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OK, so the major issue that I see here is that the average person doesn't have the education to make an informed health benefit/risk decision. Would every member of the population who is uncertain about stuff be willing to go through a RN-level course to make an informed decision? Because only at an RN level in medicine is there an understanding level capable of independent decision making.
I would like to see free education for all, maybe we can work towards that.
Hey no, don't drag vape into this. World Health Organization estimates are at least 95% less harmful than smoking. That's harm reduction. Don't get me started on the studies that are skewed though, there are a ton of those. Like other than no-name china e-juice you won't find manufacturers purposefully adding diacetyl. Also you won't find users heating their coils to 900-degrees-F
How would you suggest a placebo-controlled study (we can easily make it double blind once placebo controlled) for any disease be structured? Please tell me your study design, because an ethical study design that doesn't put lives at risk is the issue.
Anyone trained in medical carries out appropriate screening to not vaccinate people with contraindications. This brings the rate of actual risk very close to zero.
You can't placebo-control because that would be highly unethical leading to sickness and death that would not have otherwise happened. You can't double blind as soon as you cant placebo control. You can't do crossover because the dead from your first trial cannot be un-dead, and those who lived now have a different baseline.
This argument is exploiting the lack of specialized education in the general population to know what those terms mean.
A beloved family member you care about very much is sick. They are in the hospital receiving treatment but their body and immune system are already taxed to the limit fighting to survive. A new Nurse arrives on shift, upon initial meeting the Nurse tells you that "I don't believe in vaccination and have never been vaccinated for contagious disease." Do you want that Nurse to take care of your sick family member? Or do you tell the supervisor you want a different nurse?
Completely agreed. I recently finished reading the book Dark Money by Jane Meyer. She lays out convincing evidence for how our political discourse and democracy is being undermined by monied interests. The Citizen's United court decision likely accelerated this as well.
If you're saying that the standard of 'reporting' on health and science in the media at large is often conflicting and distorted into a confusing and often contradictory form there is definitely validity in that. John Oliver has a great segment called 'Scientific Studies' I'll link at the end of this post, everyone should watch this.
If you are able to read the journals directly and have studied how to critically evaluate scientific studies I can guarantee that there is significantly, like thousands-fold, more consistent information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw
The risk is overall low, often this debate gets hijacked by debating over degree of risk, which is impossible to exactly establish based on epidemiological data. All the data we have indicates no risk to vaccination, and some risk to not vaccinating. There are also swaths of the population that are on immune-suppressing meds for a wide range of illness, older people in general, and anyone else with a compromised immune system that also rely on herd immunity.
Ethically yes, obviously it's many orders of magnitude worse to deny your septic child antibiotics than it is to not vaccinate them but in my view it's on the same spectrum. The data we have is all epidemiological, which is inherently somewhat fuzzy, however a plethora of well-designed studies have crunched the numbers different ways and absolutely no link can be found between rates of childhood vaccination and autism. Vaccination was considered one of the massive health breakthroughs of the 20th century. We have pretty much eradicated Hepatitis B for instance while it's still rampant in many Asian countries. From a Medical standpoint there is no valid reason not to vaccinate. I'm not advocating forcible vaccination and understand why that could make this hysteria worse however as a society we should examine where this misinformation is arising and how it's being amplified.
Ocasio-Cortez has given me new hope that the political system can still be changed for the better, its similar now to the roaring 20's but not too late. It just has to be dramatic, and it has to start with us the people demanding change.
I try to skip Verge and Medium for the reason that most follow the format of: Salacious clickbait headline, loosely related word salad that ends abruptly. Sometimes it feels like they pay a person off Fiver for content, then just edit the headline.
Fiver is also often why self-pub books get a bad rap too, you'd be surprised how many 'authors' just pay someone in a poorer country, usually the Philippines, to come up with the bulk of something just-enough resembling content. I know this because then they sell this as a business model to aspiring make-it-self-pub-author, you can make more money on a book on how to make money churning out sub-par content with very little work and even less original content.
This is why piracy can be a net benefit to society, to separate the wheat from chaff, so-much-chaff, instead of rewarding hucksters.
The issue here is that these are parents making decisions for their minor children, not themselves. For example it has been ruled child abuse and illegal for Christian Scientists to deny their minor children life-saving medical treatment.
The other issue here is that herd immunity or lack thereof can put other people's children at risk, not everyone is a responder to vaccination.
This is the California housing crisis in a microcosm. Anything, any reason to delay building anything that would promote enough apartments for people. Driving around some of the most expensive zip codes are there are a plethora of forty to fifty year old store-front strip malls that could easily be developed to mixed use. From what I have read it's both frustrating to those who would want to buy and even more so for those who attempt to build.
Of course the extra irony here is someone confusing a laundromat with an actual historical site with some degree of gravity.
It's not an impossibility just an anomaly to be self-made and requires a lot more luck than just gumption and hard work. The far-greater majority of wealth is inherited. Technically you could argue El Chapo was self-made, so its possible but the less resources you have available the less probable. I recommend reading the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Piketty, it's an amazingly well researched and multidisciplinary work.
To me the main issue is improper animal husbandry and disgusting slaughterhouse practices directly impact food safety. Grinding beef at the slaughterhouse, using additives even though ammonia is used to make it safer does not make it safe. Bacterial contamination in conventionally processed ground beef is much higher, prevalence of multi-drug resistant bacteria for example was 18% for conventionally processed vs. 6-8% for organic and grass fed respectively. If you scroll to the bottom of the article there are some informative bar graphs.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/food/how-safe-is-your-gr...
Unfortunately for consumers the US Government deregulated the term "grass fed" as of two years ago, therefore it now means there is no legal standard to the term and doesn't really mean anything. You have to trust the supplier.
http://sustainableagriculture.net/blog/release-usda-revokes-...
edit: fixed second link
Right? The literature I have seen so far all indicates that BPA was replaced with even more toxic alternatives without the negative publicity, its more marketing than health.
As for as diabetes, all signs point to China beating US on rates in the near future due to a combination of genetics and rice. Popularity of KFC probably isn't helping either.
I would start with the Foundation trilogy first (Foundation,
Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation). Foundation for me was a perfect book. I don't remember if I finished the robot series though, and the books looking at Wiki, have a ton of content continuing on the original universe. I mean if I started at episode I of Star Wars I never would have made it to episode IV.
One of my favorite things about Asimov in general is that he is overall optimistic about the future, some of his short stories are really good too, a time-traveling Shakespeare one stuck out for me.
I also wanted to mention that there is a direct correlation between income inequality and suicide rate, I'm also of the opinion that the 'opioid epidemic' in the United States is also a reflection of this. https://theconversation.com/why-is-suicide-on-the-rise-in-th...
I found this sick and reprehensible as well.
I'm going to leave the lyrics of my favorite recent song here that deals with the issue in a manner I totally relate to, as a rebuttal to the article. Ghost by Badflower https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/badflower/ghost.html
I mean this actually makes a lot of sense to me in that in the US (my location) the majority of talking points, memos and even verbatim legislation is furnished by think tanks and 'public interest' groups with the money to fund and push their own agendas. Our politicians are already taught to repeat or support whatever copy they are given, without understanding the issue or implications. Critical thinking skills often seem at odds with the current political climate.