritis (pernicious anemia) is the most common cause of severe [vitamin B12] deficiency.

One major cause of vitamin deficiency is people on fad diets. The macrobiotic diet was one of the worst for that. Sometimes people couldn't follow the macrobiotic diet themselves, but they had an infant that they kept on a "strict" macrobiotic diet (by feeding them not much more than brown rice), and in a few cases the child died.

There are some stupid articles, like this one http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306 that simply measured vitamin D blood levels, without consideration of whether they actually had clinical disease that made any difference to the patient's health. (It's like finding an elevated PSA or a lung spot that will never develop into cancer.) If you don't know how to read a journal article, you might misinterpret this to mean that there was a lot of vitamin D deficiency. But I can't find any studies that show clinical vitamin deficiency in Americans without specific diseases, since America was industrialized during WWII.

Here's an article by people who do understand the complexity of the problem http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1009570 and here's what they say:

Randomized, controlled trials of vitamin D supplementation have addressed its effects on skeletal outcomes, but most of these trials involved supplementation with both vitamin D and calcium, making it impossible to separate out the effects attributable specifically to vitamin D.

I just spent half an hour trying to find an article in a peer-reviewed journal that describes vitamin deficiency in a population in the U.S. where the deficiency isn't the result of a serious disease, and I can't find one.

The only time Americans need vitamin supplements is when they're diagnosed with a specific disease that causes a specific deficiency. In that case, they should get treated with vitamins under the supervision of an MD. You have to find out the cause of the deficiency and treat it. Otherwise you could die. This isn't the kind of thing you can self-treat with Google searches.

Not good! So basically, gene NDM-1 jumps from bacteria carrying the gene to living bacteria that doesn't. I don't know exactly how this happens, but apparently this is a natural form of gene therapy.

Plasmid transfer.

I suspect this finding in the Chinese waste water plant is the tip of the iceberg. They seem to be treating waste at the most basic level by using lots of chlorine prior to discharging the treated waste. Nothing abnormal about that. I'm willing to bet that waste water treatment plants in every nation have this exact same issue! Hardy little buggers.

It may be worse than that. I found this last night while doing some reading related to the triclosan article but hesitated to bring it up, but it seems that chlorination itself may provide selection pressure that favors bacteria resistant to certain beta-lactam antibiotics..

We don't actually know the exact mechanism by which chlorine kills or damages bacteria, but we do know that increased permeability of the cell membrane enhances its lethality (but is not mechanism of lethality in and of itself). Beta-lactam drugs work by monkeywrenching the process of building the peptidoglycan layer of bacterial cell walls, so it may be that some forms of resistance to cell wall wrecking drugs also help resist chlorination, which would make chlorination in turn select for that trait.

At this point, I'm in pure speculation territory, though. I am not a molecular biologist.

Not good! So basically, gene NDM-1 jumps from bacteria carrying the gene to living bacteria that doesn't. I don't know exactly how this happens, but apparently this is a natural form of gene therapy.

Plasmid transfer.

I suspect this finding in the Chinese waste water plant is the tip of the iceberg. They seem to be treating waste at the most basic level by using lots of chlorine prior to discharging the treated waste. Nothing abnormal about that. I'm willing to bet that waste water treatment plants in every nation have this exact same issue! Hardy little buggers.

It may be worse than that. I found this last night while doing some reading related to the triclosan article but hesitated to bring it up, but it seems that chlorination itself may provide selection pressure that favors bacteria resistant to certain beta-lactam antibiotics..

We don't actually know the exact mechanism by which chlorine kills or damages bacteria, but we do know that increased permeability of the cell membrane enhances its lethality (but is not mechanism of lethality in and of itself). Beta-lactam drugs work by monkeywrenching the process of building the peptidoglycan layer of bacterial cell walls, so it may be that some forms of resistance to cell wall wrecking drugs also help resist chlorination, which would make chlorination in turn select for that trait.

At this point, I'm in pure speculation territory, though. I am not a molecular biologist.

According to Wikipedia, Pernicious anemia, which results in a B-12 deficiency, affects 0.1% of the population, which means we have approximately 3.139 million people with it in the U.S.. Ironically, it's brought on by a lack of IF (Intrinsic Factor), which is something you need to not have a B-12 deficiency to produce. It's very easy to fall into this trap by simply having an illness of 2-3 weeks duration.

Rickets, on the other hand, is a 1:200,000 disease in the U.S., so that's only about 1,300 cases annually.

On the plus side, things are looking up for a resurgence in scurvy, due to fast food diets: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3801222/

'in TFA summary "chronic disease" jumped out at me...that's a pretty high bar for ***anything known to medical science*** to hit, and no one ever really claimed that multivitamins would just flat prevent cancer.'

Nuts.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24256379

"In two large, independent cohorts of nurses and other health professionals, the frequency of nut consumption was inversely associated with total and cause-specific mortality, independently of other predictors of death. (Funded by the National Institutes of Health and the International Tree Nut Council Nutrition Research and Education Foundation.)."

The funding body is unfortunate, but there do seem to be similar studies backing this up.

Plenty of organisms develop resistances to alcohol, bleach, peroxide, and other things we use.

Citation needed. Especially for chlorine bleach.

Regardless, the use of alcohol and other sanitizing agents does absolutely NOTHING to contribute to DRUG resistant organisms.
Yes, properly washing with soap and water has been shown to be just as effective as sanitizing using an agent such as bleach or alcohol for some types of organisms. There are plenty of exceptions, for example Anthrax spores.
But the point of antibacterial soaps is that the vast majority of the time proper washing with soap and water is either inconvenient or simply not possible.

You could pick just about any bacteria or virus you want and breed in resistance to ethanol, chlorine, fire, whatever

Again, citations are needed for this kind of silly claim. Boiling your drinking water is every bit as effective today as it ever has been. Even the toughest super-bugs have never been shown to develop a resistance to chlorine-based bleaches.

Citation needed? You kidding me? Get a spray bottle and spritz yourself with bleach. What exposure (concentration and time) does it take for you to die?
Now do the experiment again on various molds or fungi. On parasitic mites and worms. On plant spores. There are tons of organisms that resist bleach, alcohol, etc. How the fuck do you think plant seeds evolved? It's a fucking resistance to being digested by stomach acid. If the seed survives the stomach it gets shit out in a nice pile of warm fertilizer.

Go put some tap water under a microscope. Look at all the buggers. Boils the water. Then look again. Lots of stuff is dead. Lots of stuff still lives.
Would you cook your chicken and pork to just 100 degrees? Go ahead, try it. It'll be extra juicy and tender!

You can palpate your own genitals all you want with your "citation needed" crap all day long, though. It's incredible how you jackasses can google about all day to find a Shitipedia article (or edit one) to support your own positions, but when it comes to someone else's argument you take the laziest, most passive-aggressive and contrary position possible and demand that they do all the thinking and research for you so you can sit there while you stick your fingers in your ears and sit on your own dick.

Here, go ahead and ignore this information:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC238613/
http://yosemite.epa.gov/water/owrcCatalog.nsf/1ffc8769fdecb48085256ad3006f39fa/208c8ba0e54feb3a8525702d00592dbf!OpenDocument
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC291561/

Plenty of organisms develop resistances to alcohol, bleach, peroxide, and other things we use.

Citation needed. Especially for chlorine bleach.

Regardless, the use of alcohol and other sanitizing agents does absolutely NOTHING to contribute to DRUG resistant organisms.
Yes, properly washing with soap and water has been shown to be just as effective as sanitizing using an agent such as bleach or alcohol for some types of organisms. There are plenty of exceptions, for example Anthrax spores.
But the point of antibacterial soaps is that the vast majority of the time proper washing with soap and water is either inconvenient or simply not possible.

You could pick just about any bacteria or virus you want and breed in resistance to ethanol, chlorine, fire, whatever

Again, citations are needed for this kind of silly claim. Boiling your drinking water is every bit as effective today as it ever has been. Even the toughest super-bugs have never been shown to develop a resistance to chlorine-based bleaches.

Citation needed? You kidding me? Get a spray bottle and spritz yourself with bleach. What exposure (concentration and time) does it take for you to die?
Now do the experiment again on various molds or fungi. On parasitic mites and worms. On plant spores. There are tons of organisms that resist bleach, alcohol, etc. How the fuck do you think plant seeds evolved? It's a fucking resistance to being digested by stomach acid. If the seed survives the stomach it gets shit out in a nice pile of warm fertilizer.

Go put some tap water under a microscope. Look at all the buggers. Boils the water. Then look again. Lots of stuff is dead. Lots of stuff still lives.
Would you cook your chicken and pork to just 100 degrees? Go ahead, try it. It'll be extra juicy and tender!

You can palpate your own genitals all you want with your "citation needed" crap all day long, though. It's incredible how you jackasses can google about all day to find a Shitipedia article (or edit one) to support your own positions, but when it comes to someone else's argument you take the laziest, most passive-aggressive and contrary position possible and demand that they do all the thinking and research for you so you can sit there while you stick your fingers in your ears and sit on your own dick.

Here, go ahead and ignore this information:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC238613/
http://yosemite.epa.gov/water/owrcCatalog.nsf/1ffc8769fdecb48085256ad3006f39fa/208c8ba0e54feb3a8525702d00592dbf!OpenDocument
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC291561/

I haven't run the numbers personally but many people on a low carb diet find significant drops in cholesterol, triglycerides and blood pressure.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18046594

20V under the right circumstances is more than enough to kill you. A static shock can be 10,000V and not do more than annoy you. The voltage isn't really important by itself until you get to around 500V and skin begins to break down--all that nice ionic fluid in your body is incredibly conductive. This is why it's the amps that do the trick. 20mA will happily kill you. 16mA at 60Hz is the maximum current a person can realistically let go of.

Even a cursory googling quickly turns up articles like this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10609822 or this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15950004

You obviously have no clue what you're talking about and haven't even bothered to even perform the bare minimum to inform yourself.

Even a cursory googling quickly turns up articles like this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10609822 or this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15950004

You obviously have no clue what you're talking about and haven't even bothered to even perform the bare minimum to inform yourself.

That's your wrong one. Superbugs are resistant to antibiotics, not the pointless stuff they put in soap these days. There's no way for a bacteria to become resistant to penicillin by being exposed Triclosan. That's just silly.

Your casual dismissal of this possibility seems logical but is incorrect. There are numerous studies of cross resistance between triclosan and antibiotics, Here is one showing several bacteria that evolve resistance to antibiotics after being exposed to sublethal doses of triclosan. This implies that dosing our wastewater with low levels of triclosan is reckless and had better have strong evidence that it does some good. It is definitely doing some bad!

Correction. Hyperactivity was treated with - uhhh - dammit - can't remember the name of the drug right now. The stuff was basically a tranquilizer, it made the kids into dopey zombies, lethargic little turds. Still thinking, resorting to Google - - -

This page says benzedrine, but that's not the trade name with which I am (was) familiar. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3000907/

From this page, I recognize adderal and ritalin, but that's not what I'm searching for. http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/guide/adhd-stimulant-therapy

I'm simply experiencing a mental block at the moment, and I'm failing to find the stuff that was commonly prescribed in the middle to late '70's. Need something to jog my memory.

Here's one set of search terms I used: www.google.com/search?q=history+of+ADHD&oq=history+of+ADHD&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l3.3579j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

I think that you are purposefully missing the point. Fact is, ADHD is a legitimate diagnosis that is made by psychiatrists (yes real medical doctors). However, much like a hypochondriac co-worker's "migraine", or whether that person using the handicapped parking spot is really handicapped, we humans tend to draw conclusions based on our own realities. In my experience, the toughest part about having ADHD is the public perception. Those of us with it can experience nasty feedback loops, whereby a lack of attention at any given moment (for instance, during a conversation) requires one to play catch-up, thus missing the next essential bit of information, and so forth. There are several methods of treatment, only some of which include drugs. Please educate yourself and be less condescending.