Tuesday, August 02, 2016

Quotes of the day

Algore and the Pope don't like Airconditioning,  but MomJones notes that it may be one reason Zika won't stpread in the USA

Compared with, say, Puerto Ricans, mainland Americans are also protected by our lifestyle. People in the Deep South tend to have air conditioning and screens on their windows. ..... We spend more time indoors, out of the heat. And all of this helps minimize contact with the mosquitoes.

(Italics mine) yeah, in Oklahoma, even my poor patients had at least one Airconditioner.

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Instapundit links to a CNN article claiming if you eat more meat, you have a shorter life.

and comments: That's just what the cows want us to think.

But actually, it was based on a population study of American health care professionals, with more woman than men, presumably who have more education and a different ethnic bias than the general population. In other words, a snapshot of nutrition but may not prove anything because of population bias.

I dropped out of that study because I found I couldn't remember what I ate and tended to "guess", and realized I was biasing my answers not on what I ate but what I was supposed to eat. So presumably there might be a reporting bias, or a bias toward those with OCD who actually remember and document these things accurately.

But you know, in Africa, you could tell the educated, because they were taller than their cohorts thanks to school meals. And my sons were taller than their Colombian raised siblings, and the contrast was even more stark when we visited a Ecuador a couple miles away from where they lived. We see a similar height disparity among our farmers vs their kids.

This is due to increase protein in the diet, of course.

 And another dirty little secret: People with low protein diets don't get heart disease, don't live long enough to get cancer, and die a lot easier of infectious diseases, especially the children.

BBC article on the history of how tall people are. notes the disease/nutrition changes that led to taller people.
However, when they discuss very very tall people as if they were healthy variants (most of them have diseases such as pituitary malfunctions) they are obscuring the discussion. and their Darwinian bias about short short poor people having too many kids is just that: Bias. The dirty little secret is that countries where there is enough to eat, that babies live tend to live and grow taller than mom....and that moms knowing this tend to choose to have fewer babies..., and even in the Philippines, in the last generation, the birth rate has gone down from six to almost 2.


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DavidWarren has the "globalization is good for you" quote of the day:


 “Any one reading the chronicles will find that since the birth of Christ there is nothing that can compare with what has happened in our world during the last hundred years. Never in any country have people seen so much building, so much cultivation of the soil. Never has such good drink, such abundant and delicate food, been within the reach of so many. Dress has become so rich that it cannot in this respect be improved. Who has ever heard of commerce such as we see it today? It circles the globe; it embraces the whole world! Painting, engraving — all the arts — have progressed and are still improving. More than all, we have men so capable, and so learned, that their wit penetrates everything in such a way, that nowadays a youth of twenty knows more than twenty doctors did in days gone by.” 

and he notes dryly:

 This paean to globalization was (purportedly) written by Martin Luther...

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Will "Me before you" inspire copycat suicides? Of course: That's the idea. Think of all the money you will save!

MBY is not about living with quadriplegia, as quadriplegic John Kelly points out:

 “Book and screenplay author JoJo Moyes admits she knows nothing about quadriplegics,” said Kelly, “yet her ignorance is allowed to promote the idea that people like me are better off dead. 
Italics mine.
and he adds:

No one’s suicide should be treated noble and inspirational. Our suicides should be viewed as tragedies like anyone else’s.”s should be viewed as tragedies like anyone else’s.”
Ah, but not in Hollywood, where it will get you an academy award.

Doctors have warned for years that press and media stories that paint sympathetic stories of suicide actually increase the suicide rate. (The same thing could be said about terrorist attacks of course).

But the real danger is that it will inspire crazies to kill the disabled because they think they are better off dead, as was done last week in Japan, or worse, to make it normal to put a disabled or elderly person on a death pathway because the doctor decides an disabled person is better off dead, (as opposed to those who are truly dying, where comfort care with lots of narcotics and non treatment decisions are appropriate)...

Follow the money: From the UKMail article on the abuse of the terminal care protocol (aka the Liverpool pathway) in the UK.

and follow the money:

We also revealed how some hospitals were being paid six-figure ‘bribes’ to meet targets about the numbers of patients on the LCP – leading to fears that doctors were put under pressure to use the pathway. 

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