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Lawyer Demands Pacemaker Vendor Supply Source Code
oztiks writes "Lawyer Karen Sandler's heart condition means she needs a pacemaker to ward off sudden death. Instead of trusting that the vendor will create a flawless platform for the device to operate, Sandler has demanded to see the device's source code. Sandler's reasoning brings into question the device's reliably, stability, and oddly enough, security."
She could just let her heart regulate itself naturally.
TFA has a broken link of her image. Just goes to show that errors creep up in the damndest of places.
...and incidentally every time one of their products flies over my house to land at the DC area airport I live close to.
Yet I don't demand to audit their code.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This sort of demand is why lawyers are disliked. The life science industry has to follow the FDA directive to perform a source code review. It is very unlikely that the source code in these devices have any remaining bugs due to the length of time that these devices have been used.
In addition to the source code for the software running the device, which is most likely to be extremely robust given the long time that these devices have been in use (+25 years), she might as well ask for the manufacturing process details for the battery, the casing, the electronic components, and the design of the microprocessor.
This is pointless since any qualified experts on the code are likely to be working for the device manufacturer.
Oh, come on. The source code is not going to tell you a whole lot, it would be only comprehensible to experts and it says nothing about the little hardware bits. Does Mr. Lawyer want Medtronics to go over the schematics with him? Explain the physics?
Sometimes you just have to settle down and let things go. Yes, regulatory agencies should review operations of medical devices closely. No, they don't need to peek inside.
I don't even think the FAA looks at the code for the flight control computers on airliners. They test the planes (or actually they watch the manufacturer test the planes) but they don't get every part off the aircraft and look at it under a microsope.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
A related story on NPR today points out that as a patient you don't have access to the data collected in and about your own body. The story focuses on one man's attempt to see his own data. He's looking for someone with technical skills to help him get at the data. Seems to me that somebody on /. should be able to help. http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/jan/20/who-owns-data-inside-your-body/
Many (all?) pacemakers can be read and its settings altered via a datalink.
Ignoring malice, who's to guarantee that a shoplifting detector gate doesn't interfere with your pacemaker?
Even devices that were intented to be secure fail miserabely, so if it's your life, are you gonna trust the manufacturer?
Who is with me on this? We could model it after the Arduino project.
It's called software validation and it's a pain in the ass. It's such a pain for medical devices that everyone avoids it unless absolutely needed. Which is why medicine is 10 years behind when it comes to electronics.
For a "quick" overview, here's a start: http://www.fda.gov/RegulatoryInformation/Guidances/ucm126954.htm
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
10 thump
20 thump
30 sleep 1s
40 go to 10
I smirked just a little when I thought: wouldn't it be funny if her heart kicked it while she was "analyzing" the source code... I'm no lawyer (in fact I'm a software engineer) but I'd be getting that thing in my body pretty quickly if I needed it to survive.
Don't blow it by making a pass at this poor woman, Richard.
How do we know the software works as advertised? How do we know it's secure?
Well, let's see, what is the failure rate of pacemakers? A quick Google search brought this result (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06116/685028-114.stm):
In one study, Dr. Maisel and FDA researchers analyzed reports that pacemaker and ICD manufacturers were required to submit to the federal agency between 1990 and 2002. During that period, more than 17,000 malfunctions resulted in removal and replacement with a new device, researchers found. Battery, capacitor or electrical problems accounted for half the failures. Thirty deaths were attributable to pacemaker malfunction and 31 deaths to malfunctions in ICDs. The annual replacement rate for pacemaker malfunctions decreased during the study period, from 9 per 1,000 implants in 1993 to 1.4 in 2002. But the ICD replacement rate, after decreasing from 38.6 in 1993 to 7.9 in 1996, increased in the latter half of the study, peaking in 2001 at 36.4.
So, there is a failure rate of 1.4 per 1000 in 2002, and half of those were related to hardware issues. Only 30 people ended up dying. This article (http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/105/18/2136.full) claims 3,000,000 people worldwide with pacemakers in 2002, with 600,000 implanted yearly. That means in 2002 .001% of people with pacemakers died. Assuming hardware failure accounted for half of that, then the chances of being killed by a software defect in a pacemaker is extremely small. So, I'd say it's safe to assume that the hardware "works as advertised".
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Numerous questions:
- Do you suppose the patient actually has someone who can do the audit?
- Is it realistic to audit the code without understanding the hardware interface? Probably not, so...
- Are they also going to demand hardware documentation? Free support?
Really, the source code along is not going to buy them much. I wonder what's really going on here?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
No is the answer, no one forces her to use the product. If there is alternative, then use the alternative. Invent one, get a group of geeks to support you and invent one for you. It is her choice, sudden death and her family can sue the pacemaker company for millions (lawyer specialty, right?) or just die of natural cause of heart failure.
Don't argue that there is no alternative, because only handful of vendors produce it. She always has the alternative choice, die as her defect progress. I know it is a horrible burden with a time bomb strap in your chest (believe me, I knew, I had one strapped to my head) If not, come to term, you don't always know and able to control everything. I don't see her demand the entire life span history of her food. If her client demand her to produce her secret dairy before hiring her?
Yes, this make people hate lawyers, and I hate lawyers, particularly the one in congress, senate and white house. Those are the worse kinds.
It is very unlikely that the source code in these devices have any remaining bugs due to the length of time that these devices have been used
hahahahaahaha ahaahah.
you spoke like someone who has zero experience in software development.
Read radical news here
The buyer is entitled to know exactly what he/she is buying.
Conversely, any buyer is entitled to try the product and/or returning it for a refund if found unsatisfactory. And this should include software, movies and songs.
After all, we're serious about protecting them by combating piracy (and everything remotely resembling it), then why shouldn't we be serious about protecting the customer as well?
If you read the article or ones on the same topic from last year, you'll find that the reason she is making the request is that not even the FDA has audited the code. It's just there.
Other embedded hardware has been found to be easily crackable and able to deliver fatal doses of medication. Someone has to audit the code, since the FDA is not doing it, Karen is making an issue of it. In these cases, there is no excuse for the code not being 100% open. People's lives hang in the balance.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
As a mechanical engineer I feel a little insulted. Why does the lawyer want the software code but not all of the design documents?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It she weren't a lawyer, we wouldn't even be speaking about it.
It's funny how lawyers seem to have extra rights in our society. They can make demands, we cannot.
I thought they had their hearts removed when they passed the bar at the same place that performs MBA lobotomies.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The summary is pretty bad, but one of the more salient points is that modern pacemaker/debrillators have Wi-Fi in them. Yes, WiFi. According the the recording, someone at defcon has already managed to hack into an insulin pump equipped with WiFi and been abe to manipulate the delivery rate (which could kill the patient). So the security concerns aren't completely unwarranted.
Demanding the source code is a bit silly. How many people are really going to be able to review the source code for a pacemaker/debriliator? Very very few. Even if they do, there's a hell of a lot more to a pacemaer/debrillator than the software, so why is it just the software that's her concern?
A more sane approach would be demanding the software follow basic security rules like not allowing the wi-fi connection to ever change anything in the medical device. (It's supposed to be a reporting mechanism so the doctor can follow the progress of the patient). I can't believe she has anylegal grounds to demand source code, so this is a fight for the minds of the public rather than a legal one. Demanding source code is a bit silly since most of the public doesn't even understand that there is such a thing as source code. The public is by now very aware of security problems and hackers, so ensuring that the wi-fi is read-only would be an easier battle to win.
AccountKiller
The MBA lobotomy is a very precise operation, they only remove the parts of the brain that remember to pay taxes and how to truthfully report corp. earnings.
The MBA lobotomy is a very precise operation, they only remove the parts of the brain that remember to pay taxes and how to truthfully report corp. earnings.
You forgot empathy.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Really? Last time I saw anything on a pacemaker, it had no communications interface. That's as secure from intrusion as you can get. You want to stop someone from tinkering with it physically, don't let them cut your chest open.
Well, if you don't demand that somebody audits their code (for airplanes/airlines) you are pretty stupid.
Agreed in principle that it's desirable/vital to get that job done. But it's not so easy to achieve in practice, and I think it's not just stupidity (on the part of consumers/customers) that blocks it.
Some years ago I was a regular flier with a certain airline, and then they flew a couple of my work colleagues into the ground [ :( ]. The circumstances brought their operating procedures into question -- human code, if you will. I quizzed them about the relevant points. They told me to get lost. If it wasn't in the official accident report (which turned out to be a whitewash, btw) then I would not be permitted to know it.
Needless to say, I never flew with them again, but that's not much good, the other lines might misbehave in a similar way.
I suspect that maybe there is not as much external scrutiny of these things as some of the posters in this thread optimistically believe or expect.
-wb-
As someone who works in the industry, this is all very silly. If you look at the complication rates and failure mechanisms published by the companies, you'll see that software bugs are not what this woman should worry about. The weak link the system is the wire that connects the device to the heart (the lead). They tend to dislodge from their intended location, and fatigue due to the heart's beating (400 million cycles in ten years). In fact, she's should audit the hospital's sterile procedures. She's more likely to get an infection at the implant site. It's like this: you might want want to audit your iphone's OS before you buy it, but you're more likely to break your phone by dropping it on the ground.
Even if she wants to hire an expert to review the code, good luck. Each of the three major companies has unique algorithms anyway. You'd have to find a retired or disgruntled former engineer that worked at the company in question. No one else is going to understand whether the device's auto-capture algorithm has been implemented in a reasonable way.
The MBA lobotomy is a very precise operation, they only remove the parts of the brain that remember to pay taxes and how to truthfully report corp. earnings.
You forgot empathy.
If you had measurable empathy in the first place, they wouldn't have let you in.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
After all, it's gone through a compiler, and it's the compiled code which runs the machine. They should send her a hex-dump of the executable so she can be reassured she's seeing exactly what is running on the pacemaker.
There are very few Slashdot posters who distinguish freedom from skill, appreciate freedom for its own sake, and acknowledge that real life requires us all to depend on each other as you apparently do. I see many more posters who post arguments based on myths of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps, not being entitled to anything one isn't forced to need, and not seeing force outside of a loaded weapon aimed at someone.
Digital Citizen
Seems this lady does understand the issue. Very cool! I bet she will also find people qualified to do a thorough analysis and I hope she manages to publish the results. I expect they will be fascinating and a lot worse than what many people expect. The other thing she should ask for is the documentation for architecture, design and develop, and process.
I hope she survives her condition for a long time and with good quality of life. And if she succeeds in her quest, this will benefit everybody.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The pacemaker that is controlling my heart rate at this moment has two communications interfaces that I know about. One is short-range radio of some sort, and the other is normally connected through a device placed externally within an inch of the device. I have no information about the actual effective range of either interface. I am appalled at the willingness of a number of people, not only this anonymous one, to post speculations with no apparent basis in real observation.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
My heart rate is controlled by a pacemaker at this moment. I do not have access to the specifications, so I cannot determine directly whether it contains a real-time clock. But the behavior seems to require one. The pacemaker stores records of its behavior and its sensor readings, and transmits them whenever its short-range radio can reach a satellite/cellular interface. It is extremely likely that a real-time clock in the pacemaker is used to time-stamp the data that are transmitted at unpredictable times hours after they are recorded.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
She should put her heart where her mouth is, and add to that that the pacemaker firmware be made available under GPLv3. She can then freely exercise freedom 2 and distribute it so that she can help her neighbors.
Incidentally, wonder whether she works for the FSF or is related to rms?
You don't have to be all that intelligent to follow a well-written step-by-step procedure. A procedure designed so that morons can follow it will result in consistent quality - same as the CrapBurger you get in Houston is the same as the CrapBurger you get in Newark (except for the extra toxins from the N.J. air).
Does the person have the right to ask to see the code? Sure, free world, yadda yadda yadda ... Does the company have to give it to them? Absolutely not.
Have they ever drunk a Coke? Can they ask Coka-Cola Corp. for the formula? Sure. Will they get it? No - but they could ask PepsiCo, who were able to replicate it during the New Coke fiasco. And Pepsico would probably also say No.
*facepalm*
Of course! Curse this properly formed brain of mine.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
If she doesn't already have the device implanted (no, I'm not going to read the story), then they should not let her get it done.
If she does already have one, then, it should be removed.
On a related note, does she have the source-code for the computers in her car? Microwave? What about the elevator controller in her office?
On the other hand, is she ready to pay for the code review?
What source code is there if it's all hardware? I don't think it would be that difficult to make a no-software electrical stimulator, we have large ones at the sex shop, making a tiny one shouldn't be any more difficult.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
According to Dr. Fuhrman: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
Now, she may well need a pacemaker, but she should also look into things like nutritional issues, omega 3s and good fats, vitamin D, and other similar things, if she has not. Links here: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Last year at OSCON. Sadly the line was too long for me to shake her hand and say thanks for starting this.
There's a few points I'd like to add, many already covered.
1) She's qualified to do this. Not to review the software. But she has plenty of good colleagues for that.
She's a director of GNOME (I know, I know...), former GC of the SFLC, an attorney... and ... from listening to her talk, she either genuinely gets software -- or someone that did wrote her whole speech for her.
2) This is a real, not a hypothetical problem.
People commenting without RTFA need to understand--These devices are 802.11 enabled. Remote exploits /have/ been demonstrated.
This is not a wholly uncommon situation -- one of my coworkers has a daughter with a computerized glucose pump that has also had remote compromise demonstrated.
And even a trivial interest in breathatlizers reveals there has been...myriad incidences of these devices not just being a total failure of design, but having rollover and similar bugs in their implementations.
3) People may be correct that it would be hard to get people to understand the code. That is wholly irrelevant and a false front of an argument. I don't care what your medical experience is in your industry or company. What your experience with regulators or lawsuits are. There's companies that commit fraud, lie, cheat, steal. They exist. This is indisputable. There's places where MBA's and biologists that can barely write a hello world by themselves compose pointer arithmetic, hit compile, hit test, and go home at the end of the day. I've worked at places like that on applications that could kill if they failed. It is why I do not as of two years ago.
I presently work with a woman that could not compose a CSV in a basic ETL from another filetype without help. She has the language being used using on her resume. Her workflow involved copy/paste off of the internet, and then changing one line at a time, saving it as file.### and trying to run it. If it didn't crash, she'd examine the output and try to put in what she thought would fix it. If it did, she'd try to find the error. When I offered a hand, she was currently at over her 500th revision.
So let me be damend clear -- even an unqualified person can do a basic code review just by running a fucking linter on it and looking at the warnings. Because if it generates one or a million -- that says something about the quality right there.
Why? Because unless you're in a business whose core business *IS* software, my personal experience is that 80% plus of the developers have never heard of one, and 95% don't know how to use it if they have. And that is why my code has less bugs than my colleagues.
Now -- even if my experiences are anecdotal, and "invalid" -- I've just proven the existence of the problem.
This is her life we're talking about. Her life entrusted to a piece of cybernetics that has had a demonstrated remote exploit.
Please /., have a little bit of humanity for once. This isn't about corporate profits, NDAs, lawsuits. This is about someone asking to read something to make an informed choice about their continued existence.
The only perfect (flawless) device is...the one you don't make (manufacture).
... to paraphrase Bruce Schneier, one of the most respected experts in the computer security field in the world.
I am a professional software engineer, member of the IEEE, director of an IEEE affiliate organization, and Senior Systems Engineer for one of the largest electronics corporations in the world, and have 30+ years in embedded systems engineering. I KNOW how badly the software for a lot of these embedded systems are designed and written. If the company in question was confident in the quality of their code, then they would not have a problem allowing a customer of a life-critical device, or a knowledgeable representative for her, to perform a code review. If, on the other hand, they have their own concerns for that, then they would act as this company is doing. Ergo, they have a lot to hide! In my case, if I had to have a pacemaker or other such device implanted in my body, I would insist that I be able to review not only the software design, but the hardware design, and I would want to look at their design documents (circuit diagrams, software UML diagrams, etc) as well. If they wouldn't, or couldn't, do that, then I would indeed look for another supplier who will!
The wireless interface can not be activated remotely but only through the coil induction communication interface. In other words you must place the programmer "head" over the device, interigate the device and then activate "wireless" . There is no possibility of someone remote controlling your heart! Then after a few minutes wireless turns off and has to be reactivated.
I was on the fence for a while here, alot of good points as usual,
But the split here, for me, is when this piece of hardware
and software become a part of my body. Permanent or not.
I'd much rather have a man try to hack to my heart the hard way,
my odds are better, and in a separate vein entirely, what ever
happened to good old peer review?
Are these "trade secrets" THAT important?
I'll never use the following variable names again: assumedValue, GunButterRatio etc etc.
Also there is no such thing as a 'final product'. There is always a ToDo. It belongs in bug tracking _and_ source.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Today’s Coke is darkened with caramel color.
Caramel color is produced by a reaction of sugars with ammonia and sulfites under high pressure and temperatures to create 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole.
Mmmm. Yummy. Personally, I'm a fan.
Mod parent up. Once a medical device or application has passed FDA review and has a golden ticket, the vendor will plant their feet and avoid any changes. The bottom line drives this, it costs them to get FDA review and if they have an approved product, there's no reason to rock the boat.
I am a 25 year old C coder. I was born with Tetralogy of Fallot's and developed a cardiac block, and I currently have a Medtronic pacer implanted to stop sudden death from bad rhythms.
When your life utterly depends on something you do get a different view on things - and yes, I would like to read the source for the device. Ultimately, a life is at stake, and really as many eyeballs as possible would be the best. From a personal, and objective poiint of view, I feel any other approach puts profit over life (and being in the UK under social medicine that doesn't seat well with me).
It's interesting this lawyer chose to do this, and I think I shall get in support to wish encouragement.
Isn't Dr. Fuhrman a family doctor and not a cardiologist? That page you linked to even has a disclaimer that it's only for informational and education purposes only and that you should consult a doctor first.
I tend to distrust websites like drfuhrman.com which in my opinion seem more oriented towards selling books, audio books, membership plans or a set of DVDs than providing me health information.
Imagine if Slashdot had an article about how awesome a new model of wireless router was and then on the side of that page Slashdot was trying to sell you that very same router. Wouldn't you be just a little bit skeptical?
First, there is no indication that the company is in financial trouble, so this is totally bogus on its' face.
Second, if it were to go bankrupt, the debts would be shed in a Chapter 11 filing, and the company would be more, not less, able to continue to support the code. Alternatively, the company gets acquired (minus the debts) by another company, since it is producing a product of high value, high utility, and an inelastic market demand. It's not like we're talking about an abandonware game here.
Studies show a high percentage of people with pacemakers have brain damage. This lawyer looks to be one of them, or a con artist using this as a revenue and publicity generator.
If I was her, I would follow my doctor advice (with second opinons of course) than a comment of /.
Just saying...
Why can't
The manufacturer has the right not to give access to the code. The patient has the right to refuse that particular offering.
Having said that, I think the manufacturer is an a*hole for not allowing it. I hope there are alternatives.
I suggest that for that type of device the manufacturer ought to open the source code. Opening the source code does not mean distributing it freely. It would be very easy for them to identify "plagiarism" and sue any company doing so.
I, for one, would be much, much more comfortable with code able to be reviewed and my bet would be that bugs would be found. I would nearly stake my life on it.
The expertise of the patient is irrelevant, there are many experts out there that would love to demonstrate their skills and gain the kudos associated with improving a marvelous invention.
Sorry kid, but you are writing about the interface which was added to allow changes to be made in the first place without having wires sticking out of the patient. To make things more clear the wireless access is there by design so that things can be changed in the medical device. I don't know much about the security other than RSA being involved with at least one pacemaker over ten years ago. I believe that made decent security a desirable sales bullet point if nothing else so it's likely all the competition followed.
Folks with legit ideas for research to improve the security of implantable medical devices should peruse the Open Medical Device Research Library. They loan/accept explanted medical devices for research. Why hypothesize and do armchair engineering when you could work with the real thing? http://omdrl.org/
Do me a favour if you will/can. Please name the airline and give a link to the accident report.
Generally I agree with your point; many people try to hide wherever they can; customers may not be able to get what they demand; but that doesn't mean that customers shouldn't make the demand in the first place.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
It is very unlikely that the source code in these devices have any remaining bugs due to the length of time that these devices have been used. My chess program played over 100.000 games in 6 years. Yesterday I found a bug in the en passant code.
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
"Low vitamin D linked to heart disease, death" ... After taking into account the patients' medical history, medications and other factors, the cardiologists found that people with deficient levels of vitamin D were more than twice as likely to have diabetes, 40 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and about 30 percent more likely to suffer from cardiomyopathy -- a diseased heart muscle -- as people without D deficiency."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/26/us-vitamind-heartdisease-idUSTRE7AO1UM20111126
""We expected to see that there was a relationship between heart disease and vitamin D deficiency; we were surprised at how strong it was," Dr. James L. Vacek, a professor of cardiology at the University of Kansas Hospital and Medical Center, told Reuters Health. "It was so much more profound than we expected."
http://www.livestrong.com/article/440011-can-low-potassium-cause-an-irregular-heartbeat/ ... Reviewing your dietary intake may reveal a potassium deficiency. Foods that contain high concentrations of potassium include all meats, fruits, vegetables, legumes and dairy products. High-sodium foods that lower potassium stores include processed, prepackaged foods such as soups, prepared pizza, Mexican food, frozen meals, sodas, potato chips and restaurant meals. ..."
"A potassium deficiency, or hypokalemia, is an electrolyte imbalance that may cause heart arrhythmias.
http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/NHC/irregular_heartbeat/cellular_solutions.htm
"Conventional medicine has invented its own diagnostic term to cover the fact that it does not know the origin of most arrhythmias. âoeParoxysmal arrhythmiaâ means nothing other than âoecauses unknown.â As a direct consequence, the therapeutic options of conventional medicine are confined to treating the symptoms of irregular heartbeat. Beta-blockers, calcium antagonists and other anti-arrhythmic drugs are given to patients in the hope that they will decrease the incidence of irregular heartbeat.
However, the most frequent known side effect of these drugs is an increased risk for new arrhythmias! Slow forms of arrhythmias with long pauses between heartbeats are dealt with by implanting a pacemaker. In other cases, heart muscle tissue that creates or conducts uncoordinated electrical impulses is cauterized (burned) and eliminated as a focus of the electrical disturbance in the heart muscle. Without an understanding of the primary cause of irregular heartbeat, the therapeutic approaches by conventional medicine are not specific and frequently fail.
Modern Cellular Medicine now provides the breakthrough in our understanding of the causes, prevention and adjunct treatnent of irregular heartbeat. The most frequent cause of irregular heartbeat is a chronic deficiency of vitamins and other essential nutrients in millions of âoeelectricalâ heart muscle cells that generate and conduct the electrical impulse responsible for a normal heartbeat. Long-term deficiencies of essential nutrients in these cells cause or aggravate disturbances in the creation or conduction of the electrical impulses and trigger arrhythmias. The primary method for preventing and correcting irregular heartbeat is an optimum supply of specific vitamins and other cellular nutrients.
Scientific research and clinical studies have already documented the value of magnesium, carnitine, coenzyme Q-10 and other important components of my Cellular Health recommendations in helping to normalize different forms of irregular heartbeat and improve the quality of life for patients.
A Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Clinical Study Confirms Vitamins and
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
AC wrote: "Isn't Dr. Fuhrman a family doctor and not a cardiologist? That page you linked to even has a disclaimer that it's only for informational and education purposes only and that you should consult a doctor first. I tend to distrust websites like drfuhrman.com which in my opinion seem more oriented towards selling books, audio books, membership plans or a set of DVDs than providing me health information. Imagine if Slashdot had an article about how awesome a new model of wireless router was and then on the side of that page Slashdot was trying to sell you that very same router. Wouldn't you be just a little bit skeptical?"
I actually agree with disliking Dr. Fuhrman's site for the commercial slant. You are right to be skeptical. That said, he generally knows what he is talking about and has done a lot of people a world of good (including me).
A deeper problem is all the conflicts of interest in medicine. To extend your router example, would you trust a cardiologist who says you need a heart operation, when he or she is the one who is going to make $10K from performing it? Would you even trust a second opinion from another cardiologist who also makes $10K from such operations? (Or whatever the amount is the cardiologist gets out of the $50K to $250K total costs.)
As another parallel, if you go to a new car salesman and ask, do I need a new car, mine is three years old, what do you expect to hear? If you go to another one down the road, do you expect to hear anything different?
Please also see my other reply in this thread about other (Non-Dr.Fuhrman) links between nutrition and vitaimin D and heart disease.
By the way, I want to take a moment to add that I agree with the lawyer that the software of medical devices should be open to examination, at the very least by those who receive it. A broader generalization on that theme:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
Thanks for the skeptical comment. I hope you direct that same amount of skepticism to the medical profession, for reason I outline here, including this quote by Marcia Angell
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
For what it is worth, I've had two relative (a sister and a father) die soon within a year or so of major heart operations, including getting a pacemaker etc.. :-( I wish I knew then what I know now, thanks to Dr. Fuhrman and many other conscientious and skeptical and inquiring people like him.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
this guy, a professor in University of Washington hacked a defibrillator to deliver deadly electrical jolts ...
source: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/yoshi/