Another Skepticism Thread - Audio

[Ron Collins]

To Angel of Ioren, I don't know much about the Belgian case and have no opinion on it. And I think it's highly unlikely that aliens are invading our bedrooms.

I did listen to the audio link on skepticism. My post was more about that, in that I think some skeptics are disingenuous on what their ultimate aims are. For a certain type of skeptic it's to deflate anomalous experiences by explaining them away (not just providing a scientific explanation for what may still be important experiences). To that type of skeptic it's about reality control, not science.

We don't stop watching sunsets because they're sunlight shining through dust. We don't stop listening to music because it's a human creation. And I don't think we should ignore anomalous experiences even if it turns out all of them can be explained scientifically.

very well said.

---------- Post added at 04:43 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:34 AM ----------

On July 26, 2000, the US medical community received a titanic shock to the system, when one of its most respected public-health experts, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revealed her findings on healthcare in America. Starfield was, and still is, associated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

The Starfield study, “Is US health really the best in the world?”, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came to the following conclusions:

Every year in the US there are:

12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;

7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;

20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;

80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;

106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.

This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer. [And this was ten years ago, I'm sure the numbers today are even higher.]

Need I remind everyone: There is a flip side to every coin of contention

These are good points but the breakdown is too ambiguous. Am I to discern that "106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines" means that the correct dosage was applied and the user didn't overdose? Is it possible that a slightly more scrutiny might paint a less ominous/malevolent image? The rest of the 225,000 are basically human error or complete accidents. So, a large portion can be removed from the science/technology debate. In other words, the science or technology didn't fail it was the fault of a human in the application of the science or technology.

 

[NTS]

Many years ago I was employed in a U. S. government job that required me to be examined by a public health physician (rather than a private doctor).

He told me that he often saw people in their 20s (like I was) and could guess based on their lifestyles and habits the health problems they would face in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. He thought the whole orientation of American medicine is wrong. Instead of intervening early by encouraging people to change the way they live, it intervenes after people are already sick, with the drastic treatments that sometimes lead to the results described above. This is on top of the fact that many Americans get no regular health care at all (it's not a legal right here).

So maybe conventional medicine isn't as scientific as we'd like to think either.