We had a discussion related to this (alas, it’s in the archives, which haven’t been converted over yet) in dealing with con men and “psychics.”
My basic point is that anybody can be taken in by a con man. Those who think they are immune are among those who are the best marks. So is it protecting somebody from stupidity, or protecting them from fraud? I say it’s the latter.
Put another way. Is it smart to walk through a crime-ridden neighborhood alone at night? Probably not. But does that make it OK for somebody to mug you? No.
With the advance of the web, there is a lot of information about everything you can possibly think of. However, this has not suddenly made people able to understand it or make better judgments. It just means that every nutball who can get a website can spread his message. (See some of the stuff in “Weird Earl’s” for examples – the one right now is a homepage of some folks who think the Earth is hollow!)
So far, in this particular case, Jo Ann has not shown any ability to judge the science of the issue. Therefore, the fact that she has a lot of information (or misinformation) at her fingertips doesn’t help her.
Absolutely. And they can testify at trials and give professional advice to people in that situation. What I object to is making this advice legally binding.
It is only fraudulent if the person is being intentionally misleading. How do we find out what cures cancer? By trying the cure on a certain number of people. Some people think a new cure is too risky. Others think it’s worth a try. You want to decide, based on what you believe to be realistic criteria, who gets to take the chance. I want to let anyone who wants to (and can afford it) take the chance if they so choose.
This is true of every bad thing that is done by one person to another. The question is, how much freedom are you willing to give up for this protection? Obviously, you are willing to sacrifce Ms. Esterly’s right to select her own treatment. Based on this logic, though, how many of your own freedoms are you willing to give up?
We all have our own way of calculating which risks are acceptable for which gains. Every one of us uses different numbers to make this calculation. That is why some people skydive and some don’t. You want to impose your level of risk aversion to someone else’s decisions. I say that this is in direct contradiction to the notions of freedom and liberty, and it is unjustifiable. Obviously, you may disagree. The difference is, my position doesn’t require me to exert my will upon you. Your position “justifies” you exerting your will on me.
No, but you have seen that she understands the language and can navigate the Internet. The people on this board have provided numerous links to information. Whether or not she is interested in this info is unimportant. She should not have to establish to you, or me, or the goddamned FDA, that she is qualified to make decisions about her own body.
Nope. How much of my freedom are you going to give away in order to make things “right”?
The point is: In your system, we all have to act as if you were right, whether or not you are. In my system, we get to determine for ourselves what is right (within limits, of course).
JonF:
I have not read your link, because I do not dispute your point. We can’t get in the habit of curtailing choices because of every conceivable ancillary effect. If we do, there are no choices left. The direct, immediate harm is to her if she is wrong. If we do not allow her to be “wrong” (and we are in fact wrong), we are directly harming her without justifiable cause.
Also, if she contributes money to a cause that you and I think is harmful, that is her business. It may be that, in her opinion, this is a noble use of her money. And it is her money. You insist that she share your opinion. I do not. And yet you seem to think I am being unfair.
Simple enough–you let people choose for themselves. People like you and I will seek out professionals who we think are qualified to give sound advice and then we will act on that advice. Thus, we are protected because we have chosen to be protected.
As far as fraud, you can take away almost all of my freedoms, and you’ll still not be able to protect me from fraud. The problem is that you are trying to detect a crime in advance. By my definition, a crime that has not happened yet is not a crime.
Absolutely. I trust science. I do not require others to trust it as well.
If they are harming themselves, then that is their business. If they are harming others, we need to consider the situation and find out whose rights are more fundamentally affected and should predominate. In this case, I would say that the woman who has the cancer and wants to choose how to treat her own body has the most direct involvement in the decision and her rights should prevail. Now, if the treatment she wanted required killing a child, that would be a different case, now, wouldn’t it?
I agree. That is why if you denied access to knowledgeable professionals, I would say that you are intruding on her decision-making. If you require the approval of these professionals, you are taking her decision-making away altogether.
How do you prove any case of fraud? Since this case involves technical subjects, the courts will definitely be interested in professional witnesses, I suspect. Probably be a certain amount of bickering among people with different medical opinions, just like there is right now when deciding whether or not to approve certain drugs. I say, wait and let the people most involved decide. You say, let’s decide everything in advance.
What if there is a reason, but you just don’t like it? Obviously, this guy thinks there is a reason–it just doesn’t meet your standards. Maybe it meets Ms. Esterly’s standards. Why do you insist on imposing your standards on her?
Well, does it cure cancer? Has he claimed that it does? Depends on who I was. If I was a medical insurer, I probly wouldn’t pay for this treatment. If Ms. Esterly told me she wanted to try it, I would say, “Go ahead–but I doubt it’s going to work.”
I think trying to treat cancer with water would be stupid. But if someone came up with evidence that met my standards, I might change my mind.
Yes, wouldn’t that be nice? Speaking for myself, my knowledge of the future isn’t good enough to do that. And my knowledge of the efficacy of this cancer treatment isn’t good enough to demand that Ms. Esterly die while we wait for clinical proof. How many people do you reckon died of AIDS while the “cocktail” drugs were being evaluated? How many do you think would have been willing to risk it? Who are you, or me, or the FDA to take that option away from them?
No. What level of proof do you require to allow someone to make their own decisions?
Nope. And I haven’t tried to. It is you who thinks that’s someone else’s job than hers.
I think everybody should stop for a minute and read Jo Ann’s last post more carefully. I’ve broken it up into statements for your thoughtful consideration, to diminish some of its rhetorical effects.
I think it’s clear that for her, anymore, the issue isn’t whether Dr. Burzynski’s treatments might work. Now she’s just another Doper. I think we should encourage her in Right Thinking, rather than continuing to rant about Snake Oil Salesmen. Does anybody have any facts about open-heart surgery research or deaths from prescription medication?
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board, Jo Ann!
Thanks for the information. This will be my last post here at GD. I’ve decided to take a pro-active approach instead of a verbal one. I have learned much from your comments. My invitation to you is to rethink how many freedoms you feel you DESERVE to loose. I am disgusted by the arrogance and/or stupidity of those who believe this is about “protection .” My information comes from first-hand, personal experience. The “fear” ploy or the "we must protect you from yourself is “crap”. Anyone with a brain knows that. Just because I stumbled into the “Straight Dope” board doesn’t mean I am one. Read “Molecules of Emotion” by Candace Pert, Phd. A comment for some of you patronizing idiots, I am a strong, intelligent, and capable women. I do not accept your defeatist prognosis or ignorant assertions about my future. The people I have met from all over this world are alot smarter than you think!
The full title is Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel, by Candace B. Pert and Deepak Chopra. According to http://www.skepdic.com/ayurvedic.html, Deepak Chopra used to be a major player in Transcendental Meditation, and now is a strong advocate of something resembling holistic healing.
One amazon.com customer’s review of Molecules of Emotion reads as follows:
(I would have just provided a link to this text, except it’s impossible to link to a single review on the amazon.com website.)
I think that our major disagreement is over where we would draw the line between protecting people and individual rights and responsibiliites. It also appears that you are not interested in any possibility of changing your position; OK, I’m not going to try to protect you from that. However, a few of your points do deserve rebuttal:
You said “And if she does any of these things, the person she has hurt is…herself.”. I contended that your statement is untrue and provided a link to a more detailed discussion. Does “I do not dispute your point” mean that you accept that, if she does any of these things, she harms herself and other people?
Well, it’s arguable that your knowledge of the future isn’t good enough because you choose not to immerse yourself in medical and population statistics. Properly used (which isn’t easy or intuitive) statistics can tell us the distribution of the futures of a suitably large group of people very accurately. They can’t tell us the future of a particular person in that group, but they can tell us how many people will achieve which result or (equivalently) the probability of a particular result for a particular person.
You did not respond. You stated that “Obviously, this lady knows both sides of the story”. I do not find it obvious at all; it seems likely to me that Ms. Esterly does not know both sides of the story. What reason do you have for believing that she knows both sides of the story?
You stated ‘She will probably die soon regardless, with or without our “protection”’. That’s a diagnosis.
You are exactly correct. What I am trying very hard to impress upon you is that your approach is necessarily dicatatorial. It is possible to offer people protection without requiring them to accept it. Obviously, those who do not accept it risk the consequences. This is one of the prices of freedom.
Now, for the nits you wanted to pick:
You are correct. My statement was an oversimplification. The correct phrasing would be that the largest burden of the consequences would be borne by her, and thus her rights to choose should prevail.
You may not realize it, but you are making my point for me. The fact that we know the odds does not mean that we can make prediction for a specific case–only for a population. In the specific case, we cannot say unless we have either 0 or 100 percent probability. And even then, someone may dispute our numbers. Given this, I think it is arrogant presumption to impose on individuals based on our predictions for the population. It is the individual who holds the lion’s share of the risk; so it is the individual who should make the call. Even, as strange as it may seem, if that individual is as off-the-wall as the particular one in this example.
Once again, I oversimplified. The point being, she has access to both sides of the story. People here have been trying to shove the other side down her throat. However, in retrospect, I should not have even brought this up. It is not our job to make her do good research before making a life and death decision. After all, it’s not our life.
Since we are being so careful with our terms, this is not true. I relied on her personal report of the diagnosis. What I made was a prediction, based on my understanding of “the distribution of the futures of a suitably large group” of people with a similar diagnosis. Do I know it will happen? Of course not. That’s why I said “probably”. You are free to disagree with my prediction, but I somehow doubt that you do.
Not that it matters. The point is that she is the one who faces this possible future–whatever its probability–and, for that reason, I think she should be the one to decide what risks are appropriate for her.
OK, I’ll bite, although I suspect Ms. Esterly’s questions were rhetorical and she has announced she won’t be around to read the answer.
From a half-hour or so of searching, it appears to me that open-heart surgery, specifically coronary bypass, was introduced without significant research and proof of efficacy because there were no other possibilities for treatment. That lack of research has been addressed. From Evolution of Coronary Surgery:
“When myocardial revascularìzation surgery entered the clinical practice in 1967, there was no medical therapy capable to improve the survival of patients with coronaroscerosis. Therefore, the aortocoronary by-pass surgery reached a fast and broad diffusion. However, in the seventies, with the introduction of new medical therapies, the need was felt of performing randomized prospective studies to compare medical treatment with surgical intervention. Three randomized prospective studies, similar in the size of the test population and the statistical methods employed, have played a fundamental role in identifying the indications to surgery in patients with stable angina. There are: 1) Veterans Administration Cooperative Study, carried out on a population of 686 patients; 2) The European Coronary Surgery Study, including 767 patients; 3) The National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute, CASS Study, with 780 patients (2,3,4). … Data presented in these studìes and the most recent literature demonstrate a remarkable clinical improvement and a greater exercise tolerance in patients operated on of aorto-coronary by-pass.”
As to the question on prescription drug deaths, it appears that around 100,000 Americans die each year due to adverse drug reactions, not counting errors of administration. When errors of administration are counted, the toll rises to about 140,000 per year. Those are noticable numbers. That could make such deaths the fourth leading cause of death in the United States (after heart disease, cancer, and stroke). But I question whether those numbers are relevant to this discussion. See Another Kind of Drug Problem and Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients: A Meta-analysis of Prospective Studies.
I don’t think I’m making my point for you; my point that was we can provide an excellent estimate of the probability, somewhere between 0 and 100%. You appear to understand that. What we do with that estimate is a matter of opinion, on which we disagree.
We must have lines; you and I choose to draw them differently. If your house catches on fire, there is less than 100% probability that the fire department will put it out before it would have gone out by itself, lessening the damage; do you resent the fact that your are forced to support the fire department through your taxes?
Perhaps you should have quantified your prediction. The median survival rate for metastatic breast cancer is around 2.7 years from the onset of symptoms. Some small percentage of patients with metastatic breast cnacer relapse and survive more than ten years. Whether or not you call 2.7 years “soon”, and whether or not you decide to base your prediction on the median, is a matter of individual choice. See Metastatic Breast Cancer.
It all boils down to the fact that she was bringing us The Truth, and we were supposed to bow down and forget about logic, science and reason. She had no intention of listening to anybody’s facts or opinions-she was assuming the role of desciple, preaching The Truth to all of us that have been duped by the medical/governmental/scientific “establishment”.
Good riddance. My daddy told me a long time ago that if someone approaches you bearing The Truth, run like hell in the opposite direction.
That is true. We both agree that this information can help in making better decisions. The difference is that you, out of concern for your fellow man, feel justified in forcing your fellow man to act in this sensible manner. In contract, I, out of respect for my fellow man, acknowledge that his way of looking at the world may be different from mine and would therefore encourage him to act in a sensible manner, but would not presume to force him to.
You can assert that we must have lines and I will not argue. But it provides no support whatsoever for where your placing your line, which is what we are debating.
Your fire department example just won’t make a good analogy here. Fire departments are not imposed on the federal level, but the local level. Also, I am not compelled to call the fire department in case of fire, particularly if I live in a very rural area. Lastly, I am not denied access to water in order to prevent me from circumventing the expertise of the fire department.
I could have qualified my prediction, but it would have been obnoxious, because it would have required me to assume that you are an idiot. 2.7 years is not stretching the definition of “soon” when compared to a normal life-span. Using the word “probably” implies that I am not basing my prediction on “some small percentage of patients”. And I can base my prediction on either the median or the average and still qualify for “soon”.
Why are you still picking at this point? The rest of this debate seems to hover around some good, meaty issues. Yet, you insist on continuing to parse my sentence down to each word, rather than admit that I did not misspeak.
THis particular discussion is admittedly tangential to the main thrust of the debate (Even more tangential side noe - one thing it do not like about this board is that the “threads” are presented linearly rather than in a tree structure). I’m not trying to change your mid; it’a apparent that’s not going to happen. However. I’m interested in your philosophy and honestly can’t see how it is internally consistent. I’m trying to explore it to find out more.
OK, I took that one too far, and my criticism was not justified. I apologize.
See below …
Are you saying that “interference” with individual “rights” by local governments is OK, but such “intereference” by the federal government is not? If so, where and why do you draw that line?
You appear to have missed the point. In several places you have stated “it’s her money”, implying that you believe that individuals are entitled to do waht they will with their money. Well, our curent laws have it that your are not entitiled to do as you will with all your money; you must give some of it to governments. One of the many reasons for this is fire department service. It is reasonably possible that you will never have need of this service, and if you do have need and choose to avail yourself of that service there is a reasonable probability that it will do you little good. In other words, the fire department does not provide a 100% guarantee of efficacy. You said that we should not force Ms. Esterly, who is undoubtably in need of medical service, to accept a particular service that usually works but is not 100% guaranteed to work or to avoid a particular service that is unproven or unlikely to work; why should we force you to pay your hard-earned money for a service that you may not need and is also not guaranteed to work?
I have no problem with this. However, in this situation, we are debating the effects my philosophy has on a particular issue. In trying to tie me down, you bring out examples that our consistent with your own. It leads to confusion. It might be more practical, if this is your goal, to ask pointed, but more general questions. I will answer as well as I can, and I believe my general philosophy to be internally consistent; however, I don’t spend enough time concentrating on it to be absolutely sure.
You cannot have any sort of social order without some amount of “interference” in individual rights. The key, particularly on a federal level, is that your actions are based on protecting individual rights for every person. Any interference must be based on preventing the violation of other individual rights. By accepting categorical violation of rights for any other purpose, you are accepting the categorical revocation of all rights based on purposes that may not suit all the people affected. By only accepting the violation of rights in cases where they are superceded by the rights of other individuals, you are placing personal freedom (or, individual liberty) at the top of your value scale. The advantage of this, other than providing the most “fairness” to the most people, is that it “automatically” leads to an optimal distribution of happiness.
Strictly speaking, supporting a fire department with tax money is a violation of rights at the local level. This is not as offensive as a violation at the federal level as it affects fewer people as a group, and because communities tend to be more homogenous than nations. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier for my voice to be heard in my home town than for it to be heard nationwide. Also, I can move to a different community without being required to abandon the protections that the federal government offers.
Lastly, I will say that “protection” from fire is something that the majority of people want. If the government never provided this protection, people would come up with some sort of solution anyway. In fact, they would probably come up with multiple solutions, and individuals would have choices about what kind of protection they wanted. I believe that this Libertarian approach would be better, but, like I said, this particular violation does not approach the offensiveness of the violations perpertrated in the name of protecting people from bad medical treatments. If you denied people access to water, as I suggested, then you would be have reached that level of violation.
This is true. However, these laws are in conflict with concepts of Liberty upon which this nation was founded. Also, they lead to ridiculously inefficient “solutions” to perceived problems. Once again, fire departments are not an egregious example of this, probably at least in part due to the fact that they are not implemented at the federal level.
See, here is an example of an implicit assumption. Your statements are based on the assumption that if the government did not provide fire protection, then none would be available. I dispute this assumption.
You shouldn’t. Once again, I am not saying the fire department is a bad example because I think it is not a violation; I am saying it is a bad example because it is on a different scale and the violations are not so personal and fundamental.
If you like, we can talk about the fire department example in depth–you will find that my views are consistent, but I don’t get as worked up about this. Also, since you and I live in different communities, there is little chance that arguing with you over a local law serves much purpose. Even if I bring you over to my side, you won’t be voting in our next local elections.
I agree with Smartass (on the thread’s topic), for a simple reason: No one knows for certain whether this treatment in question is fraudulent or not. It is certainly suspicious, but Smartass is right–we are deciding for ourselves that this doctor is a quack before he has given us any solid evidence. I have no problem with restricting doctors from peddling “cures” which we know to be harmful or, at best, useless, but in this case we simply do not know, and thus we should not pretend to know.
