Which is why we need to fight to save them.
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Nah, feed them to sharks, then extract the cartilage.
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Surely we need to grind them up and sift the rubble?
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For an entertaining, easy-to-understand education on how to differentiate science from bullshit, read this book:
To pierce paywalls, there are a few things to do.
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Not all journals are paywalled; PLoS etc. If you’re interested in the general topic rather than a specific piece of research, have a look for a non-paywalled review article.
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Most university libraries have access. If you have a friend who is a student, see if you can borrow their login.
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Most scientists hate paywalls and are delighted with the idea that somebody might actually be interested in their work. A polite, brief email direct to the author will often result in them sending you a pdf.
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Many researchers maintain a website with links to free copies of their research. Google the authors.
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Also, their email address or other contact info should be right in the freely available abstract. It’s just that easy!
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You should publish! So we can read the detailed Methods section.
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You look to see if the journal is well-respected. The first article you mention is in an alternative medicine journal that is listed in Quackwatch.
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Anything beats Western medicine where they drug you with the most expensive drugs, cut things off/out… they are listed the third leading cause of death in the US and I am sure that is under reported.
Citation Needed.
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And a lot of the heart disease and cancer deaths are due to their treatments.
Yeah, not as simple as you try to make it out to be.
[quote]How much death is due to medical error, anyway?
I’ll conclude by giving my answer to the question that all of these
studies ask, starting with the IOM report: How many deaths in the US are
due to medical errors? The answer is: I don’t know! And neither do
Makary and Daniels—or anyone else for sure. I do know that there might
be a couple of hundred thousand possibly preventable deaths in
hospitals, but that number might be much lower or higher depending on
how you define “preventable.” I’m also pretty sure that medical errors,
in and of themselves, are not the number three cause of deaths. That’s
because medical errors rarely occur in isolation from serious medical
conditions, which means it’s very to attribute most deaths to primarily a
medical error. That number of 250,000 almost certainly includes a lot
of deaths that were not primarily due to medical error, given that
that’s 9% of all deaths every year.
But it’s even more than that. As I mentioned above, According to the CDC,
of the 2.6 million deaths that occur every year in the U.S., 715,000
occur in hospitals, which means that, if Makary’s estimates are correct,
35% of all hospital deaths are due to medical errors. On its face, such
a claim is very hard to believe, especially if you consider that, of
those who died in a hospital, 75% were age 65 and over, and 27% were age
85 and over. That’s a lot of people prone to dying because they are old
and ill, regardless of how good their care was. Add to that the fact
that between 2000 and 2010, hospital deaths decreased 8% even though the
number of hospitalizations increased 11%, and Makary’s numbers become
less and less credible.
Here are some other things I know. I know that the risk of death and
complications is a fairly meaningless number unless weighed against the
benefits of medical care, a point that Harriet Hall made long ago,
noting for example that an “an insulin reaction counts as an adverse
drug reaction, but if the patient weren’t taking insulin he probably
wouldn’t be alive to have a reaction.” I also know that Makary’s
suggestion that there should be a field on death certificates asking
whether a problem or error related to patient care contributed to a
patient’s death will be a non-starter in the litigious United States of
America, promises of anonymity notwithstanding.[/quote]
So your numbers are very misleading and would not be improved by drinking your own urine, taking photos of your poo, sleeping with crystals, or any of the hundreds of different non-sense alt med practices.
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None of those are things I do. But I DO stay as far away from Western mecicine as I can. Western medicine is mostly dictated by drug companies whose only goal is profit. I fee bad for anyone with faith in Western medicine.
I think you are doing yourself and others a disservice with your false, blanket condemnation of scientific medicine. That drug companies can be evil profiteers is not mutually exclusive with scientific medicine being effective. One can condemn the problems of drug companies while at the same time recognizing the proven (as in actually proven with studies) efficacy of scientific medicine.
I don’t have “faith” in scientific medicine, rather it is proven to work. Alt-med is the faith-based medicine, literally.
Also, you have no basis not to drink your own urine, take photos of your poo or sleep with magic crystals because you have no proven, objective way to separate what medical treatments work and which just seem to work. Science is the tool we have to do that. Intuition and magical thinking, on the other hand, are not reliable ways of separating what is true from what merely seems to be true - a fact also proven by science.
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We don’t need faith in medicine. Because it works a lot better than nothing. And I dare you to prove me wrong.
We know science based medicine works because we investigate it and test it against alternatives to medicine.
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Speaking of the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry:
This is how science-based medicine addresses these issues: by seeking to accurately understand the causes, and working to address the problems.
Not by abandoning the greatest scientific achievement of all time and embracing superstitous nonsense.
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Ah, such “Western medicine” as tooth brushing (originated in Africa). Or bone setting (practiced in ancient India).
“Western medicine” is nothing more than a slur to try and denigrate medicine we know works because we use science to quantify it. You’re discounting the thousands of advances that have let us literally double (literally as in it actually happened) our life span.
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Rejecting “Western Medicine” also means rejecting clean water, anti-sepsis and the Germ Theory of Disease. And anesthesia.
How about it, @donaleen, do you accept that germs cause disease? Or are viruses and germs “Western Medicine” that you reject?
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That really isn’t a good way to start a conversation about how to communicate clearly about what is and isn’t scientific.
I’ve only ever seen it used in frustration after a few rounds with someone for whom anecdotes trump data.
And yet that may actually be the worst place to use it - it is a preaching to the choir shorthand that doesn’t explain why the appeal to anecdotes is insufficient evidence in the face of systematically collected and statistically analyzed data. Perhaps “Metrics trump gut” or some other phrase could summarize the issue better.
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