Most physicians (myself included) are more frustrated with patients with mental problems than physical. And, as you point out, there are likely a number of other reasons aside from limited clinical efficacy that roll into this. Patients with congestive heart failure (typically) don't grab your stethoscope and try to strangle you.
But we've really only hit the low hanging fruit with current treatments - lots of room to improve. However, since the whole concept of psychiatric 'illness' is fairly vague, is on a continuum with normal behavior and because it so profoundly effects how we interact with each other and society, the implications for significantly improving our ability to manipulate the mind is somewhat troubling.
Of course, this may well be true with more 'physical' problems as well if gene manipulation and similar technologies actually work.
You're correct. We have monitors all over the place. In the OR / ER / nurses station. We transmit patient data all of the time. Images / text. We buy whatever we need from the open market. I've had a bit of an issue getting IT not to buy the absolute cheapest panels on the planet, but anything mid spec these days is perfectly fine.
Anything electrical needs to pass some simple leakage tests, but our bio med tech does this on every piece of electronic equipment at least once a year anyway. But no certification is required.
Radiologist like these idiot expensive BARCO monitors (about 5 grand a pop). They have a 16 bit data path from the card to the screen (everybody else uses 8 or 10 except most laptops which are typically 6 bit paths) and do a wonderful job of greyscale display, but they're not 'medical' devices.
No, I think it's more of a cop-out. Now, Slashdot doesn't even have to sort through the submissions to eek out a story. They just wander through some random RSS feed with perhaps some search terms (in this case the technical and ever interesting concept of VOIP), dump the blurb out and then let the rest of us figure out what's going on.
Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me? Bomb #20: Of course. Doolittle: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts? Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions. Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist? Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist. Doolittle: But how do you know you exist? Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious. Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist? Bomb #20: Hmmmm... well... I think, therefore I am. Doolittle: That's good. That's very good. But how do you know that anything else exists? Bomb #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun.
Generally, society gives a free pass to antisocial / psychopathic behavior until and unless it passes some artificial boundary. That boundary is flexible and varies from place to place and time to time. In our present culture, pyschopathic tendencies are in fact generously rewarded in many instances (politics, business) and it actually takes a serious transgression (axe murderer) to get nailed.
Of course, the big problem here is that personality disorders and actual mental illnesses exist along a complex, non linear, unstable gradation. Sure, you've been 'antisocial' or even worse at times. Sure, you have been depressed, perhaps even temporarily psychotic. But most of the time, I will assume, that you're behaviors (and thoughts) hang out within two standard deviations of the population. There are clearly people at then ends of the curve - they can be pretty darn scary. There are even more people (assuming a normal distribution which seems to be applicable here) who push at the boundaries of 'normal'. It's these folks that you see in jail or just not doing well in society.
It's also these folks that modern psychiatric care attempts to treat but really doesn't have a great track record for doing so. Some of these people would do better in an institutional setting but that is a complex, morally hazardous and tremendously expensive method that has a track record for being systematically abused.
Take your pill and be happy, comrade. It really is better that way.
There is this psychiatric issue called transference. (In this case the third definition) that may be operative here. I sometimes wonder exactly what kind of childhood the majority of Slashdot moderators had. Kinda scary.
But we are in general, much more successful in treatment of 'physical' conditions rather than 'mental' (See what I did there? I artificially made a distinction where there really isn't one.) With some of the new techniques and knowledge in neurobiology we are getting closer (although this has been said many times before).
The problem then becomes do you really want to go there? It is easy to imagine a period of time in the not to distant future when medical science understands cognition and emotion well enough to control it say, like we do with blood pressure. Take a pill, you're really better. No major nasty side effects. Clear efficacy. Perhaps even permanent cures.
I for one, am not sure I want to welcome those particular overlords.
Well, I am certainly not running around in a hoodie... Nor I am much interested in makeup. Active jamming is more my style but for now, I mostly live in a place that is so backwater that I doubt even Google understands much about it (too look at their maps of the place anyway).
And I do have both NoScript and Ghostery up in Firefox. Internet banking is done in a Linux VM off Parallels (mostly for security rather than privacy). I am not terribly worried about this - there are many more pressing issues in our society that will be our undoing, but I'm mostly bemused.
The Powers That Be could always go after you if they wanted to. If they didn't have any dirt on you, they could just make it up. Never been much of a problem..
Lots of room up here. Plenty of space. And if you wait it out long enough the climate will warm up enough to where you might even be able to grow some food.
Or perhaps older humans looked out over some vast ancient flood plain and realized it was a flood plain. A couple of nibbles off some fun mushrooms and a bag of fermented something or other and the prefrontal cortex goes wild....
What. You think Noah looked throughout all of the ark? That was a pretty big boat. Cubits and cubits of horseshit, zebra shit, rotifera dung etc.
I'll bet there were more than a few extra humans hiding away in that thing. And would they have stuck around once the ground dried up? Of course not. They would have high tailed it away from the rest of the group.
You certainly can't 'control' it. It might be possible to guide it to a small degree. Especially with the ubiquitous use of 'surveillance' cameras which are, at present, fairly low technology, low resolution devices that can be spoofed by various means.
Maybe a new line of cosmetics that had a lot of reflectivity in the infrared (where most of these cameras have a lot of sensitivity). Change your facial structure oh so slightly, make your hair look different. Perhaps some integrated IR / UV LEDs in your clothing to effect the same thing. Why there could be several millionaires hiding in this er, umm, opportunity. You just have to look at things the right way.
And of course, you could easily camouflage yourself by wearing baggy pants, a baseball hat and a hoodie, thereby looking like every under 25 male in the developed world.
Oh stop it. You can go off into the wilds and stay away from the IRS, UPS, AT&T and likely the NSA. Very, very few people stay completely off the grid. If you want to have the benefits of civilization, then you have to pay for it. That said, the ACA isn't going to help (or hurt much), the entire system is screwed up six ways from Sunday, but if you want to have any chance of reasonable rates you have to spread the costs as far and as wide a possible.
Perhaps there should be a way to opt out - you sign a form (and get branded, RFID'ed, tatooed or whatever) and you don't get to go to the ER. You don't get Police or Fire protection. You don't get mail. You can live your life in whatever rugged fantasy world you create for yourself. Goodluckwiththat.
Are they also checking if you can get high from a substance? Is somebody going to leak that list?
No need to do that. The Federal Government has gone to great expense and trouble to compile this exhaustive list of drugs that can get all the blinky lights in your brain going.
The big argument against dropping POTS is that cellular is simply not available everywhere you need a phone. In basements. In rural areas. Yes, you can bypass those limitations but I'm not seeing any legislation that forces the Really Big Corporations to do that.
Guarantee that everyone who needs a phone line can get reception, work on your redundancy and backup, nail the corporate weasels down tight and no problemo.
Slashdot Mirror
No shit, Sherlock.
A Public Safety Message.
You can usually get away with 'Gun control is using two hands', can't you?
Most physicians (myself included) are more frustrated with patients with mental problems than physical. And, as you point out, there are likely a number of other reasons aside from limited clinical efficacy that roll into this. Patients with congestive heart failure (typically) don't grab your stethoscope and try to strangle you.
But we've really only hit the low hanging fruit with current treatments - lots of room to improve. However, since the whole concept of psychiatric 'illness' is fairly vague, is on a continuum with normal behavior and because it so profoundly effects how we interact with each other and society, the implications for significantly improving our ability to manipulate the mind is somewhat troubling.
Of course, this may well be true with more 'physical' problems as well if gene manipulation and similar technologies actually work.
You're correct. We have monitors all over the place. In the OR / ER / nurses station. We transmit patient data all of the time. Images / text. We buy whatever we need from the open market. I've had a bit of an issue getting IT not to buy the absolute cheapest panels on the planet, but anything mid spec these days is perfectly fine.
Anything electrical needs to pass some simple leakage tests, but our bio med tech does this on every piece of electronic equipment at least once a year anyway. But no certification is required.
Radiologist like these idiot expensive BARCO monitors (about 5 grand a pop). They have a 16 bit data path from the card to the screen (everybody else uses 8 or 10 except most laptops which are typically 6 bit paths) and do a wonderful job of greyscale display, but they're not 'medical' devices.
No, I think it's more of a cop-out. Now, Slashdot doesn't even have to sort through the submissions to eek out a story. They just wander through some random RSS feed with perhaps some search terms (in this case the technical and ever interesting concept of VOIP), dump the blurb out and then let the rest of us figure out what's going on.
Fossil Fuel summer.
Nuclear Winter.
The world goes round in circles,
Yin / Yang.
Burma Shave.
Kilometers and Kilometer of stunted trees, frozen nights, stunted trees, gulags, stunted trees, vodka, stunted trees, blowing and drifting snow, stunted trees ....
Well, you get the idea.
Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me?
Bomb #20: Of course.
Doolittle: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?
Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.
Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Hmmmm... well... I think, therefore I am.
Doolittle: That's good. That's very good. But how do you know that anything else exists?
Bomb #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun.
Generally, society gives a free pass to antisocial / psychopathic behavior until and unless it passes some artificial boundary. That boundary is flexible and varies from place to place and time to time. In our present culture, pyschopathic tendencies are in fact generously rewarded in many instances (politics, business) and it actually takes a serious transgression (axe murderer) to get nailed.
Of course, the big problem here is that personality disorders and actual mental illnesses exist along a complex, non linear, unstable gradation. Sure, you've been 'antisocial' or even worse at times. Sure, you have been depressed, perhaps even temporarily psychotic. But most of the time, I will assume, that you're behaviors (and thoughts) hang out within two standard deviations of the population. There are clearly people at then ends of the curve - they can be pretty darn scary. There are even more people (assuming a normal distribution which seems to be applicable here) who push at the boundaries of 'normal'. It's these folks that you see in jail or just not doing well in society.
It's also these folks that modern psychiatric care attempts to treat but really doesn't have a great track record for doing so. Some of these people would do better in an institutional setting but that is a complex, morally hazardous and tremendously expensive method that has a track record for being systematically abused.
Take your pill and be happy, comrade. It really is better that way.
There is this psychiatric issue called transference. (In this case the third definition) that may be operative here. I sometimes wonder exactly what kind of childhood the majority of Slashdot moderators had. Kinda scary.
But we are in general, much more successful in treatment of 'physical' conditions rather than 'mental' (See what I did there? I artificially made a distinction where there really isn't one.) With some of the new techniques and knowledge in neurobiology we are getting closer (although this has been said many times before).
The problem then becomes do you really want to go there? It is easy to imagine a period of time in the not to distant future when medical science understands cognition and emotion well enough to control it say, like we do with blood pressure. Take a pill, you're really better. No major nasty side effects. Clear efficacy. Perhaps even permanent cures.
I for one, am not sure I want to welcome those particular overlords.
Well, I am certainly not running around in a hoodie... Nor I am much interested in makeup. Active jamming is more my style but for now, I mostly live in a place that is so backwater that I doubt even Google understands much about it (too look at their maps of the place anyway).
And I do have both NoScript and Ghostery up in Firefox. Internet banking is done in a Linux VM off Parallels (mostly for security rather than privacy). I am not terribly worried about this - there are many more pressing issues in our society that will be our undoing, but I'm mostly bemused.
The Powers That Be could always go after you if they wanted to. If they didn't have any dirt on you, they could just make it up. Never been much of a problem..
Give it time. Give it time. What was once back alley is now mainstream.
Look at the Kardishans, for instance.
Lots of room up here. Plenty of space. And if you wait it out long enough the climate will warm up enough to where you might even be able to grow some food.
An Historical Document for you to peruse if you are interested.
Or perhaps older humans looked out over some vast ancient flood plain and realized it was a flood plain. A couple of nibbles off some fun mushrooms and a bag of fermented something or other and the prefrontal cortex goes wild....
What. You think Noah looked throughout all of the ark? That was a pretty big boat. Cubits and cubits of horseshit, zebra shit, rotifera dung etc.
I'll bet there were more than a few extra humans hiding away in that thing. And would they have stuck around once the ground dried up? Of course not. They would have high tailed it away from the rest of the group.
Problem solved.
Oh, one more thing.
If you can't make money fighting the system, you certainly could make some by maintaining all of these electronic / computer gizmos.
Again, you folks just have to start looking at the bright side of things.
After all, nothing from nothing....
You certainly can't 'control' it. It might be possible to guide it to a small degree. Especially with the ubiquitous use of 'surveillance' cameras which are, at present, fairly low technology, low resolution devices that can be spoofed by various means.
Maybe a new line of cosmetics that had a lot of reflectivity in the infrared (where most of these cameras have a lot of sensitivity). Change your facial structure oh so slightly, make your hair look different. Perhaps some integrated IR / UV LEDs in your clothing to effect the same thing. Why there could be several millionaires hiding in this er, umm, opportunity. You just have to look at things the right way.
And of course, you could easily camouflage yourself by wearing baggy pants, a baseball hat and a hoodie, thereby looking like every under 25 male in the developed world.
Oh stop it. You can go off into the wilds and stay away from the IRS, UPS, AT&T and likely the NSA. Very, very few people stay completely off the grid. If you want to have the benefits of civilization, then you have to pay for it. That said, the ACA isn't going to help (or hurt much), the entire system is screwed up six ways from Sunday, but if you want to have any chance of reasonable rates you have to spread the costs as far and as wide a possible.
Perhaps there should be a way to opt out - you sign a form (and get branded, RFID'ed, tatooed or whatever) and you don't get to go to the ER. You don't get Police or Fire protection. You don't get mail. You can live your life in whatever rugged fantasy world you create for yourself. Goodluckwiththat.
I see nobody asked the real important questions.
Are they also checking if you can get high from a substance?
Is somebody going to leak that list?
No need to do that. The Federal Government has gone to great expense and trouble to compile this exhaustive list of drugs that can get all the blinky lights in your brain going.
A fifteen year old with a six digit UID?
What happened? Your parent's got bored with you and set you in front of Slashdot as a toddler?
Easy Peasy: Everybody gets CBs!
So are POTS. Especially for long distance.
The big argument against dropping POTS is that cellular is simply not available everywhere you need a phone. In basements. In rural areas. Yes, you can bypass those limitations but I'm not seeing any legislation that forces the Really Big Corporations to do that.
Guarantee that everyone who needs a phone line can get reception, work on your redundancy and backup, nail the corporate weasels down tight and no problemo.
Otherwise, leave the damned wires alone.
Doesn't the tin foil get uncomfortable after a while?