21st November 2007, 2:35 PM
Who has seen that video? What is your thoughts? Do you have a medical story? I know I met a girl from Ohio who moved to Canada because her family could not afford medical care in America.
21st November 2007, 2:35 PM
21st November 2007, 4:20 PM
Just one?
Well there's really not much of a health care system at all here in America. So yeah, poorer people can't afford health care. That's all there is to it really.
Michael Moore often gets a lot of the details wrong and goes with way too much appeal to emotion, so I didn't bother seeing that movie. I figured it was a "does more harm than good" sort of thing like Captain Planet was.
The fact is though, my family is not what you call "well to do", so this does affect pretty much everyone I know. I don't like airing my dirty laundry online (though I'll say this much, year after year my health for the past 5 years has been solid freakin' gold, I think I'm invincible, I mean I haven't even vomitted, no wait I still have my allergies but I mean that's just going to be expected). Anyway, more than a few just go without going to a doctor in spite of some pretty bad symptoms because they just can't afford to, literally. It's more than a little disturbing and it usually takes another family member more or less forcing them to go and paying the bill for them.
That said, what the medical system covers can also be disturbing at times. Far too many politicians want to expand it, but expand it the wrong way. That is, they want to get more funding not for stuff that will actually save lives, but for stuff that the people ASK them to support (politics, what an interesting thing...), whether it works or not. No one seems to want federal paid chemotherapy or radiation treatment for cancer patients. Heck, I know the process can weaken someone pretty bad, but the fact is it has a VERY high success rate, like 85%, and is the best thing we have going. Rather, they want to dump insane amounts of money providing health care in the form of drinking magic water. Er, sorry, homeopathy (look it up, it isn't just a natury sounding word, it's nonsense). Heck those guys can't even figure out which "cure" is which by any means other than the label (no test they can apply, because it's WATER, very shaken WATER). That's right, they want health care supporting this garbage with NO scientific evidence supporting it instead of towards stuff that DOES have a large body of evidence supporting it. Maybe it's cheaper, or maybe it's just cowing to the demands of a largely deceived public. Either way, when people say make health care better, I'm pretty sure they tend to want stuff that might actually work. Just giving people water and telling them it works just eases their mind, which while it may make them feel a little better in the short term (placebo effect), won't actually cure anything major. Most it'll do is get the brain to ignore chronic pain or trigger a stronger immune response in the cases of infection, but in the cases of diseases our immune system can't handle normally or severe physical injury or cancer, in which our body's immune system doesn't even identify it as a threat, placebo is worthless for anything but pain relief.
I'll just expand on the whole homeopathy thing because I think it's important to realize exactly what it is, since homeopaths don't really explain it's mysterious workings to patients. Most don't even realize that weird chemical they are drinking that "doesn't taste bad at all, it looks like water" actually IS frickin' water. Basically the idea is "like cures like". The idea is if you are suffering from mercury poisoning, take mercury and it'll trigger an immune response. This is THEIR idea mind you. But it gets better. You see they found a long time ago that people who tried taking mercury or other large doses of various substances were... dying. So, they came up with the "problem", dilutions. The more diluted the substance was, the less often they seemed to die (this is about the most scientific this idea ever got by the way). Thus, the dilution thing came to be. They will tell you, these cures turn out to work BETTER the LESS you take. Mind you, take this to it's logical conclusion and they get a little upset. (Logical conclusion of course being that the ultimate cure is taking NONE of it for INFINITE results.) What sort of dilutions are we talking about?
Here's their method of dilution. They take the cure and mix it in 1 to 10 (sometimes 1 in 100) in some water. Well, it isn't always water. If it is soluble, they use water or sometimes alcohol. If it isn't, they grind it up and stir it into some powdered lactose. They then stir it in a weird way. They basically just shake it up and down, then left and right, then forward and backward. For some reason doing it "in all 3 dimensions" is needed. Eh, oh well. Anyway they then take a drop or spoonful of that mixture and put it into another vial of whatever at the same ratio as before (either x10 or x100) and repeat the process. This gets pretty dilute pretty fast and is easier than doing it all in one mixing container, and why it's easier makes sense in the next paragraph...
Um, well here's where math might help. As in any discipline, true understanding is mathematical understanding. You see if you look at the bottles these cures come in, they will mark them all with a number next to either a C or an X. They use X to show it's diluted by powers of ten. So 6X, a pretty standard level, is 1 to 1,000,000. That's one in a million, literally, assuming they dilute it right. The C is a power of 100. Some of the more diluted you'll see comes in 30C. That's dilute. That means 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. I typed that out because I have no idea what the word for that number is. What I DO know is that's 1 molecule of cure per volume of matter 30,000,000,000 times the size of Earth. So THAT is why they need all those containers. All said, the odds of you getting even a single molecule of the active ingredient (which very often is a sample of whatever they think is in your body causing the problem anyway), make winning the lottery look mundane.
So here's the thing. Those dilutions finally made homeopathy safe. That's why, today, they can claim there are no side effects. That's right, there are no effects at all! It is as safe as drinking water. Well the problem is they had to realize to themselves eventually, or at least defend to others, how what has literally been reduced to water could ever cure someone now, at least cure them better than just drinking a small vial of water a day could and be worth that kind of money.
Now's the part that'll make your head hurt. I really don't know who first came up with this explanation, or why they were so sure it was accurate. My guess is they were so sure it worked that it "had" to be this way. Basically they invented the concept of "water memory". Their dilutions, originally meant as a safety precaution and to show "less is more" via dilution were now the MOST important part of the process. Now it didn't matter that the active ingrediant was gone. What gave it the power is that the water "remembers" the active ingrediant, somehow, and triggers the correct reaction by the body. The problems with this explanation are legion... The first is zero possible mechanisms wherein water can even HAVE memory on a molecular level. There's nothing you can alter there. Let's say you use one of the few methods you can of altering it, say ionizing it, well ionizing is no way to convince the body that the water is in fact, say, st john's wart. Further the specific interactions of various plant chemicals on our body's chemicals are well documents. You know, breaking up of this molecule and so on, and a substance like water just isn't going to physically DO that stuff. Even if it "remembered" it, the energy needed to do the very specific chemical reactions that the active ingrediants would actually do has to come from somewhere. There's also the matter of zero evidence supporting this water memory thing. The biggest issue though is how the water selectively decides WHICH susbstance in it's dilution to remember. When you have the insane levels of dilution they are talking about, it doesn't really matter if there is more or less by some small amount in that first sample. The fact is, completely pure water is nearly impossible to come by, and they don't use that, no matter what they say. Running water through a focet filter isn't going to be enough. That first sample, and all subsequent substances it gets mixxed in with, will have dust, dirt, skin cells, bacteria, and hey trace amounts of things like arsenic while we're at it (in amounts that are only enough that they can be traced, not enough to cause us any harm or we'd die from drinking the stuff, but hey it's the homeopaths that think less is more). Why doesn't the water remember that? Why does the water specifically remember only what the homeopaths wanted it to?
Well, they tend to ignore that last part, but as for specific mechanism, when pressed they tend to invoke quantum physics. This is the stand-by explanation for pretty much all nonsense these days. The thing is, the only people that can possibly have any say on quantum physics are people that actually know what it IS. These people go on and on about quantum physics but get a totally blank look when you actually call them on it and ask if they even know what a quark is, or color exchange processes between various quark types to create baryonic matter. All they know of quantum physics seems to come from vague misunderstandings of some famous experiments. A common one? Mind determines reality, as misunderstood by experiments like the light slit experiment (and a big misunderstanding of what "observe" means in quantum interactions, namely that it refers to an interaction, between any two things, an "observation" occurs the moment light is absorbed and emmitted again by a particle, or when two particles interact, basically they are alone until they interact and verbage for some reason calls that an observation, no humans, not even a camera or a recording device, is needed, just the interaction, which pretty much takes "mind" out of the picture). They don't actually understand any of it, they are just convinced that something in quantum physics defends it. Hint? Nothing does. Nothing about current understanding of particle physics shows water, or alcohol, or any molecule to be capable of memory. Memory, after all, requires two very important things. A MEASURABLE changable state (water isn't water any more if you change it's molecular structure, and something so small it can't be measured can't be used as memory) and some system that can interpret that change in state as something meaningful to that system. For example, a book is a form of memory so long as there are people, or computer imaging systems, that can read it. When that's lost, it isn't memory any more. What would our human bodies, or what system in our bodies, would be informed as to the workings of homeopathic cures?
Yeah, I'd say it's all nonsense. Or, at the very least, it working would basically overthrow EVERY SINGLE field of science. Now, I'm not saying that's impossible. I certainly would be very interested to find that out and so would every single scientist out there. Not knowing things is job security for a scientist after all. Every single one would LOVE to overthrow their field with some new theory of everything. The main difference is the average scientist understands the need to show some evidence to back up their idea, and generally they form the ideas after the evidence comes in anyway. Homeopaths don't see that as a big problem.
The last issue is one of faith really. They come in convinced beforehand their method works. Every patient that says "hey I think I do feel better" (note, a patient's statement is never evidence unless there's a double blind trial to eliminate bias or expectations as much as possible) just confirms it more to them, and they don't like tests. Recently they have all come to the conclusion and will tell you that homeopathy "can't be tested". They say by it's very nature there's no way to properly test it and the double blind test is "flawed". Well, namely because they always fail I suppose, but when you press them to explain WHY it can't be tested, they never really have an explanation. They just say it's outside the domain of science. That doesn't make sense. Science is just a method for finding out about the world. It doesn't matter if it is made of matter or energy or information or spirit particles or chakra or karma. The only thing that matters is if it can produce a noticable effect, which homeopathy certainly is claiming it can do. If it makes people get well, that can be measured. It may not be explainable currently, or maybe ever, but if it is real, it can be measured and shown to exist. That's all science is, and it'll work on anything that can have an effect on the real world. Indeed, if you could just show it worked, it wouldn't be alternative medicine at all, it would just be medicine, implemented and used by the whole community, since it is in their best interests to use the best cures available. It is also in the best interests of the big bad drug companies, which while I am as disgusted as anyone by their advertising and the prices, at least it does exactly what it says it will do, right down to the explosive anal leakage. The whole conspiracy angle of "keeping customers sick" assumes they have it down to a science of keeping them ill but alive for a long time, since living customers buy longer than dead ones, and it also assumes that EVERY SINGLE employee of the companies is a total sociopath with not a whit of moral concience in any of their offices at all.
Let's say then though that homeopathy is real, it works, but it cures exactly as quickly and exactly as often as one would get better had they taken no cure at all. Well first I'd ask, if you have no evidence for it working, and under this claim you say it can never actually have a measurable effect on anything to show it works, by what reason did you come to believe this was the case anyway? Secondly I'd ask, if it is the same as not taking a cure but is nonetheless there, SO WHAT? What does it matter? Who cares? How does it benefit anyone? How can we even learn more about it or the rest of reality through it and be awed by it? And, of course, why should anyone pay money and waste time on it INSTEAD of seeking out a cure that actually does have a noted benefit? Indeed why should anyone use it to SUPPLEMENT a noted cure instead of saving their money for more working cure or just something for themselves?
Well there's really not much of a health care system at all here in America. So yeah, poorer people can't afford health care. That's all there is to it really.
Michael Moore often gets a lot of the details wrong and goes with way too much appeal to emotion, so I didn't bother seeing that movie. I figured it was a "does more harm than good" sort of thing like Captain Planet was.
The fact is though, my family is not what you call "well to do", so this does affect pretty much everyone I know. I don't like airing my dirty laundry online (though I'll say this much, year after year my health for the past 5 years has been solid freakin' gold, I think I'm invincible, I mean I haven't even vomitted, no wait I still have my allergies but I mean that's just going to be expected). Anyway, more than a few just go without going to a doctor in spite of some pretty bad symptoms because they just can't afford to, literally. It's more than a little disturbing and it usually takes another family member more or less forcing them to go and paying the bill for them.
That said, what the medical system covers can also be disturbing at times. Far too many politicians want to expand it, but expand it the wrong way. That is, they want to get more funding not for stuff that will actually save lives, but for stuff that the people ASK them to support (politics, what an interesting thing...), whether it works or not. No one seems to want federal paid chemotherapy or radiation treatment for cancer patients. Heck, I know the process can weaken someone pretty bad, but the fact is it has a VERY high success rate, like 85%, and is the best thing we have going. Rather, they want to dump insane amounts of money providing health care in the form of drinking magic water. Er, sorry, homeopathy (look it up, it isn't just a natury sounding word, it's nonsense). Heck those guys can't even figure out which "cure" is which by any means other than the label (no test they can apply, because it's WATER, very shaken WATER). That's right, they want health care supporting this garbage with NO scientific evidence supporting it instead of towards stuff that DOES have a large body of evidence supporting it. Maybe it's cheaper, or maybe it's just cowing to the demands of a largely deceived public. Either way, when people say make health care better, I'm pretty sure they tend to want stuff that might actually work. Just giving people water and telling them it works just eases their mind, which while it may make them feel a little better in the short term (placebo effect), won't actually cure anything major. Most it'll do is get the brain to ignore chronic pain or trigger a stronger immune response in the cases of infection, but in the cases of diseases our immune system can't handle normally or severe physical injury or cancer, in which our body's immune system doesn't even identify it as a threat, placebo is worthless for anything but pain relief.
I'll just expand on the whole homeopathy thing because I think it's important to realize exactly what it is, since homeopaths don't really explain it's mysterious workings to patients. Most don't even realize that weird chemical they are drinking that "doesn't taste bad at all, it looks like water" actually IS frickin' water. Basically the idea is "like cures like". The idea is if you are suffering from mercury poisoning, take mercury and it'll trigger an immune response. This is THEIR idea mind you. But it gets better. You see they found a long time ago that people who tried taking mercury or other large doses of various substances were... dying. So, they came up with the "problem", dilutions. The more diluted the substance was, the less often they seemed to die (this is about the most scientific this idea ever got by the way). Thus, the dilution thing came to be. They will tell you, these cures turn out to work BETTER the LESS you take. Mind you, take this to it's logical conclusion and they get a little upset. (Logical conclusion of course being that the ultimate cure is taking NONE of it for INFINITE results.) What sort of dilutions are we talking about?
Here's their method of dilution. They take the cure and mix it in 1 to 10 (sometimes 1 in 100) in some water. Well, it isn't always water. If it is soluble, they use water or sometimes alcohol. If it isn't, they grind it up and stir it into some powdered lactose. They then stir it in a weird way. They basically just shake it up and down, then left and right, then forward and backward. For some reason doing it "in all 3 dimensions" is needed. Eh, oh well. Anyway they then take a drop or spoonful of that mixture and put it into another vial of whatever at the same ratio as before (either x10 or x100) and repeat the process. This gets pretty dilute pretty fast and is easier than doing it all in one mixing container, and why it's easier makes sense in the next paragraph...
Um, well here's where math might help. As in any discipline, true understanding is mathematical understanding. You see if you look at the bottles these cures come in, they will mark them all with a number next to either a C or an X. They use X to show it's diluted by powers of ten. So 6X, a pretty standard level, is 1 to 1,000,000. That's one in a million, literally, assuming they dilute it right. The C is a power of 100. Some of the more diluted you'll see comes in 30C. That's dilute. That means 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. I typed that out because I have no idea what the word for that number is. What I DO know is that's 1 molecule of cure per volume of matter 30,000,000,000 times the size of Earth. So THAT is why they need all those containers. All said, the odds of you getting even a single molecule of the active ingredient (which very often is a sample of whatever they think is in your body causing the problem anyway), make winning the lottery look mundane.
So here's the thing. Those dilutions finally made homeopathy safe. That's why, today, they can claim there are no side effects. That's right, there are no effects at all! It is as safe as drinking water. Well the problem is they had to realize to themselves eventually, or at least defend to others, how what has literally been reduced to water could ever cure someone now, at least cure them better than just drinking a small vial of water a day could and be worth that kind of money.
Now's the part that'll make your head hurt. I really don't know who first came up with this explanation, or why they were so sure it was accurate. My guess is they were so sure it worked that it "had" to be this way. Basically they invented the concept of "water memory". Their dilutions, originally meant as a safety precaution and to show "less is more" via dilution were now the MOST important part of the process. Now it didn't matter that the active ingrediant was gone. What gave it the power is that the water "remembers" the active ingrediant, somehow, and triggers the correct reaction by the body. The problems with this explanation are legion... The first is zero possible mechanisms wherein water can even HAVE memory on a molecular level. There's nothing you can alter there. Let's say you use one of the few methods you can of altering it, say ionizing it, well ionizing is no way to convince the body that the water is in fact, say, st john's wart. Further the specific interactions of various plant chemicals on our body's chemicals are well documents. You know, breaking up of this molecule and so on, and a substance like water just isn't going to physically DO that stuff. Even if it "remembered" it, the energy needed to do the very specific chemical reactions that the active ingrediants would actually do has to come from somewhere. There's also the matter of zero evidence supporting this water memory thing. The biggest issue though is how the water selectively decides WHICH susbstance in it's dilution to remember. When you have the insane levels of dilution they are talking about, it doesn't really matter if there is more or less by some small amount in that first sample. The fact is, completely pure water is nearly impossible to come by, and they don't use that, no matter what they say. Running water through a focet filter isn't going to be enough. That first sample, and all subsequent substances it gets mixxed in with, will have dust, dirt, skin cells, bacteria, and hey trace amounts of things like arsenic while we're at it (in amounts that are only enough that they can be traced, not enough to cause us any harm or we'd die from drinking the stuff, but hey it's the homeopaths that think less is more). Why doesn't the water remember that? Why does the water specifically remember only what the homeopaths wanted it to?
Well, they tend to ignore that last part, but as for specific mechanism, when pressed they tend to invoke quantum physics. This is the stand-by explanation for pretty much all nonsense these days. The thing is, the only people that can possibly have any say on quantum physics are people that actually know what it IS. These people go on and on about quantum physics but get a totally blank look when you actually call them on it and ask if they even know what a quark is, or color exchange processes between various quark types to create baryonic matter. All they know of quantum physics seems to come from vague misunderstandings of some famous experiments. A common one? Mind determines reality, as misunderstood by experiments like the light slit experiment (and a big misunderstanding of what "observe" means in quantum interactions, namely that it refers to an interaction, between any two things, an "observation" occurs the moment light is absorbed and emmitted again by a particle, or when two particles interact, basically they are alone until they interact and verbage for some reason calls that an observation, no humans, not even a camera or a recording device, is needed, just the interaction, which pretty much takes "mind" out of the picture). They don't actually understand any of it, they are just convinced that something in quantum physics defends it. Hint? Nothing does. Nothing about current understanding of particle physics shows water, or alcohol, or any molecule to be capable of memory. Memory, after all, requires two very important things. A MEASURABLE changable state (water isn't water any more if you change it's molecular structure, and something so small it can't be measured can't be used as memory) and some system that can interpret that change in state as something meaningful to that system. For example, a book is a form of memory so long as there are people, or computer imaging systems, that can read it. When that's lost, it isn't memory any more. What would our human bodies, or what system in our bodies, would be informed as to the workings of homeopathic cures?
Yeah, I'd say it's all nonsense. Or, at the very least, it working would basically overthrow EVERY SINGLE field of science. Now, I'm not saying that's impossible. I certainly would be very interested to find that out and so would every single scientist out there. Not knowing things is job security for a scientist after all. Every single one would LOVE to overthrow their field with some new theory of everything. The main difference is the average scientist understands the need to show some evidence to back up their idea, and generally they form the ideas after the evidence comes in anyway. Homeopaths don't see that as a big problem.
The last issue is one of faith really. They come in convinced beforehand their method works. Every patient that says "hey I think I do feel better" (note, a patient's statement is never evidence unless there's a double blind trial to eliminate bias or expectations as much as possible) just confirms it more to them, and they don't like tests. Recently they have all come to the conclusion and will tell you that homeopathy "can't be tested". They say by it's very nature there's no way to properly test it and the double blind test is "flawed". Well, namely because they always fail I suppose, but when you press them to explain WHY it can't be tested, they never really have an explanation. They just say it's outside the domain of science. That doesn't make sense. Science is just a method for finding out about the world. It doesn't matter if it is made of matter or energy or information or spirit particles or chakra or karma. The only thing that matters is if it can produce a noticable effect, which homeopathy certainly is claiming it can do. If it makes people get well, that can be measured. It may not be explainable currently, or maybe ever, but if it is real, it can be measured and shown to exist. That's all science is, and it'll work on anything that can have an effect on the real world. Indeed, if you could just show it worked, it wouldn't be alternative medicine at all, it would just be medicine, implemented and used by the whole community, since it is in their best interests to use the best cures available. It is also in the best interests of the big bad drug companies, which while I am as disgusted as anyone by their advertising and the prices, at least it does exactly what it says it will do, right down to the explosive anal leakage. The whole conspiracy angle of "keeping customers sick" assumes they have it down to a science of keeping them ill but alive for a long time, since living customers buy longer than dead ones, and it also assumes that EVERY SINGLE employee of the companies is a total sociopath with not a whit of moral concience in any of their offices at all.
Let's say then though that homeopathy is real, it works, but it cures exactly as quickly and exactly as often as one would get better had they taken no cure at all. Well first I'd ask, if you have no evidence for it working, and under this claim you say it can never actually have a measurable effect on anything to show it works, by what reason did you come to believe this was the case anyway? Secondly I'd ask, if it is the same as not taking a cure but is nonetheless there, SO WHAT? What does it matter? Who cares? How does it benefit anyone? How can we even learn more about it or the rest of reality through it and be awed by it? And, of course, why should anyone pay money and waste time on it INSTEAD of seeking out a cure that actually does have a noted benefit? Indeed why should anyone use it to SUPPLEMENT a noted cure instead of saving their money for more working cure or just something for themselves?
22nd November 2007, 1:24 PM
Thank you for the novel DJ!
Go rent the movie its not that bad ; Its probaily less funny then bowling for columbine but probaily less full of shit too.
Where I live there is a shortage of beds ; big waiting time in the er just for people waiting for service or a room; try four days ; But if you had your arm cut off you'll probaily get a bed.
Go rent the movie its not that bad ; Its probaily less funny then bowling for columbine but probaily less full of shit too.
Where I live there is a shortage of beds ; big waiting time in the er just for people waiting for service or a room; try four days ; But if you had your arm cut off you'll probaily get a bed.