I've talked to a lot of Harvard professors, and sat in on their lectures. I've talked to community college instructors. There's no comparison.
Do you think that a biology class with Steven J. Gould is no better than a class with Joe Schmoe at Valley Community College?
The experience of college is to spend four years full-time dedicated to learning as much as you can, among people who are doing the same thing.
The experience of community college is to take 4 credits a semester in the evening while you work breakfast and lunch at McDonald's to pay the bills.
Education is a public responsibility. The community should pay for it. It's much too expensive for an individual student to afford. It's bad to put students into debt for college, especially non-dischargeable debt. If the economy takes a dive, students wind up with debts they'll never be able to pay off, like the kids in the Rolling Stone article.
In New York City, college used to be free. CCNY graduated Nobel laureates, it graduated the engineers like Andrew Grove who built the digital revolution, and it graduated the students who built the post-WWII economy, the greatest economic and scientific growth the world has ever seen. They graduated scientists, engineers and doctors whose parents were tailors and butchers, who say they would never have gone on to college unless it was free. Free college education worked.
New York State built the state university system, which was almost free. The University of California was modeled on the New York State system. They turned out an educated work force that built the most powerful economy in the world. It worked.
Now our anti-tax movements have destroyed free college education, and kids have to choose between going without a college degree and going into debt for the rest of their lives.
College has become a rich kid's privilege. We have more poverty and inequality, and less social mobility, in the U.S. today than we've had since the 1929 depression.
I recommend to teenagers today that if they can do it, they should become citizens of a European Union country, where they can get a free or cheap college education the way the previous generation did here.
Either that, or stay here and fight for your rights against the 1% that rule the country. You deserve the same free education that your European competitors get.
People study art in college because they learn things there. They learn how to create a better portfolio. There are few self-taught artists who make a living.
I know a lot of professional artists. Most of them studied art in school.
Furthermore, a lot of what people learn in art has direct relevance to engineering. A lot of art students become architects.
I know a commercial artist who was making $80,000 a year designing textbooks. The publishing industry is a big industry, and there are lots of people like that.
How many people do you know who were making $80,000 or more?
And what do you know about art? Did you ever hear of the Bauhaus? Is there an engineer or designer who didn't hear of the Bauhaus? I wouldn't want to drive on a bridge he built.
How do you know a liberal arts degree will get you nowhere?
Look at the biographies of Nobel laureates in science. Many of them started in the liberal arts. For example, Eric Kandell started out studying literature.
If I had sex with a 16-year-old girl, I would go to jail because she is not competent to give consent to having sex.
But if I sell that 16-year-old girl a college loan, even though I know that people in her situation are never able to pay those loans off and are sinking deeper into undischargeable debt, she is competent to agree to that contract.
College is not free in Europe. The people's taxes pay for it.
There is no such thing as free except for the breaths you take. Someone, somewhere, pays for everything, whether they want to or not.
Thank you for your right-wing talking point.
Most of us who were educated in English know that when we talk about "free" education, "free" libraries, "free" radio, "free" health care, "free" parks, and "free" sidewalks, somebody is paying for them.
We support them as a community responsibility. That's because the benefit they bring is much greater than the cost, and it's cheaper for the community to support them than for rugged individualists to buy them from vendors in the free market.
Sometimes we support them with voluntary contributions, but most of the time, that doesn't work. There is no functioning society today supported primarily by voluntary contributions. So we form governments, and agree by majority vote that everybody has to pay taxes to cover the costs of the services we use in common.
Some people want to be free riders and moochers, and get the benefits of the common services everybody else pays for without paying their share. Those people are called "conservatives" or "Republicans" or "libertarians" or "objectivists. When that happens we have to make them pay their share.
You can use your own Humpty-Dumpty language, and people in your own right-wing circle will use it to bond with each other, but nobody outside your circle uses the word "free" that way.
Yes, I saw all those publications. I looked them up on Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed which everyone who understands the medical literature knows about. The latest one, which I discussed above, is from 1999, which is pretty old. In that paper, Esselstyn used diet and cholesterol-lowering drugs, as I said above. Cholesterol-lowering drugs like Lipitor (atorvastatin) will lower a patient's cholesterol dramatically, and extend life in certain patients, with or without a low-cholesterol diet. If he wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his diet, he should have had one group on the diet, and one group on a normal diet. That study doesn't prove anything.
I have read the work of James Randi, Marcia Angell, John Ioannidis, and Ignaz Semmelweis. I've talked to some of them. I doubt that you've read the actual original articles that you're quoting. You're quoting out of context, you're using their work to prove your own beliefs that they don't agree with, and you're getting their ideas all wrong.
I know what the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association say about diet preventing cardiovascular disease. I know what those (mainstream, establishment) doctors wrote in the Washington Post about Bush's stent. I don't dispute that. What I do dispute is that diet can reverse cardiovascular disease to the extent that Fuhrman claims.
This is America. We have the First Amendment. Anybody can publish a book, no matter how stupid or poorly-supported its claims are.
What I want is an article in a major peer-reviewed journal, like The Lancet, that supports Fuhrman's claims. There isn't any. Fuhrman is happy to cherry-pick The Lancet, but he can't cite an article in The Lancet or any place else that supports his claims.
Ornish and Atkins published articles in JAMA. They've demonstrated small but significant benefits from diet. However, they doesn't claim to reverse heart disease the way Fuhrman does. Fuhrman hasn't published his results in The Lancet, JAMA, or any other major journal.
I'm using your post as a teachable moment. I'm trying to explain how science works.
Scientists submit their results to peer-reviewed journals. The journals send their results out to experts in the field to review their work. If an article appears in JAMA or Cardiology, you know that at least a handful of experts have reviewed the article and decided that its methods and logic were solid, and there weren't any obvious misrepresentations.
Fuhrman can publish his own stuff in a book and say whatever he wants. He can make misleading claims about what the scientific literature says. He can confuse issues like angioplasty and coronary bypass. He can use anecdotes. That's why a book like that isn't reliable the way a peer-reviewed journal is.
I looked up Esselstyn's work on Pubmed and I read his 1999 article in American Journal of Cardiology. I'll give him credit for publishing his results. He had 24 patients and no control group. He says he gave them cholesterol-lowering drugs. (But he doesn't say what the cholesterol-lowering drugs were.) So he's mixing the effect of diet with the effect of drugs. Yes, Lipitor will lower cholesterol. Yes, some researchers (and drug companies) believe that statins can reverse atherosclerosis. But he hasn't published any data since 1999, as far as I could see. If he ever publishes something in NEJM, JAMA, Lancet or BMJ, I'll read it there.
I haven't seen anything there in any peer-reviewed journals that shows plant-based diets can reverse most heart disease.
The findings indicated that there was no evidence that angioplasty and stent placement for coronary artery disease resulted in fewer heart attacks or deaths when compared to patients with the same level of disease who were not treated in this manner.
That's true, but irrelevant. As the Lancet reported in 2009, angioplasty and stent placement doesn't reduce deaths. Cardiologists don't use it to reduce death any more. They use it to reduce angina (pain). Of course there are unscrupulous doctors who do unnecessary surgery. Just as there are unscrupulous doctors who sell people overpriced, unnecessary vitamins and supplements, as Fuhrman is doing.
However, coronary artery bypass, which bypasses the occluded coronary arteries with grafts from arteries and veins, does reduce death. It extends life by about 6 years in one study that I read, but it depends on the patient population. One of the issues is that medical treatment (diuretics, ACE inhibitors, alpha-blockers, statins, etc.) has gotten so good that the advantage of surgery over best medical treatment has gotten smaller.
Here's one study.
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/112/9_suppl/I-371.full Surgery for Coronary Artery Disease: Comparing Long-Term Survival of Patients With Multivessel Coronary Disease After CABG or PCI Circulation. 2005; 112: I-371-I-376 doi: 10.1161/
Adjusted long-term survival for patients with 3-vessel disease was better after CABG than PCI (HR, 0.60; P<0.01) but not for patients with 2-vessel disease (HR, 0.98; P=0.77).
Conclusions— In contemporary practice, survival for patients with 3-vessel coronary disease is better after CABG than PCI, an observation that patients and physicians should carefully consider when deciding on a revascularization strategy.
Dr. Fuhrman (selectively) quotes The Lancet to argue that angioplasty and stents don't work.
Where are the published studies in major peer-reviewed journals to show that Dr. Fuhrman's diet treatment works? I don't think there are any.
There are studies published in in JAMA and NEJM of randomized trials of various dietary interventions, like the Atkins diet and traditional Greek diets, and some of them have good results, but nowhere near what Fuhrman is claiming.
Conclusion Come to your own conclusion.
I conclude that Fuhrman is a huckster, making misleading and probably false claims. If people drop their standard medical treatment in favor of his diets, he's killing people.
A patent is supposed to be "enabling," which means it should enable someone skilled in the art to create it (after the patent expires, for example). If it doesn't tell you how to make a working product, it's not a valid patent.
Or at least that's my understanding of patent law. IANAL.
My understanding of the German insurance system is that everyone is required to buy insurance, people who can't afford insurance get subsidies, and the insurance plans are heavily regulated to require the same minimum package. Some insurance plans will add additional services, like private rooms at hospitals, for additional fees.
As I also understand it, the German hospitals are run by the state governments, and some doctors are employed by the hospitals, while others are in their own private business, which we call fee for service.
It's not such a great idea to remove personal accountability. When nobody cares about being healthy because "someone else" will pay the bill, then nobody will be healthy, and the amount of money required to pay the bill every year will exceed all of our production (although we already do not produce enough to pay our bills).
This has been disproven by 40 years of research, starting with the Rand Health Insurance Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experiment and confirmed with studies by insurance companies and big corporations that self-insure their employees. The reason people believe it, when the data contradicts it, is that they're following an irrational free-market ideology. The rich conservatives figure that they can easily afford copayments themselves, and they can save money by not having to pay for the poor. It's a way of making the poor pay more for worse health care. Copayments result in worse health outcomes, and higher health costs. Companies have tried copayments and gone back when it wound up costing more. In health care, the free market fails, and we know the reasons why. If a doctor tells you to go to the hospital immediately because you could die, you can't start researching it on the Internet and comparing prices. If you want to discourage people from spending money on needless health care, you should put pressure on the doctors, who actually make the big purchasing decisions. That's what they do in countries like Canada and England, that spend half as much as we do. This is part of the Republican war on science. They try a free-market solution, it doesn't work, and instead of accepting failure, they ignore the facts and make excuses.
The Rand study was a controlled study that randomly divided people into different groups, with different levels of copay among them. That's the strongest evidence you can get.
The goal of the Rand study was to find out whether people who must pay copayments would be more likely to use appropriate treatments, and less likely to use inappropriate treatments.
-- The people with copayments were less likely to use inappropriate treatments, but they were also less likely to use appropriate treatments -- like drugs to control blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, etc. As a result, they wound up in the hospital more.
-- With copayments, people with asthma would save $100 by not taking their asthma controller medication, have an asthma crisis, go to the emergency room, and run up a $1,000 hospital bill that they couldn't afford to pay anyway.
The Rand study didn't have the statistical power to tell whether people with higher copayments were more likely to die, but they did find that the secondary outcomes like high blood pressure and high blood sugar were worse.
Studies of copayments have been done ever since, by insurance companies and big employers that were looking for ways to save money. They consistently found that copayments cost them more money in the long run.
-- When Medicare managed care companies imposed a small copayment for mammograms -- in over-65yo women, one group in which mammograms are cost-effective -- the rate of mammograms went down significantly. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa070929 Effect of Cost Sharing on Screening Mammography in Medicare Health Plans
-- IBM tried a copayment scheme with their employees. It wound up costing them more money, so they dropped it.
The reason it doesn't work is that the free market doesn't work in health care. The Nobel prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow explained why in an article seve
One of them actually met the legal requirements for a stop and arrest -- the suspect actually fit the description of a criminal -- but most of them didn't.
The admissions by the cops from officer to cop on the beat made it clear that they were violating the Fourth Amendment.
Nice example, but your single data point proves nothing. Somebody saw a guy busting into a house and called police, and she even said it could be the guy who lives there---she wasn't sure. An officer showed up and explained that he was looking into a report of a break-in. Gates became belligerent and abusive, so he got arrested.
You're a lawyer? I looked up the Massachusetts disorderly conduct statute that Gates was charged with (and there were a few articles by lawyers about this issue). Disorderly conduct required making a public disturbance. Gates was not in public. He was on his own porch, in the middle of his own fenced-in plot. There was nobody from the public around for him to disturb. He had a right to be disorderly on his own private property where he was bothering no one else. They had to throw the charge out, because it was invalid on its face. They couldn't have prevailed.
Gates became belligerent and abusive, so he got arrested.
If Gates had behaved perfectly, he wouldn't have been belligerent and abusive. But people in that situation often do get angry and offended.
Gates had no legal obligation to behave perfectly. He only had a legal obligation to follow the law, and it's not against the law to become "belligerent and abusive" in his own home under those circumstances.
On the other hand, Crowley had no right to arrest Gates. "Disrespecting a cop" is not a crime.
Gates also asked Crowley repeatedly for his name and badge number, and Crowley repeatedly refused. In New York City, that would be grounds for discipline, as you can read in the Scheindlin memorandum. In Gates' account, his being "belligerent and abusive" consisted of repeatedly demanding Crowley's name and badge number -- which was Gates' legal right.
It was a false arrest, and I wish Gates had settled the debate by suing Cambridge for false arrest.
Then the racial-industrial complex jumped in to milk it for maximum gain.
I'm glad they did. Do you want to live in a world where somebody can get arrested for repeatedly asking a cop for his badge number? I don't. They're protecting me. They're protecting the rest of us. They're protecting you.
Then the Agitator-in-Chief weighed in with his blanket statement that Gates was right and Crowley was wrong.
You're a lawyer? What was Obama's "blanket statement"? Citation needed. I thought Obama stuck up for Crowley when he shouldn't have, out of inappropriate even-handedness.
I somehow suspect you're not a defense lawyer. Or a constitutional lawyer.
Queens and Staten Island are high-crime areas. Being in a high-crime area is reason for suspicion. So the cops testified that they have reasonable suspicion to stop someone for being in Queens.
A guy is in Queens, he's black, somebody black committed a crime two weeks ago -- that's three reasons. Put them together and that's a reason to stop and frisk somebody. He's gotta be guilty of something.
Another reason is the way they walk. Walking too fast is reason for suspicion. Walking too slow is reason for suspicion. Walking at a normal speed is reason for suspicion -- they might be trying to avoid attention.
Think about it... black people are -no- different to us in any way except their appearance. The number of people that escape that trap and become highly successful proves it.
Except for the history of 100 years of slavery and another 100 years of Jim Crow that killed black people who tried to vote.
The City and its highest officials believe that blacks and Hispanics should be stopped at the same rate as their proportion of the local criminal suspect population. But this reasoning is flawed because the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent — not criminal. There is no basis for assuming that an innocent population shares the same characteristics as the criminal suspect population in the same area.
To put it in simple terms, if you happen to be black or Hispanic and have been clean all your life, you wouldn't like it if you were stopped simply because you are black or Hispanic.
Or to put it another way, just because a black neighborhood has a high rate of crime, you still can't suspend the Fourth Amendment to fight crime in that neighborhood.
Leroy Downs is a black male resident of Staten Island in his mid-thirties. On the evening of August 20, 2008, Downs arrived home from work and, before entering his house, called a friend on his cell phone while standing in front of a chain link fence in front of his house. Downs used an earpiece connected to the phone by a cord, and held the cell phone in one hand and the black mouthpiece on the cord in the other.
Downs saw a black Crown Victoria drive past and recognized it as an unmarked police car. The car stopped, reversed, and double-parked in front of Downs’s house, at which point Downs told his friend he would call back. Two white plainclothes officers, later identified as Officers Scott Giacona and James Mahoney, left the car and approached Downs.
One officer said in an aggressive tone that it looked like Downs was smoking weed. They told him to “get the [fuck] against the fence,” then pushed him backwards until his back was against the fence. Downs did not feel free to leave.
Downs explained that he was talking on his cell phone, not smoking marijuana, that he is a drug counselor, and that he knows the captain of the 120th Precinct. Without asking permission, the officers patted down the outside of his clothing around his legs and torso, reached into his front and back pants pockets and removed their contents: a wallet, keys, and a bag of cookies from a vending machine. The officers also searched his wallet.
After the officers failed to find any contraband, they started walking back to the car. Downs asked for their badge numbers. The officers “laughed [him] off” and said he was lucky they did not lock him up. Downs said he was going to file a complaint, and one of them responded by saying, “I’m just doing my [fucking] job.” Charles Joseph, a friend of Downs who lives on the same block, witnessed the end of the stop. After the officers drove away, Downs walked to the 120th Precinct to file a complaint.
Downs told Officer Anthony Moon at the front desk that he wanted to make a complaint and described what had happened. Officer Moon said that he could not take the complaint because Downs did not have the officers’ badge numbers, and that Downs should file a complaint with the CCRB. As Downs left the station he saw the two officers who stopped him driving out of the precinct in their Crown Victoria, and he wrote down its license plate number on his hand.
Downs then returned to the station. He tried to give Officer Moon the license plate information, but Officer Moon said that he should give the information to the CCRB instead. Downs waited at the station until he saw the two officers come through the back door with two young black male suspects.
Downs pointed out the two officers to Officer Moon and asked him, “Can you get their badge numbers?” Officer Moon talked to the officers and then told Downs “maybe you can ask them.” At that point, Downs went outside again and took a picture of the license plate on the Crown Victoria, which was the same number he had written on his hand.
Eventually, Downs spoke with a supervisor, who said he would try to get the officers’ badge numbers and then call Downs. The call never came. Having spent a few hours at the station, Downs went home.
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I've talked to a lot of Harvard professors, and sat in on their lectures. I've talked to community college instructors. There's no comparison.
Do you think that a biology class with Steven J. Gould is no better than a class with Joe Schmoe at Valley Community College?
The experience of college is to spend four years full-time dedicated to learning as much as you can, among people who are doing the same thing.
The experience of community college is to take 4 credits a semester in the evening while you work breakfast and lunch at McDonald's to pay the bills.
Education is a public responsibility. The community should pay for it. It's much too expensive for an individual student to afford. It's bad to put students into debt for college, especially non-dischargeable debt. If the economy takes a dive, students wind up with debts they'll never be able to pay off, like the kids in the Rolling Stone article.
In New York City, college used to be free. CCNY graduated Nobel laureates, it graduated the engineers like Andrew Grove who built the digital revolution, and it graduated the students who built the post-WWII economy, the greatest economic and scientific growth the world has ever seen. They graduated scientists, engineers and doctors whose parents were tailors and butchers, who say they would never have gone on to college unless it was free. Free college education worked.
New York State built the state university system, which was almost free. The University of California was modeled on the New York State system. They turned out an educated work force that built the most powerful economy in the world. It worked.
Now our anti-tax movements have destroyed free college education, and kids have to choose between going without a college degree and going into debt for the rest of their lives.
College has become a rich kid's privilege. We have more poverty and inequality, and less social mobility, in the U.S. today than we've had since the 1929 depression.
I recommend to teenagers today that if they can do it, they should become citizens of a European Union country, where they can get a free or cheap college education the way the previous generation did here.
Either that, or stay here and fight for your rights against the 1% that rule the country. You deserve the same free education that your European competitors get.
People study art in college because they learn things there. They learn how to create a better portfolio. There are few self-taught artists who make a living.
I know a lot of professional artists. Most of them studied art in school.
Furthermore, a lot of what people learn in art has direct relevance to engineering. A lot of art students become architects.
I know a commercial artist who was making $80,000 a year designing textbooks. The publishing industry is a big industry, and there are lots of people like that.
How many people do you know who were making $80,000 or more?
And what do you know about art? Did you ever hear of the Bauhaus? Is there an engineer or designer who didn't hear of the Bauhaus? I wouldn't want to drive on a bridge he built.
How do you know a liberal arts degree will get you nowhere?
Look at the biographies of Nobel laureates in science. Many of them started in the liberal arts. For example, Eric Kandell started out studying literature.
Look at the biographies of any successful people.
Ever met an unemployed aerospace engineer?
That's a good analogy.
If I had sex with a 16-year-old girl, I would go to jail because she is not competent to give consent to having sex.
But if I sell that 16-year-old girl a college loan, even though I know that people in her situation are never able to pay those loans off and are sinking deeper into undischargeable debt, she is competent to agree to that contract.
College is not free in Europe. The people's taxes pay for it.
There is no such thing as free except for the breaths you take. Someone, somewhere, pays for everything, whether they want to or not.
Thank you for your right-wing talking point.
Most of us who were educated in English know that when we talk about "free" education, "free" libraries, "free" radio, "free" health care, "free" parks, and "free" sidewalks, somebody is paying for them.
We support them as a community responsibility. That's because the benefit they bring is much greater than the cost, and it's cheaper for the community to support them than for rugged individualists to buy them from vendors in the free market.
Sometimes we support them with voluntary contributions, but most of the time, that doesn't work. There is no functioning society today supported primarily by voluntary contributions. So we form governments, and agree by majority vote that everybody has to pay taxes to cover the costs of the services we use in common.
Some people want to be free riders and moochers, and get the benefits of the common services everybody else pays for without paying their share. Those people are called "conservatives" or "Republicans" or "libertarians" or "objectivists. When that happens we have to make them pay their share.
You can use your own Humpty-Dumpty language, and people in your own right-wing circle will use it to bond with each other, but nobody outside your circle uses the word "free" that way.
Esselstyn has many peer reviewed publications:
http://www.heartattackproof.com/publications.htm
Yes, I saw all those publications. I looked them up on Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed which everyone who understands the medical literature knows about. The latest one, which I discussed above, is from 1999, which is pretty old. In that paper, Esselstyn used diet and cholesterol-lowering drugs, as I said above. Cholesterol-lowering drugs like Lipitor (atorvastatin) will lower a patient's cholesterol dramatically, and extend life in certain patients, with or without a low-cholesterol diet. If he wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his diet, he should have had one group on the diet, and one group on a normal diet. That study doesn't prove anything.
I have read the work of James Randi, Marcia Angell, John Ioannidis, and Ignaz Semmelweis. I've talked to some of them. I doubt that you've read the actual original articles that you're quoting. You're quoting out of context, you're using their work to prove your own beliefs that they don't agree with, and you're getting their ideas all wrong.
I know what the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association say about diet preventing cardiovascular disease. I know what those (mainstream, establishment) doctors wrote in the Washington Post about Bush's stent. I don't dispute that. What I do dispute is that diet can reverse cardiovascular disease to the extent that Fuhrman claims.
This is America. We have the First Amendment. Anybody can publish a book, no matter how stupid or poorly-supported its claims are.
What I want is an article in a major peer-reviewed journal, like The Lancet, that supports Fuhrman's claims. There isn't any. Fuhrman is happy to cherry-pick The Lancet, but he can't cite an article in The Lancet or any place else that supports his claims.
Ornish and Atkins published articles in JAMA. They've demonstrated small but significant benefits from diet. However, they doesn't claim to reverse heart disease the way Fuhrman does. Fuhrman hasn't published his results in The Lancet, JAMA, or any other major journal.
I'm using your post as a teachable moment. I'm trying to explain how science works.
Scientists submit their results to peer-reviewed journals. The journals send their results out to experts in the field to review their work. If an article appears in JAMA or Cardiology, you know that at least a handful of experts have reviewed the article and decided that its methods and logic were solid, and there weren't any obvious misrepresentations.
Fuhrman can publish his own stuff in a book and say whatever he wants. He can make misleading claims about what the scientific literature says. He can confuse issues like angioplasty and coronary bypass. He can use anecdotes. That's why a book like that isn't reliable the way a peer-reviewed journal is.
I looked up Esselstyn's work on Pubmed and I read his 1999 article in American Journal of Cardiology. I'll give him credit for publishing his results. He had 24 patients and no control group. He says he gave them cholesterol-lowering drugs. (But he doesn't say what the cholesterol-lowering drugs were.) So he's mixing the effect of diet with the effect of drugs. Yes, Lipitor will lower cholesterol. Yes, some researchers (and drug companies) believe that statins can reverse atherosclerosis. But he hasn't published any data since 1999, as far as I could see. If he ever publishes something in NEJM, JAMA, Lancet or BMJ, I'll read it there.
I haven't seen anything there in any peer-reviewed journals that shows plant-based diets can reverse most heart disease.
Now please start working on a replacement for my liver.
We've got it!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130225153130.htm
Liver Stem Cells Grown in Culture, Transplanted With Demonstrated Therapeutic Benefit
You are a mouse, aren't you?
...so this research is misguided in that sense. See: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
The link to Dr. Fuhrman's web site says:
The findings indicated that there was no evidence that angioplasty and stent placement for coronary artery disease resulted in fewer heart attacks or deaths when compared to patients with the same level of disease who were not treated in this manner.
That's true, but irrelevant. As the Lancet reported in 2009, angioplasty and stent placement doesn't reduce deaths. Cardiologists don't use it to reduce death any more. They use it to reduce angina (pain). Of course there are unscrupulous doctors who do unnecessary surgery. Just as there are unscrupulous doctors who sell people overpriced, unnecessary vitamins and supplements, as Fuhrman is doing.
However, coronary artery bypass, which bypasses the occluded coronary arteries with grafts from arteries and veins, does reduce death. It extends life by about 6 years in one study that I read, but it depends on the patient population. One of the issues is that medical treatment (diuretics, ACE inhibitors, alpha-blockers, statins, etc.) has gotten so good that the advantage of surgery over best medical treatment has gotten smaller.
Here's one study.
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/112/9_suppl/I-371.full
Surgery for Coronary Artery Disease: Comparing Long-Term Survival of Patients With Multivessel Coronary Disease After CABG or PCI
Circulation. 2005; 112: I-371-I-376 doi: 10.1161/
Adjusted long-term survival for patients with 3-vessel disease was better after CABG than PCI (HR, 0.60; P<0.01) but not for patients with 2-vessel disease (HR, 0.98; P=0.77).
Conclusions— In contemporary practice, survival for patients with 3-vessel coronary disease is better after CABG than PCI, an observation that patients and physicians should carefully consider when deciding on a revascularization strategy.
Dr. Fuhrman (selectively) quotes The Lancet to argue that angioplasty and stents don't work.
Where are the published studies in major peer-reviewed journals to show that Dr. Fuhrman's diet treatment works? I don't think there are any.
There are studies published in in JAMA and NEJM of randomized trials of various dietary interventions, like the Atkins diet and traditional Greek diets, and some of them have good results, but nowhere near what Fuhrman is claiming.
Conclusion
Come to your own conclusion.
I conclude that Fuhrman is a huckster, making misleading and probably false claims. If people drop their standard medical treatment in favor of his diets, he's killing people.
Juliet was 14 years old.
Example, see the judge who prevented parents from naming their child 'Messiah' because "There is only one true Messiah".
Or Jesus.
A patent is supposed to be "enabling," which means it should enable someone skilled in the art to create it (after the patent expires, for example). If it doesn't tell you how to make a working product, it's not a valid patent.
Or at least that's my understanding of patent law. IANAL.
My understanding of the German insurance system is that everyone is required to buy insurance, people who can't afford insurance get subsidies, and the insurance plans are heavily regulated to require the same minimum package. Some insurance plans will add additional services, like private rooms at hospitals, for additional fees.
As I also understand it, the German hospitals are run by the state governments, and some doctors are employed by the hospitals, while others are in their own private business, which we call fee for service.
It's not such a great idea to remove personal accountability. When nobody cares about being healthy because "someone else" will pay the bill, then nobody will be healthy, and the amount of money required to pay the bill every year will exceed all of our production (although we already do not produce enough to pay our bills).
This has been disproven by 40 years of research, starting with the Rand Health Insurance Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experiment and confirmed with studies by insurance companies and big corporations that self-insure their employees. The reason people believe it, when the data contradicts it, is that they're following an irrational free-market ideology. The rich conservatives figure that they can easily afford copayments themselves, and they can save money by not having to pay for the poor. It's a way of making the poor pay more for worse health care. Copayments result in worse health outcomes, and higher health costs. Companies have tried copayments and gone back when it wound up costing more. In health care, the free market fails, and we know the reasons why. If a doctor tells you to go to the hospital immediately because you could die, you can't start researching it on the Internet and comparing prices. If you want to discourage people from spending money on needless health care, you should put pressure on the doctors, who actually make the big purchasing decisions. That's what they do in countries like Canada and England, that spend half as much as we do. This is part of the Republican war on science. They try a free-market solution, it doesn't work, and instead of accepting failure, they ignore the facts and make excuses.
The Rand study was a controlled study that randomly divided people into different groups, with different levels of copay among them. That's the strongest evidence you can get.
The goal of the Rand study was to find out whether people who must pay copayments would be more likely to use appropriate treatments, and less likely to use inappropriate treatments.
-- The people with copayments were less likely to use inappropriate treatments, but they were also less likely to use appropriate treatments -- like drugs to control blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, etc. As a result, they wound up in the hospital more.
-- With copayments, people with asthma would save $100 by not taking their asthma controller medication, have an asthma crisis, go to the emergency room, and run up a $1,000 hospital bill that they couldn't afford to pay anyway.
The Rand study didn't have the statistical power to tell whether people with higher copayments were more likely to die, but they did find that the secondary outcomes like high blood pressure and high blood sugar were worse.
Studies of copayments have been done ever since, by insurance companies and big employers that were looking for ways to save money. They consistently found that copayments cost them more money in the long run.
-- Copayments raised costs. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa0904533 Increased Ambulatory Care Copayments and Hospitalizations among the Elderly. People made worse health care decisions.
-- When Medicare managed care companies imposed a small copayment for mammograms -- in over-65yo women, one group in which mammograms are cost-effective -- the rate of mammograms went down significantly. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa070929 Effect of Cost Sharing on Screening Mammography in Medicare Health Plans
-- IBM tried a copayment scheme with their employees. It wound up costing them more money, so they dropped it.
The reason it doesn't work is that the free market doesn't work in health care. The Nobel prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow explained why in an article seve
So God is a giant rat.
You have a funny definition of "liberal politicians."
Correct.
Readers can get a good legal education by reading the examples of stops in the memorandum. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750446/stop-and-frisk-memoranda.pdf
One of them actually met the legal requirements for a stop and arrest -- the suspect actually fit the description of a criminal -- but most of them didn't.
The admissions by the cops from officer to cop on the beat made it clear that they were violating the Fourth Amendment.
Or "not walking furtively." If they're trying too hard to be inconspicuous, they must be up to something.
George Zimmerman did.
Nice example, but it seems the answer is still the black guy.
Nice example, but your single data point proves nothing. Somebody saw a guy busting into a house and called police, and she even said it could be the guy who lives there---she wasn't sure. An officer showed up and explained that he was looking into a report of a break-in. Gates became belligerent and abusive, so he got arrested.
You're a lawyer? I looked up the Massachusetts disorderly conduct statute that Gates was charged with (and there were a few articles by lawyers about this issue). Disorderly conduct required making a public disturbance. Gates was not in public. He was on his own porch, in the middle of his own fenced-in plot. There was nobody from the public around for him to disturb. He had a right to be disorderly on his own private property where he was bothering no one else. They had to throw the charge out, because it was invalid on its face. They couldn't have prevailed.
Gates became belligerent and abusive, so he got arrested.
If Gates had behaved perfectly, he wouldn't have been belligerent and abusive. But people in that situation often do get angry and offended.
Gates had no legal obligation to behave perfectly. He only had a legal obligation to follow the law, and it's not against the law to become "belligerent and abusive" in his own home under those circumstances.
On the other hand, Crowley had no right to arrest Gates. "Disrespecting a cop" is not a crime.
Gates also asked Crowley repeatedly for his name and badge number, and Crowley repeatedly refused. In New York City, that would be grounds for discipline, as you can read in the Scheindlin memorandum. In Gates' account, his being "belligerent and abusive" consisted of repeatedly demanding Crowley's name and badge number -- which was Gates' legal right.
It was a false arrest, and I wish Gates had settled the debate by suing Cambridge for false arrest.
Then the racial-industrial complex jumped in to milk it for maximum gain.
I'm glad they did. Do you want to live in a world where somebody can get arrested for repeatedly asking a cop for his badge number? I don't. They're protecting me. They're protecting the rest of us. They're protecting you.
Then the Agitator-in-Chief weighed in with his blanket statement that Gates was right and Crowley was wrong.
You're a lawyer? What was Obama's "blanket statement"? Citation needed. I thought Obama stuck up for Crowley when he shouldn't have, out of inappropriate even-handedness.
I somehow suspect you're not a defense lawyer. Or a constitutional lawyer.
The police can't possibly have reasonable suspicion that every black person in NYC is a potential criminal.
The judge's memorandum went into that. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750446/stop-and-frisk-memoranda.pdf
Queens and Staten Island are high-crime areas. Being in a high-crime area is reason for suspicion. So the cops testified that they have reasonable suspicion to stop someone for being in Queens.
A guy is in Queens, he's black, somebody black committed a crime two weeks ago -- that's three reasons. Put them together and that's a reason to stop and frisk somebody. He's gotta be guilty of something.
Another reason is the way they walk. Walking too fast is reason for suspicion. Walking too slow is reason for suspicion. Walking at a normal speed is reason for suspicion -- they might be trying to avoid attention.
Think about it... black people are -no- different to us in any way except their appearance. The number of people that escape that trap and become highly successful proves it.
Except for the history of 100 years of slavery and another 100 years of Jim Crow that killed black people who tried to vote.
The City and its highest officials believe that blacks and Hispanics should be stopped at the same rate as their proportion of the local criminal suspect population. But this reasoning is flawed because the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent — not criminal. There is no basis for assuming that an innocent population shares the same characteristics as the criminal suspect population in the same area.
To put it in simple terms, if you happen to be black or Hispanic and have been clean all your life, you wouldn't like it if you were stopped simply because you are black or Hispanic.
Or to put it another way, just because a black neighborhood has a high rate of crime, you still can't suspend the Fourth Amendment to fight crime in that neighborhood.
This is from the memorandum in the case. There are many other accounts like this.
DAVID FLOYD, et al. vs. THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
David Floyd, et al. vs. The City of New York.
OPINION AND ORDER
08 Civ. 1034 (SAS)
Case 1:08-cv-01034-SAS-HBP Document 373
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/12/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-decision.html
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750446/stop-and-frisk-memoranda.pdf
1. Unconstitutional Stop and Frisk
a. Leroy Downs
i. Findings of Fact
Leroy Downs is a black male resident of Staten Island in his mid-thirties. On the evening of August 20, 2008, Downs arrived home from work and, before entering his house, called a friend on his cell phone while standing in front of a chain link fence in front of his house. Downs used an earpiece connected to the phone by a cord, and held the cell phone in one hand and the black mouthpiece on the cord in the other.
Downs saw a black Crown Victoria drive past and recognized it as an unmarked police car. The car stopped, reversed, and double-parked in front of Downs’s house, at which point Downs told his friend he would call back. Two white plainclothes officers, later identified as Officers Scott Giacona and James Mahoney, left the car and approached Downs.
One officer said in an aggressive tone that it looked like Downs was smoking weed. They told him to “get the [fuck] against the fence,” then pushed him backwards until his back was against the fence. Downs did not feel free to leave.
Downs explained that he was talking on his cell phone, not smoking marijuana, that he is a drug counselor, and that he knows the captain of the 120th Precinct. Without asking permission, the officers patted down the outside of his clothing around his legs and torso, reached into his front and back pants pockets and removed their contents: a wallet, keys, and a bag of cookies from a vending machine. The officers also searched his wallet.
After the officers failed to find any contraband, they started walking back to the car. Downs asked for their badge numbers. The officers “laughed [him] off” and said he was lucky they did not lock him up. Downs said he was going to file a complaint, and one of them responded by saying, “I’m just doing my [fucking] job.” Charles Joseph, a friend of Downs who lives on the same block, witnessed the end of the stop. After the officers drove away, Downs walked to the 120th Precinct to file a complaint.
Downs told Officer Anthony Moon at the front desk that he wanted to make a complaint and described what had happened. Officer Moon said that he could not take the complaint because Downs did not have the officers’ badge numbers, and that Downs should file a complaint with the CCRB. As Downs left the station he saw the two officers who stopped him driving out of the precinct in their Crown Victoria, and he wrote down its license plate number on his hand.
Downs then returned to the station. He tried to give Officer Moon the license plate information, but Officer Moon said that he should give the information to the CCRB instead. Downs waited at the station until he saw the two officers come through the back door with two young black male suspects.
Downs pointed out the two officers to Officer Moon and asked him, “Can you get their badge numbers?” Officer Moon talked to the officers and then told Downs “maybe you can ask them.” At that point, Downs went outside again and took a picture of the license plate on the Crown Victoria, which was the same number he had written on his hand.
Eventually, Downs spoke with a supervisor, who said he would try to get the officers’ badge numbers and then call Downs. The call never came. Having spent a few hours at the station, Downs went home.