I believe it is improper to charge thousands of dollars for a test that has not been validated and may not be safe. I don't think any of Amen's research has provided clear evidence that patients who have had SPECT scans have superior clinical outcomes to adequately treated patients who have not been scanned. That's really the bottom lineâ"especially with an expensive test that involves significant radiation. At the very least, he should be describing the test as experimental.
Some of Dr. Amen's treatment suggestions also worry me. For example, he recommends: (a) uses for dietary supplements that are not supported by good evidence, (b) EMDR (a highly questionable approach), and (c) hyperbaric oxygen therapy for conditions not generally considered to warrant such therapy.
I don't doubt that many patients who visit the Amen Clinics are helped. The key question, however, is whether or not SPECT scanning is justifiable for most of them. I, personally, would not undergo the test at Dr. Amen's clinic even if it were free. In my opinion, based on current knowledge, the possibility of harm outweighs any potential benefit. Pictures showing that "this is your brain on drugs" may impress some people, but I am far more impressed by quantifiable data (such as tests of mental performance) and clinical consequences (such as improved behavior) than by nonspecific pictures of "holes" in the brain.
So this is an operation that is selling diagnoses and treatments not supported by legitimate scientific research. They wound up with thousands of SPECT scans and decided to do some data-dredging on them, a process that we know is guaranteed to produce false positives http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...https://xkcd.com/882/ , along with any real causative association. They found an association with marijuana, and rushed to publish.
Once it was published in a journal, they made claims in the press release that weren't supported by the data:
According to Daniel Amen, M.D., Founder of Amen Clinics, "Our research demonstrates that marijuana can have significant negative effects on brain function. The media has given the general impression that marijuana is a safe recreational drug, this research directly challenges that notion. In another new study just released, researchers showed that marijuana use tripled the risk of psychosis. Caution is clearly in order."
That's right. News based on eyewitness accounts isn't fake news.
Parent is saying that the news media should believe the police accounts and ignore the eyewitnesses.
Eyewitness accounts are often wrong. Police accounts are often wrong.
People are often convicted of crimes and sentenced to death based on eyewitness accounts. That's what the Innocence Project found out when they used DNA tests to double-check those accounts.
Every criminal defense lawyer knows that police give false testimony, and bribe witnesses to give false testimony. They sometimes get caught by DNA testing and video evidence. So why should you assume that the police are telling the truth?
You need to listen to both sides of the story, and wait for more facts to develop. That's pretty much what the mainstream news media did.
So, in all this uncertainty, how can you be sure you have a good understanding of reality? Alternatively, if you consider every point of view, no matter how crazy, how can you not be swayed back and forth by every conflicting report that pops into your view?
The big problem with this story is that they're hyping a vaccine that is still in Phase I clinical trials. Yeah, doctors are trying to find a vaccine for the common cold. Doctors have been doing that for 100 years. What's new about this one?
Other than that, it's a somewhat disorganized collection of interesting and maybe even useful information about the common cold. She went to experts and they explained their work and what they thought were the important issues. She spent a day at Imperial College London, let them teach her about the common cold, and wrote a story about it. She could do worse.
If you want to understand how to evaluate (or write) a medical story, Health News Reviews has a great checklist. http://www.healthnewsreview.or...
The thing that bothers me about it is I'd really like to be able to make some of the stuff to play with out in the desert or some other safe place, but it's illegal to do that kind of thing. So, even if you could read the books, you couldn't legally have any fun with the knowledge.:(
I did play with that stuff when I was in high school.
In 1957, when the free world was locked in a death struggle with international Communism, the Soviet Union humiliated the United States by sending up Sputnick, the first artificial satellite in outer space, orbiting the world and beeping its presence on radio frequencies that any Ham operator in the world could tune in to. That was soon followed by the first dog in space, the first man in space, and the first woman in space.
America had to do something. They responded the way they always do -- promoting science, technology, engineering and math. (No coding; we still used T-squares and slide rules.) If you were a science teacher willing to make a Faustian bargain to get endless resources, laboratories, and cool toys in exchange for teaching kids how to become engineers and scientists and find better, more reliable, accurate ways to deliver hydrogen bombs to the Kremlin. We were in a space race with the Russians. Crisis in Education: exclusive pictures of a Russian schoolboy vs. his U.S. counterpart, Life, 24 March 1958, https://books.google.com/books...
You know the line, "If you don't give me a billion dollars and let me do anything I want, the terrorists will win"? Well, that started off in 1957 as, "If you don't give me a billion dollars and let me do anything I want, the Communists will win."
This was not long after the Manhattan Project dramatically ended the world's greatest struggle with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scientists were war heroes. Scientists could get away with anything.
Science teachers tolerated (and sometimes tacitly encouraged) adolescent boys playing with explosives. You never can tell when your country may be invaded and you'll have to join the guerillas to fight back with improvised explosive devices.
As every chemistry teacher knows, nothing attracts the attention of a class as well as an explosion. The smarter chemistry students were the ones who were most attracted to making their own explosives.
Some of you may recall a column in Scientific American called "The Amateur Scientist," and some of you may further recall their article on model rockets, which set off a craze for building rockets around the country, which I joined. The propellant they recommended was zinc dust and sulfur, which was safer because it was a self-limiting explosion which would slow down as the pressure increased. My high school friends in the Science Club experimented with other propellants. "Experiment" in this context means seeing if it shoots your rocket higher or just blows up. Blowing up was not a total loss. In reference to the other message, everyone who mixed potassium chlorate with red phosphorous, including me, eventually met disaster. Without going into detail, I strongly recommend face shields and tongs. I also recommend that you keep it wet and don't let it dry out as you're working on it. There are a lot of 6-fingered chemists around.
We actually learned a lot of chemistry and physics. The chemistry of rocket fuels is a good lesson in oxydation and in applying theory to practice. We ran into a PR guy at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Aerospace who probably did the same thing at our age and directed us to some basic textbooks on rocketry, which we then looked up across the street in the Science and Technology division of the New York Public Library. The books were full of calculus, so I said to myself, "I have to learn calculus." So I did. I remember how, in a well-designed rocket, the fuel would bu
On a full English language keboard there is no way speech is faster if you know how to type.
How fast do you type?
I've transcribed hundreds of hours of tapes, mostly lectures and panel discussions. I tested ~72 wpm. I spent a lot of time perfecting my typing methods and speed.
I estimated that most lectures were about 120 wpm. Some people talk much faster, particularly in bursts. I think certified courtroom stenographers have to pass a test at 210 wpm.
I could never keep up with continuous speech. I used a transcribing machine, and played it back at a slower speed, and/or backpedaled. I could usually keep up with normal lectures without pausing when I reduced the speed to 50%.
I know a lot of people who transcribe lectures and interviews, and there is a general consensus that it takes about 3 hours to transcribe 1 hour of speech. That's with good accuracy and corrections. It probably takes about 2 hours for a rough draft. I could never do it in 1 hour.
You are using the logic of a criminal lawyer who defends clients who are guilty, and uses every argument, no matter how dubious or irrelevant, to try to get a murderer off.
The parent asked, "can you show me some Jewish incitement?"
I showed him.
That's the end of the discussion as far as I'm concerned.
The Israeli excuse when they kill innocent children is that they did it "accidentally."
They say, that's the difference between the Palestinians and us. They kill children deliberately, and they feel good about it afterwards. We kill children accidentally, and we feel bad about it afterwards.
But I've never heard an Israeli government spokesman apologize for killing innocent Palestinian children. For example, Izzeldin Abuelaish's daughters https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As soon as it was published late last year,Torat Ha'Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book's contents as "230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew." According to the book's author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, "Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and should be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations." "If we kill a gentile who has has violated one of the seven commandments⦠there is nothing wrong with the murder," Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults."
One of Shapira's followers, an American immigrant named Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze'ev Sternhell with a mail bomb. Teitel is suspected of many more murders, including an attack on a Tel Aviv gay community center.
Despite its apparent role as a terror training institute, Od Yosef Chai has raked in nearly fifty thousand dollars from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs since 2007, while the Ministry of Education has pumped over 250 thousand dollars into the yeshiva's coffers between 2006 and 2007.
Though he does not name "the enemy" in the pages of his book, Shapira's longstanding connection to terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians exposes the true identity of his targets. In 2006, Shapira was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country's Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested under suspicion that he helped orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus. Though he was released, Shapira's name arose in connection with another act of terror, when in January, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking the vandals who set fire to a nearby mosque. After arresting ten settlers, the Shabak held five of Shapira's confederates under suspicion of arson.
while Lior served as the IDF's top rabbi, he instructed soldiers: "There is no such thing as civilians in wartime⦠A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail!" Indeed, there are only a few non-Jews whose lives Lior would demand to be spared. They are captured Palestinian militants who, as he once suggested, could be used as subjects for live human medical experiments.
Otherwise, Lior appears content to watch Palestinians perish as they did at the muzzle of Dr. Baruch Goldstein's machine gun in 1994. Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians and wounded 150 in a shooting spree while they prayed in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs mosque, was a compatriot and neighbor of Lior in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. At Goldstein's funeral, Lior celebrated the massacre as an act carried out "to sanctify the holy name of God." He then extolled Goldstein as "a righteous man." Thanks to Lior's efforts, a shrine to Goldstein was constructed in center of Kiryat Arba so that locals could celebrate the killer's deeds and pass his legacy down to future generations.
There were a lot of good technical schools in the 1980s and earlier.
The old RCA Institute was very good; Bell Labs used to hire technicians there. But after the phone company broke up, they couldn't be economically viable.
Devry just became a university in New York State, which isn't easy to do (just ask Donald Trump).
I think that at least some of the technical schools were good, gave a good education, their graduates could get good jobs.
However, once they were under financial pressure, they had to move into marginal classes and outright scams to make money, like medical assistant jobs that didn't lead to certification. A good concept destroyed by the market. Government guaranteed loans didn't help either.
"for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system"
Eric Kandel was born in Vienna, Austria, where he lived until his family emigrated to New York in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime. He studied history and literature at Harvard University, before becoming interested in psychoanalysis, learning and memory. At New York University medical school he turned to the biological basis of the mind
Archaeology maybe your dream and you may passionately love it, definitely pursue it, but have a very viable backup plan of something that will net you a job with high probability and that you can live with.
Actually Science magazine had a story on the job prospects in anthropology, and the prospects were actually quite good. OTOH last time I saw the numbers, the unemployment rate for biology majors was pretty bad, about 5%.
My belief is that you should spend your time in college learning a diversity of things, which is what the liberal arts does (the liberal arts includes a lot of science; Antioch produced one Nobel laureate).
You have a lot of good points in your post and a lot that I disagree with. Fortunately, my liberal arts education (which included a lot of hard science courses) enabled me to separate the good from the bad.
It's amazing (and hopeful) how human beings evolved to be cooperative and work together for the benefit of the group.
There's lots of research on that, in anthropology, biology, behavioral economics, etc.
I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page for 30 years. Milton Friedman was wrong. Ayn Rand was really wrong.
People aren't motivated by money, once they're financially comfortable. In published studies, they will sacrifice real money in order to satisfy their sense of justice. Look up behavioral economics.
If some FDA exec is denying a trip for an inspector becase an AMTRAK ticket cannot be afforded, FIRE the exec and buy some tickets with the savings. Obama and the Democrats have been running the FDA for over 7 years. Priorities????
the core problem created by our "friends" in places like the UK and Canada who do it. Those foreign governments doing it for their socialist medical services are what forced the American consume to bear all the R&D costs and drove-up OUR drug prices; they threatened to break the patents and let the American companies get ripped-off if the American companies did not sell at prices too low to cover all the costs. The result was that the companies lowered the prices over there to a level that allowed a profit on the manufacturing costs but no margin to cover the R&D costs which went entirely onto the US customers and their insurance companies.
I take it from your comment that your expertise is not in pharmaceuticals.
Did you ever hear of insulin (Canada), statins (Japan), penicillin (England), cancer chemotherapy (Italy) or monoclonal antibodies (Argentina/Switzerland)?
I am leaving the Wikipedia search as an exercise for the reader.
The US pharmaceutical industry tried some of the short-cuts you recommended and ended up with several disasters, such as the New England Compounding Center disease outbreak, which caused 64 deaths.
The Chinese pharmaceutical industry also tried it with the same results.
Pharmaceutical quality control and manufacture is a lot more complicated than making artisinal beer.
You also mentioned something about a media source claiming syringes require "extensive medical training" or something... I call BS. Again, diabetics deal with this all the time. There are some precautions, but most are similar to EpiPens, and the additional warnings can easily be explained in a few minutes. You also may want to check into the credentials of that medical professional -- I've seen some media quotes in stories in the past few days saying similar, but it turns out they work for allergy societies that get a huge amount of support from the manufacturer of EpiPens, which at a minimum presents a significant conflict of interest.
That "media source" was Consumer Reports. I have checked into their credentials. Their medical reviewers are probably more qualified in each of the specialties than some of the reviewers in the second-string peer-review journals. And they take no money from industry.
Diabetics do inject themselves with insulin, however there are differences between them and people with anaphylactic reactions so you can't equate the two. The most obvious difference is that insulin-dependent diabetics inject regularly, several times a day, so they're used to the equipment and familiar with it. People with anaphylactic reactions might a reaction once in their lives, once a year, or once every few years (according to a friend of mine who did have an anaphylactic reaction to bee antigen in a doctor's office), so they can forget how to use it.
You want to say that it makes no difference. I don't accept that. In a matter of life or death, you need better evidence than your own personal feeling. You seem to know enough about medicine to be able to look up articles on PubMed, but I'm certain that you're not a medical doctor or medical student. The standard of evidence for pharmaecuticals is a lot more rigorous than, say, the flavors and fragrances industry. I'd rather follow the advice of an MD.
It's not good enough to say that diabetic injections are sort of like epinephrine injections, so if it works for diabetes it seems like it should work for epinephrine. The only thing that will tell you what kind of problems come up when people use manual epinephrine injections is a well-designed study of people who use manual epinephrine injections, preferably with a comparison group of people who use the EpiPen. But that would be hard to do, because an anaphylactic shock is such a rare event.
And contrary to what you say, there is nothing in those studies that addresses the claim that "people won't fill them correctly or they'll lose time in doing all that for people inexperienced with them." Those were just lab studies of 2 narrow issues -- stability and sterility.
If you want to understand the design of medical studies, you could read the NEJM, BMJ, and JAMA Internal Medicine (my preferences) over the last few years. If you want to get a summary of what it's all about, you can look in http://www.healthnewsreview.or...
http://www.consumerreports.org... Can You Get a Cheaper EpiPen? You could save about $400 per two-pack with generic Adrenaclick and still protect against life-threatening allergy attacks By Ginger Skinner August 11, 2016
The DIY Syringe Method
To further cut costs, some have turned to using manual syringes and buying vials of epinephrine to fill them. The drug costs a few dollars per vial. But experts caution that switching to a do-it-yourself syringe is more complicated and can result in getting too much or little epinephrine. What’s more, you’ll need to be trained by a doctor or pharmacist on how to inject the drug quickly and accurately before attempting to try it during an emergency.
And because there are different concentrations on the market, getting the proper dose is critical, especially for children.
I looked up your Pubmed citations in the hope that they would show that it was practical for people to use epinephrine injections rather than auto-injectors.
Unfortunately they didn't say that. Those were just lab tests of stability and sterility. In order to be convinced, I'd have to see a study of actual patients who successfully learned to do their own epinephrine injections. That would be a hard study to do, since anaphylaxis is relatively rare. Consumer Reports had an article about alternatives to the EpiPen, and their medical experts said that epinephrine would require more training than the EpiPen. You'd need a product that could be used by a bystander, such as a teacher, with minimal or no training.
If as you say people screw up the autoinjectors, it seems that they would be even more likely to screw up epinephrine. I'll believe it when I see the data.
(The other problem was that ephinephrine degrades after 3 months, while the EpiPen lasts 12 months.)
My basic reaction to your post is, you can't know that something is going to work until you've done a well-designed study in the real world.
As an example, my wife's kidney dialysis sessions are billed out at $3,925 each, for a total of about $600,000 per year. The insurance company's "real price" is $290 per session.
Well, the original intention of Congress was to have free market competition in kidney dialysis, to bring the price down, but that didn't work. There were a lot of small providers but a couple of big companies took over the industry and turned it into a monopoly. You can't negotiate prices with a monopoly.
It seems that in the modern economy, the free market doesn't last long as many industries turn into monopolies. Amazon is a book-selling monopoly. Google is an internet advertising monopoly.
If we must have a monopoly, we might as well have the government running it.
It's not just an exclusive license. They passed laws requiring schools to buy them.
Heather Bresch, Mylan's CEO, whose father is a congressman, managed to get Congress to pass a law effectively requiring every school in the country to stock an automatic injector, of which EpiPen is the only one readily available.
The solution: Change the FDA. Make it cheap and fast for a drug manufacturer to get approved to make any drug if they can prove that they are using industry-standard (or better) processes for quality control and if they are producing a chemically-identical product.
And exactly how do you propose to change that? Do you want FDA employees to work longer hours? Or do you want them to work twice as fast in the same hours? Can you speed them up like a tape recorder?
Actually, the FDA does a pretty good job right now. They approve drugs faster than European regulators. They had a backup several years ago when Congress (actually, Republicans) thought it would be a great idea to cut taxes and cut the budgets of government agencies.
I remember the CEO of a biotechnology company (I think Centicor) complaining that the FDA inspector couldn't come to his plant because they didn't have the budget for the train fare on Amtrack.
FDA regulation has little to do with why drugs cost so much money. More important is the Republicans refusing to let the government negotiate prices with the drug makers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In the UK, they have an agency, NICE, which decides how much the drugs are worth, which is often half or a third as much as the US price.
Without personal gain, shit just doesn't get done. You don't work for free. Why do you expect anyone else to.
You mean like penicillin? Or polio vaccine? Or insulin? Which were invented by people who refused to take patents and didn't try to make money out of it? The history of medicine is full of people who came up with important breakthroughs and weren't particularly interested in money.
Once you get a certain level of income, enough to raise a family in comfort with all the requirements of a good life, you don't really need more money and a lot of people will work for free just because they want to do something useful for the world.
A lot of doctors who are specialists make $300,000 a year. That should be enough for anybody.
Some of the most important work in medicine gets done free -- peer-reviewing journal articles and grant applications.
Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan who raised the price of EpiPens to $600, is making $16 million a year. Couldn't she get by on $1 million? Even Adam Smith would say that's excessive.
How could this possibly hurt the US economy or its workers? It's just a new business, with foreign money on the line, that must hire people in order to have the visa extended.
Since you ask --
The Wall Street Journal did a story after the Oakland, California race riots, to try to find the root causes of the riots.
A Korean grocery store owner made the news at the time because he and his relatives protected his store with shotguns.
The WSJ reported that he had been an officer in the Korean army. That's why they thought of defending their store with guns. (From other stories in the WSJ and elsewhere, I read that the Korean army at that time was particularly corrupt, in terms of giving military contracts to relatives of well-connected politicians and officers, etc. In New York City, according to the New York Times and everybody who knows what's going on, including real estate dealers and immigration lawyers, foreign investors from every corrupt country in the world are buying up New York real estate. But put that aside for the moment.)
The Korean owners came to this country through one of these investment provisions, which were even more lenient back then, and they brought their whole family.
Maybe it was a legitimate business operation that they thought would be profitable.
But any money they made out of a grocery in Oakland was insignificant compared to the financial benefits of moving their families to the U.S. and having their children go to college here and grow up with the opportunities here, as compared to the opportunities back in Korea.
(I know a Korean surgeon, who I think was born here, who is making at least $300,000 a year, which is much more than he could make back in Korea.)
The WSJ reporter found a black guy who had an auto repair shop right by the Korean grocery. The Koreans wanted to expand, and get a warehouse. The black guy also wanted to expand, and open a new facility. They both wanted the same industrial space nearby. The Korean guy outbid the black guy. The Korean guy had an easy time getting bank credit for the space, and the black guy couldn't get credit. So the Korean guy got the space.
There are some people (particularly on the WSJ editorial page) who say that the free market is the will of God, and the outcome of the free market is always good. They would say (without even needing to investigate the facts) that the Korean grocers would of necessity contribute more to the economy than the black auto repair guy. Maybe. But I'm not convinced.
The first lesson in this WSJ story is that immigration and foreign investment makes winners and losers. The black auto repair guy was a loser. Maybe he deserved to lose. But I'm not comfortable with the idea of a Korean military officer coming to Oakland with this wealth of mysterious origin and outbidding this hard-working black guy. You can work hard at your business and they can beat you just because they have access to more capital.
The second lesson that I would draw from it is, I'm not sure that these Korean grocers that we used to see all around New York City are such good businessmen or that they contribute that much to the economy. The purpose of their grocery store isn't to provide the best goods and services to their customers, or to provide good jobs to the workers in the neighborhood. The purpose of the grocery store is to get American citizenship for their families, and once they've done that they can (and do) close the store and leave.
After all, you don't have an efficient free market if people are running a business not to maximize their profits but for an ulterior purpose, like getting residency and citizenship.
I'm not singling out Koreans. I could tell a similar story about immigrants from any corrupt country. Russia, Haiti, and Saudi Arabia are high on the list lately.
If foreigners are willing and able to come in and contribute to this country, fine. But there are winners and losers, and the way our country is run, there are a lot of losers.
Slashdot Mirror
This study proves that working for a publicity-hungry quack clinic damages your ability to distinguish between association and causation.
The author http://www.amenclinics.com/sta... works for a clinic http://www.amenclinics.com/ that sells dubious treatments based on dubious SPECT diagnoses.
Quackwatch has this to say:
https://www.quackwatch.org/06R...
A Skeptical View of SPECT Scans and Dr. Daniel Amen
by Harriet Hall, M.D.
I believe it is improper to charge thousands of dollars for a test that has not been validated and may not be safe. I don't think any of Amen's research has provided clear evidence that patients who have had SPECT scans have superior clinical outcomes to adequately treated patients who have not been scanned. That's really the bottom lineâ"especially with an expensive test that involves significant radiation. At the very least, he should be describing the test as experimental.
Some of Dr. Amen's treatment suggestions also worry me. For example, he recommends: (a) uses for dietary supplements that are not supported by good evidence, (b) EMDR (a highly questionable approach), and (c) hyperbaric oxygen therapy for conditions not generally considered to warrant such therapy.
I don't doubt that many patients who visit the Amen Clinics are helped. The key question, however, is whether or not SPECT scanning is justifiable for most of them. I, personally, would not undergo the test at Dr. Amen's clinic even if it were free. In my opinion, based on current knowledge, the possibility of harm outweighs any potential benefit. Pictures showing that "this is your brain on drugs" may impress some people, but I am far more impressed by quantifiable data (such as tests of mental performance) and clinical consequences (such as improved behavior) than by nonspecific pictures of "holes" in the brain.
So this is an operation that is selling diagnoses and treatments not supported by legitimate scientific research. They wound up with thousands of SPECT scans and decided to do some data-dredging on them, a process that we know is guaranteed to produce false positives http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea... https://xkcd.com/882/ , along with any real causative association. They found an association with marijuana, and rushed to publish.
Once it was published in a journal, they made claims in the press release that weren't supported by the data:
According to Daniel Amen, M.D., Founder of Amen Clinics, "Our research demonstrates that marijuana can have significant negative effects on brain function. The media has given the general impression that marijuana is a safe recreational drug, this research directly challenges that notion. In another new study just released, researchers showed that marijuana use tripled the risk of psychosis. Caution is clearly in order."
Clearly false. Association is not causation.
That's right. News based on eyewitness accounts isn't fake news.
Parent is saying that the news media should believe the police accounts and ignore the eyewitnesses.
Eyewitness accounts are often wrong. Police accounts are often wrong.
People are often convicted of crimes and sentenced to death based on eyewitness accounts. That's what the Innocence Project found out when they used DNA tests to double-check those accounts.
Every criminal defense lawyer knows that police give false testimony, and bribe witnesses to give false testimony. They sometimes get caught by DNA testing and video evidence. So why should you assume that the police are telling the truth?
You need to listen to both sides of the story, and wait for more facts to develop. That's pretty much what the mainstream news media did.
So, in all this uncertainty, how can you be sure you have a good understanding of reality? Alternatively, if you consider every point of view, no matter how crazy, how can you not be swayed back and forth by every conflicting report that pops into your view?
John Stuart Mill. On Liberty.
http://www.bartleby.com/130/2....
I realize that the Daily Mail has issues.
https://www.theguardian.com/co... After all, we get Private Eye here in the states.
The big problem with this story is that they're hyping a vaccine that is still in Phase I clinical trials. Yeah, doctors are trying to find a vaccine for the common cold. Doctors have been doing that for 100 years. What's new about this one?
Other than that, it's a somewhat disorganized collection of interesting and maybe even useful information about the common cold. She went to experts and they explained their work and what they thought were the important issues. She spent a day at Imperial College London, let them teach her about the common cold, and wrote a story about it. She could do worse.
If you want to understand how to evaluate (or write) a medical story, Health News Reviews has a great checklist. http://www.healthnewsreview.or...
Kill yourself you intellectually dishonest piece of shit. Idiots like you are why other innocent people are going to die. You are insane.
Reducto ad absurdum logical arguments have become "intellectual dishonesty".
"I disagree with you" has become "you're lying" and "you are intellectually dishonest."
The thing that bothers me about it is I'd really like to be able to make some of the stuff to play with out in the desert or some other safe place, but it's illegal to do that kind of thing. So, even if you could read the books, you couldn't legally have any fun with the knowledge. :(
I did play with that stuff when I was in high school.
In 1957, when the free world was locked in a death struggle with international Communism, the Soviet Union humiliated the United States by sending up Sputnick, the first artificial satellite in outer space, orbiting the world and beeping its presence on radio frequencies that any Ham operator in the world could tune in to. That was soon followed by the first dog in space, the first man in space, and the first woman in space.
America had to do something. They responded the way they always do -- promoting science, technology, engineering and math. (No coding; we still used T-squares and slide rules.) If you were a science teacher willing to make a Faustian bargain to get endless resources, laboratories, and cool toys in exchange for teaching kids how to become engineers and scientists and find better, more reliable, accurate ways to deliver hydrogen bombs to the Kremlin. We were in a space race with the Russians. Crisis in Education: exclusive pictures of a Russian schoolboy vs. his U.S. counterpart, Life, 24 March 1958, https://books.google.com/books...
You know the line, "If you don't give me a billion dollars and let me do anything I want, the terrorists will win"? Well, that started off in 1957 as, "If you don't give me a billion dollars and let me do anything I want, the Communists will win."
This was not long after the Manhattan Project dramatically ended the world's greatest struggle with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scientists were war heroes. Scientists could get away with anything.
Science teachers tolerated (and sometimes tacitly encouraged) adolescent boys playing with explosives. You never can tell when your country may be invaded and you'll have to join the guerillas to fight back with improvised explosive devices.
As every chemistry teacher knows, nothing attracts the attention of a class as well as an explosion. The smarter chemistry students were the ones who were most attracted to making their own explosives.
Some of you may recall a column in Scientific American called "The Amateur Scientist," and some of you may further recall their article on model rockets, which set off a craze for building rockets around the country, which I joined. The propellant they recommended was zinc dust and sulfur, which was safer because it was a self-limiting explosion which would slow down as the pressure increased. My high school friends in the Science Club experimented with other propellants. "Experiment" in this context means seeing if it shoots your rocket higher or just blows up. Blowing up was not a total loss. In reference to the other message, everyone who mixed potassium chlorate with red phosphorous, including me, eventually met disaster. Without going into detail, I strongly recommend face shields and tongs. I also recommend that you keep it wet and don't let it dry out as you're working on it. There are a lot of 6-fingered chemists around.
We actually learned a lot of chemistry and physics. The chemistry of rocket fuels is a good lesson in oxydation and in applying theory to practice. We ran into a PR guy at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Aerospace who probably did the same thing at our age and directed us to some basic textbooks on rocketry, which we then looked up across the street in the Science and Technology division of the New York Public Library. The books were full of calculus, so I said to myself, "I have to learn calculus." So I did. I remember how, in a well-designed rocket, the fuel would bu
On a full English language keboard there is no way speech is faster if you know how to type.
How fast do you type?
I've transcribed hundreds of hours of tapes, mostly lectures and panel discussions. I tested ~72 wpm. I spent a lot of time perfecting my typing methods and speed.
I estimated that most lectures were about 120 wpm. Some people talk much faster, particularly in bursts. I think certified courtroom stenographers have to pass a test at 210 wpm.
I could never keep up with continuous speech. I used a transcribing machine, and played it back at a slower speed, and/or backpedaled. I could usually keep up with normal lectures without pausing when I reduced the speed to 50%.
I know a lot of people who transcribe lectures and interviews, and there is a general consensus that it takes about 3 hours to transcribe 1 hour of speech. That's with good accuracy and corrections. It probably takes about 2 hours for a rough draft. I could never do it in 1 hour.
You are using the logic of a criminal lawyer who defends clients who are guilty, and uses every argument, no matter how dubious or irrelevant, to try to get a murderer off.
The parent asked, "can you show me some Jewish incitement?"
I showed him.
That's the end of the discussion as far as I'm concerned.
So it's ok to try to kill someone if you miss?
The Israeli excuse when they kill innocent children is that they did it "accidentally."
They say, that's the difference between the Palestinians and us. They kill children deliberately, and they feel good about it afterwards. We kill children accidentally, and we feel bad about it afterwards.
But I've never heard an Israeli government spokesman apologize for killing innocent Palestinian children. For example, Izzeldin Abuelaish's daughters https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I hate replying to an AC, but can you show me some Jewish incitement?
http://www.alternet.org/story/...
As soon as it was published late last year,Torat Ha'Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book's contents as "230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew." According to the book's author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, "Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and should be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations." "If we kill a gentile who has has violated one of the seven commandments⦠there is nothing wrong with the murder," Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults."
One of Shapira's followers, an American immigrant named Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze'ev Sternhell with a mail bomb. Teitel is suspected of many more murders, including an attack on a Tel Aviv gay community center.
Despite its apparent role as a terror training institute, Od Yosef Chai has raked in nearly fifty thousand dollars from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs since 2007, while the Ministry of Education has pumped over 250 thousand dollars into the yeshiva's coffers between 2006 and 2007.
Though he does not name "the enemy" in the pages of his book, Shapira's longstanding connection to terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians exposes the true identity of his targets. In 2006, Shapira was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country's Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested under suspicion that he helped orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus. Though he was released, Shapira's name arose in connection with another act of terror, when in January, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking the vandals who set fire to a nearby mosque. After arresting ten settlers, the Shabak held five of Shapira's confederates under suspicion of arson.
while Lior served as the IDF's top rabbi, he instructed soldiers: "There is no such thing as civilians in wartime⦠A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail!" Indeed, there are only a few non-Jews whose lives Lior would demand to be spared. They are captured Palestinian militants who, as he once suggested, could be used as subjects for live human medical experiments.
Otherwise, Lior appears content to watch Palestinians perish as they did at the muzzle of Dr. Baruch Goldstein's machine gun in 1994. Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians and wounded 150 in a shooting spree while they prayed in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs mosque, was a compatriot and neighbor of Lior in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. At Goldstein's funeral, Lior celebrated the massacre as an act carried out "to sanctify the holy name of God." He then extolled Goldstein as "a righteous man." Thanks to Lior's efforts, a shrine to Goldstein was constructed in center of Kiryat Arba so that locals could celebrate the killer's deeds and pass his legacy down to future generations.
1943? That would make them paleocons.
Get off my free-market lawn!
There were a lot of good technical schools in the 1980s and earlier.
The old RCA Institute was very good; Bell Labs used to hire technicians there. But after the phone company broke up, they couldn't be economically viable.
Devry just became a university in New York State, which isn't easy to do (just ask Donald Trump).
I think that at least some of the technical schools were good, gave a good education, their graduates could get good jobs.
However, once they were under financial pressure, they had to move into marginal classes and outright scams to make money, like medical assistant jobs that didn't lead to certification. A good concept destroyed by the market. Government guaranteed loans didn't help either.
You had it right up to the part about engineering.
Starting in the 18th century, the liberal arts expanded to include the sciences.
Take a look at the Nobel prize web site. A lot of the laureates started out in the liberal arts.
https://www.nobelprize.org/nob...
"for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system"
Eric Kandel was born in Vienna, Austria, where he lived until his family emigrated to New York in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime. He studied history and literature at Harvard University, before becoming interested in psychoanalysis, learning and memory. At New York University medical school he turned to the biological basis of the mind
Archaeology maybe your dream and you may passionately love it, definitely pursue it, but have a very viable backup plan of something that will net you a job with high probability and that you can live with.
Actually Science magazine had a story on the job prospects in anthropology, and the prospects were actually quite good. OTOH last time I saw the numbers, the unemployment rate for biology majors was pretty bad, about 5%.
My belief is that you should spend your time in college learning a diversity of things, which is what the liberal arts does (the liberal arts includes a lot of science; Antioch produced one Nobel laureate).
You have a lot of good points in your post and a lot that I disagree with. Fortunately, my liberal arts education (which included a lot of hard science courses) enabled me to separate the good from the bad.
It's amazing (and hopeful) how human beings evolved to be cooperative and work together for the benefit of the group.
There's lots of research on that, in anthropology, biology, behavioral economics, etc.
I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page for 30 years. Milton Friedman was wrong. Ayn Rand was really wrong.
People aren't motivated by money, once they're financially comfortable. In published studies, they will sacrifice real money in order to satisfy their sense of justice. Look up behavioral economics.
If some FDA exec is denying a trip for an inspector becase an AMTRAK ticket cannot be afforded, FIRE the exec and buy some tickets with the savings. Obama and the Democrats have been running the FDA for over 7 years. Priorities????
That happened during the Reagan Administration.
the core problem created by our "friends" in places like the UK and Canada who do it. Those foreign governments doing it for their socialist medical services are what forced the American consume to bear all the R&D costs and drove-up OUR drug prices; they threatened to break the patents and let the American companies get ripped-off if the American companies did not sell at prices too low to cover all the costs. The result was that the companies lowered the prices over there to a level that allowed a profit on the manufacturing costs but no margin to cover the R&D costs which went entirely onto the US customers and their insurance companies.
I take it from your comment that your expertise is not in pharmaceuticals.
Did you ever hear of insulin (Canada), statins (Japan), penicillin (England), cancer chemotherapy (Italy) or monoclonal antibodies (Argentina/Switzerland)?
I am leaving the Wikipedia search as an exercise for the reader.
The US pharmaceutical industry tried some of the short-cuts you recommended and ended up with several disasters, such as the New England Compounding Center disease outbreak, which caused 64 deaths.
The Chinese pharmaceutical industry also tried it with the same results.
Pharmaceutical quality control and manufacture is a lot more complicated than making artisinal beer.
You also mentioned something about a media source claiming syringes require "extensive medical training" or something... I call BS. Again, diabetics deal with this all the time. There are some precautions, but most are similar to EpiPens, and the additional warnings can easily be explained in a few minutes. You also may want to check into the credentials of that medical professional -- I've seen some media quotes in stories in the past few days saying similar, but it turns out they work for allergy societies that get a huge amount of support from the manufacturer of EpiPens, which at a minimum presents a significant conflict of interest.
That "media source" was Consumer Reports. I have checked into their credentials. Their medical reviewers are probably more qualified in each of the specialties than some of the reviewers in the second-string peer-review journals. And they take no money from industry.
Diabetics do inject themselves with insulin, however there are differences between them and people with anaphylactic reactions so you can't equate the two. The most obvious difference is that insulin-dependent diabetics inject regularly, several times a day, so they're used to the equipment and familiar with it. People with anaphylactic reactions might a reaction once in their lives, once a year, or once every few years (according to a friend of mine who did have an anaphylactic reaction to bee antigen in a doctor's office), so they can forget how to use it.
You want to say that it makes no difference. I don't accept that. In a matter of life or death, you need better evidence than your own personal feeling. You seem to know enough about medicine to be able to look up articles on PubMed, but I'm certain that you're not a medical doctor or medical student. The standard of evidence for pharmaecuticals is a lot more rigorous than, say, the flavors and fragrances industry. I'd rather follow the advice of an MD.
It's not good enough to say that diabetic injections are sort of like epinephrine injections, so if it works for diabetes it seems like it should work for epinephrine. The only thing that will tell you what kind of problems come up when people use manual epinephrine injections is a well-designed study of people who use manual epinephrine injections, preferably with a comparison group of people who use the EpiPen. But that would be hard to do, because an anaphylactic shock is such a rare event.
And contrary to what you say, there is nothing in those studies that addresses the claim that "people won't fill them correctly or they'll lose time in doing all that for people inexperienced with them." Those were just lab studies of 2 narrow issues -- stability and sterility.
If you want to understand the design of medical studies, you could read the NEJM, BMJ, and JAMA Internal Medicine (my preferences) over the last few years. If you want to get a summary of what it's all about, you can look in http://www.healthnewsreview.or...
I looked up your Pubmed citations in the hope that they would show that it was practical for people to use epinephrine injections rather than auto-injectors.
Unfortunately they didn't say that. Those were just lab tests of stability and sterility. In order to be convinced, I'd have to see a study of actual patients who successfully learned to do their own epinephrine injections. That would be a hard study to do, since anaphylaxis is relatively rare. Consumer Reports had an article about alternatives to the EpiPen, and their medical experts said that epinephrine would require more training than the EpiPen. You'd need a product that could be used by a bystander, such as a teacher, with minimal or no training.
If as you say people screw up the autoinjectors, it seems that they would be even more likely to screw up epinephrine. I'll believe it when I see the data.
(The other problem was that ephinephrine degrades after 3 months, while the EpiPen lasts 12 months.)
My basic reaction to your post is, you can't know that something is going to work until you've done a well-designed study in the real world.
As an example, my wife's kidney dialysis sessions are billed out at $3,925 each, for a total of about $600,000 per year. The insurance company's "real price" is $290 per session.
Well, the original intention of Congress was to have free market competition in kidney dialysis, to bring the price down, but that didn't work. There were a lot of small providers but a couple of big companies took over the industry and turned it into a monopoly. You can't negotiate prices with a monopoly.
It seems that in the modern economy, the free market doesn't last long as many industries turn into monopolies. Amazon is a book-selling monopoly. Google is an internet advertising monopoly.
If we must have a monopoly, we might as well have the government running it.
It's not just an exclusive license. They passed laws requiring schools to buy them.
Heather Bresch, Mylan's CEO, whose father is a congressman, managed to get Congress to pass a law effectively requiring every school in the country to stock an automatic injector, of which EpiPen is the only one readily available.
The solution: Change the FDA. Make it cheap and fast for a drug manufacturer to get approved to make any drug if they can prove that they are using industry-standard (or better) processes for quality control and if they are producing a chemically-identical product.
And exactly how do you propose to change that? Do you want FDA employees to work longer hours? Or do you want them to work twice as fast in the same hours? Can you speed them up like a tape recorder?
Actually, the FDA does a pretty good job right now. They approve drugs faster than European regulators. They had a backup several years ago when Congress (actually, Republicans) thought it would be a great idea to cut taxes and cut the budgets of government agencies.
I remember the CEO of a biotechnology company (I think Centicor) complaining that the FDA inspector couldn't come to his plant because they didn't have the budget for the train fare on Amtrack.
FDA regulation has little to do with why drugs cost so much money. More important is the Republicans refusing to let the government negotiate prices with the drug makers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In the UK, they have an agency, NICE, which decides how much the drugs are worth, which is often half or a third as much as the US price.
Without personal gain, shit just doesn't get done. You don't work for free. Why do you expect anyone else to.
You mean like penicillin? Or polio vaccine? Or insulin? Which were invented by people who refused to take patents and didn't try to make money out of it? The history of medicine is full of people who came up with important breakthroughs and weren't particularly interested in money.
Once you get a certain level of income, enough to raise a family in comfort with all the requirements of a good life, you don't really need more money and a lot of people will work for free just because they want to do something useful for the world.
A lot of doctors who are specialists make $300,000 a year. That should be enough for anybody.
Some of the most important work in medicine gets done free -- peer-reviewing journal articles and grant applications.
Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan who raised the price of EpiPens to $600, is making $16 million a year. Couldn't she get by on $1 million? Even Adam Smith would say that's excessive.
And yes, I've done some of my best work for free.
How could this possibly hurt the US economy or its workers? It's just a new business, with foreign money on the line, that must hire people in order to have the visa extended.
Since you ask --
The Wall Street Journal did a story after the Oakland, California race riots, to try to find the root causes of the riots.
A Korean grocery store owner made the news at the time because he and his relatives protected his store with shotguns.
The WSJ reported that he had been an officer in the Korean army. That's why they thought of defending their store with guns. (From other stories in the WSJ and elsewhere, I read that the Korean army at that time was particularly corrupt, in terms of giving military contracts to relatives of well-connected politicians and officers, etc. In New York City, according to the New York Times and everybody who knows what's going on, including real estate dealers and immigration lawyers, foreign investors from every corrupt country in the world are buying up New York real estate. But put that aside for the moment.)
The Korean owners came to this country through one of these investment provisions, which were even more lenient back then, and they brought their whole family.
Maybe it was a legitimate business operation that they thought would be profitable.
But any money they made out of a grocery in Oakland was insignificant compared to the financial benefits of moving their families to the U.S. and having their children go to college here and grow up with the opportunities here, as compared to the opportunities back in Korea.
(I know a Korean surgeon, who I think was born here, who is making at least $300,000 a year, which is much more than he could make back in Korea.)
The WSJ reporter found a black guy who had an auto repair shop right by the Korean grocery. The Koreans wanted to expand, and get a warehouse. The black guy also wanted to expand, and open a new facility. They both wanted the same industrial space nearby. The Korean guy outbid the black guy. The Korean guy had an easy time getting bank credit for the space, and the black guy couldn't get credit. So the Korean guy got the space.
There are some people (particularly on the WSJ editorial page) who say that the free market is the will of God, and the outcome of the free market is always good. They would say (without even needing to investigate the facts) that the Korean grocers would of necessity contribute more to the economy than the black auto repair guy. Maybe. But I'm not convinced.
The first lesson in this WSJ story is that immigration and foreign investment makes winners and losers. The black auto repair guy was a loser. Maybe he deserved to lose. But I'm not comfortable with the idea of a Korean military officer coming to Oakland with this wealth of mysterious origin and outbidding this hard-working black guy. You can work hard at your business and they can beat you just because they have access to more capital.
The second lesson that I would draw from it is, I'm not sure that these Korean grocers that we used to see all around New York City are such good businessmen or that they contribute that much to the economy. The purpose of their grocery store isn't to provide the best goods and services to their customers, or to provide good jobs to the workers in the neighborhood. The purpose of the grocery store is to get American citizenship for their families, and once they've done that they can (and do) close the store and leave.
After all, you don't have an efficient free market if people are running a business not to maximize their profits but for an ulterior purpose, like getting residency and citizenship.
I'm not singling out Koreans. I could tell a similar story about immigrants from any corrupt country. Russia, Haiti, and Saudi Arabia are high on the list lately.
If foreigners are willing and able to come in and contribute to this country, fine. But there are winners and losers, and the way our country is run, there are a lot of losers.