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Nobody reads individual sentences from other books and then takes them (often out of context) as individual snacks of wisdom and truth.

Uh, yes they do. All they time. What is the modern news cycle but a collection of individual sentences (often out of context) from longer speeches or documents, then repackaged as eye catching headlines?

If you want to get more literary, I invite you to read the words of Shakespeare and find out just how many of his individual sentences have passed into common wisdom and truth .

This is a true. I tried coding a character builder for Pathfinder Society. It was all fine and dandy until you got into creating and undoing multi-classing. Then it all fell apart.

With D&D 5th ed, it was much easier. Although I went from a "character builder" to more of an online character sheet after WotC shut down http://www.pathguy.com/ddnext.htm/ for a short time, and allowed him to continue only in a limited fashion.

One of the main reasons Shakespeare is considered so important is the way he seemed to coin or at least popularise dozens of turns of phrases that are still used today, as well as more than a few words.

http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm

The other main reason Shakespeare is considered important is all the smutty jokes ;)

2001: A Space Odyssey remains one of the greatest science fiction movies ever made. I'm sorry that it didn't have enough lasers going PEW PEW and ships roaring loudly through space (which is, you know, impossible in a vacuum) to hold your interest.

Shakespeare is over-rated to be sure, but as I've grown older I have begun to realize that it's kind of like the Bible, even if you don't like the corpus it is so foundational to the Western culture that you can't allow yourself to be ignorant of it. Do you know how many phrases of Shakespeare you are probably using without realizing it?

I still don't like Shakespeare, but I respect the impact that he and Bacon have had on the fundamentals of English-speaking culture. He is for better or for worse to us what Homer was to the Greeks.

The disease is not confluent over the entire gut, in fact it can be anywhere from mouth to anus, in small patches. Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it? They will have taken many specimens from the girl's GI tract, and if this is the only sample with a granuloma, then it's not too unforgiveable that a patch of cells only around 30 cells-wide is miss. Yes, it sucks, but pathology is actually a fairly bloody hard speciality, with an very vigorous set of examinations

Yet a highschool girl was able to find what the pathologist had not been able to find in the same piece of tissue!

Maybe you guys instantly thought Crohn's, but there are plenty of other rarer diseases it could have been. Without a positive biopsy it would have been incredibly immoral to slap a Crohn's diagnosis on this girl and medicated her for it.

But if it could be Crohn's, and that's an obvious diagnosis, how can it remain undiagnosed for 8 years? I can understand that it takes a couple of months. Years, maybe. But if a highschool girl can find the granuloma in a piece of tissue that the pathologist had already examined, then he just wasn't looking very hard. It's his job. He's the specialist. What use is he if an 18 year old girl can do it better?

In a year's time I will be a doctor, and have just spent a year learning about pathology, so I thought I'd put my view forward. The interesting thing about Crohn's disease, in contrast to the other big type of inflammatory bowel disease (Ulcerative colitis) is that it is characterised by skip lesions. The disease is not confluent over the entire gut, in fact it can be anywhere from mouth to anus, in small patches. Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it? They will have taken many specimens from the girl's GI tract, and if this is the only sample with a granuloma, then it's not too unforgiveable that a patch of cells only around 30 cells-wide is miss. Yes, it sucks, but pathology is actually a fairly bloody hard speciality, with an very vigorous set of examinations, at least in the UK, so don't imply that these pathologists don't know what Crohn's is. Life isn't black and white, and medicine is just the same.

Maybe you guys instantly thought Crohn's, but there are plenty of other rarer diseases it could have been. Without a positive biopsy it would have been incredibly immoral to slap a Crohn's diagnosis on this girl and medicated her for it. It would have proved interesting were she have had say tropic sprue and you were to treat her with the immunosupressants.

Okay, so tell me what isn't a form of torture. Raising your voice? Not being polite?

he would be keen to get involved

Well, if you were actually around for the 50s (as I was around for one of them), you would know that the usage of "keen" associated with that decade is different from that in the quote (where it means "interested"). In the 50s it meant "swell" (another dated bit of slang), to be replaced by "cool" in the 60s, then later "bad", and so on. Example: "That's a keen flattop you got there, Bobby!" (Guys in the 50s were either named Jimmy, Bobby, Tommy, or Johnny.)

Interestingly, this "HIV==AIDS myth"-thing appears in a "6. Profit"-thread.

There are some scientists (like the (in-)famous Peter Duesberg, see here and somewhere in here) who strongly argue against the fact that HIV usually causes AIDS. They even argue that drugs against HIV (like AZT) cause AIDS.
Especially some african governments appreciate this view.

So, here we go...

1. Deny that HIV causes AIDS
2. Say that drugs against HIV cause AIDS
3. Ban all those drugs from your (banana republic) country
4. Profit !!! -> less uneducated, sexual (over-)active people to care about
5. Even more profit -> no need to pay for drugs against HIV and a working infrastructure to bring them to the patients and ensure a steady treatment

Notez bien: The "???"-step is not necessary, instead you get two "profit!"-steps!