A Moderate's View on Abortion
A moderate's view on abortion. (See here) an article in the Washington Post discussing how difficult it is for a woman to get an abortion in remote areas.
Here in America the abortion issue is framed by those who have extreme viewpoints on the issue. It is all or nothing, and anyone having an opinion somewhere in the middle is not allowed to enter the debate. If the pro-abortion crowd gets their way, a woman, by her choice alone, should be allowed to kill the infant all the way up till the umbilical cord is severed because it is still part of the woman's body. If the anti-choice crowd gets their way, it would be illegal to even use a condom for birth control.
Well according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll (see here) conducted in November, a firm majority of Americans, 56%, say an abortion should be "legal only under certain circumstances". If I had been asked the question, I would have been in this group.
Now what would these people say should be the "certain circumstances"? My guess is there would be a range of opinions expressed, and 100% agreement within the group would never be achieved.
I am only going to express my viewpoint on it. I kinda liked the way Bill Clinton stated his policy on abortion. It went something like: "Abortion should be readily available, but rare." Only problem with Bill's policy is that during his two terms in office, everything was done to keep an abortion readily available and nothing was done to make it rare.
Since the Clinton policy is probably unworkable (although maybe it could have worked if there had been some effort put into it) I guess we need to come up with something new. So what would I propose? A woman has the right to unrestricted abortions up till the point that which is growing inside her develops a mind of its own. When it starts to think for itself, it starts to enjoy some of the protections under the Constitution just like all the rest of us human beings. Up till it starts to think, there is no more harm for a woman to have an abortion then it would be for her to have a cyst removed from her body. But after that which is growing starts to think, it should be illegal, with some exceptions, for anyone to kill it.
What should we decide would be the exceptions? Well that opens up a new debate. Let's stick to deciding what should be true under most circumstances, or at least what should be the goal we strive for, and after we reach a decision on that we can debate what constitutes an exception.
I do not know at what stage of development the fetus starts to think. I do not believe it should be too hard to prove with reasonable certainty when this occurs. All we need are sensitive instruments that can measure brain waves. Some brain waves do not witness to higher thought. Some children develop with nothing more then a brain stem. Any brain waves a child such as that possesses could be ignored. Other brain waves probably do witness to higher thought. At what stage do these types of brain waves appear?
I noted in the article that the two examples of women who obtained abortions did so at a fairly early stage. One at 45 days, the other at 9 weeks. I believe that most women who have abortions do so as early as possible. I am hopeful that the point that the fetus develops a mind of its own would not even affect most women and their right to choose, however I have no education on this and can not offer an opinion as to when this happens. I am saying, however, that no matter when it happens this should be the governing factor on when an abortion is permitted.
Once the "fetus" starts to think for itself, it should start enjoying the same rights as the rest of us that think. Since we can not ask it if it wants to live or die, we must assume it wants to live just like the vast majority of the rest of us who think.
When the fetus starts to think for itself, when it develops a mind of its own, the woman should lose the right to choose. At least this is my opinion.
Here in America the abortion issue is framed by those who have extreme viewpoints on the issue. It is all or nothing, and anyone having an opinion somewhere in the middle is not allowed to enter the debate. If the pro-abortion crowd gets their way, a woman, by her choice alone, should be allowed to kill the infant all the way up till the umbilical cord is severed because it is still part of the woman's body. If the anti-choice crowd gets their way, it would be illegal to even use a condom for birth control.
Well according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll (see here) conducted in November, a firm majority of Americans, 56%, say an abortion should be "legal only under certain circumstances". If I had been asked the question, I would have been in this group.
Now what would these people say should be the "certain circumstances"? My guess is there would be a range of opinions expressed, and 100% agreement within the group would never be achieved.
I am only going to express my viewpoint on it. I kinda liked the way Bill Clinton stated his policy on abortion. It went something like: "Abortion should be readily available, but rare." Only problem with Bill's policy is that during his two terms in office, everything was done to keep an abortion readily available and nothing was done to make it rare.
Since the Clinton policy is probably unworkable (although maybe it could have worked if there had been some effort put into it) I guess we need to come up with something new. So what would I propose? A woman has the right to unrestricted abortions up till the point that which is growing inside her develops a mind of its own. When it starts to think for itself, it starts to enjoy some of the protections under the Constitution just like all the rest of us human beings. Up till it starts to think, there is no more harm for a woman to have an abortion then it would be for her to have a cyst removed from her body. But after that which is growing starts to think, it should be illegal, with some exceptions, for anyone to kill it.
What should we decide would be the exceptions? Well that opens up a new debate. Let's stick to deciding what should be true under most circumstances, or at least what should be the goal we strive for, and after we reach a decision on that we can debate what constitutes an exception.
I do not know at what stage of development the fetus starts to think. I do not believe it should be too hard to prove with reasonable certainty when this occurs. All we need are sensitive instruments that can measure brain waves. Some brain waves do not witness to higher thought. Some children develop with nothing more then a brain stem. Any brain waves a child such as that possesses could be ignored. Other brain waves probably do witness to higher thought. At what stage do these types of brain waves appear?
I noted in the article that the two examples of women who obtained abortions did so at a fairly early stage. One at 45 days, the other at 9 weeks. I believe that most women who have abortions do so as early as possible. I am hopeful that the point that the fetus develops a mind of its own would not even affect most women and their right to choose, however I have no education on this and can not offer an opinion as to when this happens. I am saying, however, that no matter when it happens this should be the governing factor on when an abortion is permitted.
Once the "fetus" starts to think for itself, it should start enjoying the same rights as the rest of us that think. Since we can not ask it if it wants to live or die, we must assume it wants to live just like the vast majority of the rest of us who think.
When the fetus starts to think for itself, when it develops a mind of its own, the woman should lose the right to choose. At least this is my opinion.
posted by Little David at 12/27/2005 05:31:00 AM
18 Comments:
Since I had no idea at all as to when brain waves appear I did a search of Wikipedia to see if anyone there had an opinion. (See here) where someone stated brain waves might appear as early as 42 days.
I do not know where this opinion comes from or if the opinion is valid. However it does give us an idea of, perhaps, which point of development we are speaking about.
Nonsense.
At 42 days, the brain has not even developed yet. Rather, it is simply a cluster of neurons.
Nice though your idea is, there is one fundamental flaw in reality. That is that foetuses are not floating around inside the uterus awake and conscious. In fact, they are anaesthetised / asleep from hormones produced in pregnancy. This means that even if we could scan a foetuses "brain waves", it wouldn't really tell us all that much about its cognition or cognitive abilities.
As for the sentiment that abortion should be freely available though rare, this is mostly already the case. Abortions are not common and late term abortions are already extremely rare. Most women who have abortions do so early (i.e., pretty soon after they discover that they are pregnant). In any case, the best way of reducing the rate of abortions is not by banning it, rather by promoting and educating on the appropriate use of contraception, and making these easily accessible... something, I notice, which is generally not given much attention by the so-called "pro-lifers" (i.e., armchair moralisers waving their fingers at women).
New Scientist Article
Why fetuses do not feel pain
* 03 September 2005
* From New Scientist Print Edition.
* Andy Coghlan
* Emma Young Sydney
IF FETUSES could talk, legislating on their behalf would be a lot easier. But in the absence of direct testimony, politicians are taking significant decisions about fetal welfare based on controversial claims about whether or not they can feel pain.
In the US, for example, a government openly opposed to abortion claims that fetuses feel pain from 20 weeks after conception. Congress is even considering proposing federal laws that would force doctors to inform women seeking an abortion of this, and to offer them the opportunity to have their fetus anaesthetised. Arkansas and Georgia enacted similar state laws this year, and dozens of other states are considering doing the same.
But two new reviews of fetal pain, one from the US and one from New Zealand, suggest the proposed laws might be misguided and based on evidence that is out-of-date and prone to misinterpretation.
Both reports say there is an emerging consensus that fetuses do not have the brain circuitry to feel pain until 29 weeks into a pregnancy. The New Zealand researchers go further, concluding that the fetus is likely to be unconscious throughout pregnancy, existing in a sleep-like state and unable to sense pain. That means doctors who advocate giving analgesia to fetuses during surgery not aimed at abortion should think again. Although few studies have been done, there is emerging evidence that anaesthetics may actually harm the growing baby, the review says.
The US research, authored by Mark Rosen of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues, says that although the thalamus of a fetus less than 29 weeks old can receive nerve signals that a conscious person would interpret as pain, their sensory cortex lacks the circuitry to receive and interpret the signal (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 294, p 947). "The capacity for perception cannot exist before the circuitry develops, and even then, functional capacity probably requires even more time to develop," says Rosen.
His paper also rejects the idea that fetuses must feel pain because they flinch away from injections, grimace when exposed to pain during in utero surgery and experience surges of stress hormones during "painful" procedures. The authors argue the same events happen in brain-dead adults and anaesthetised adults undergoing surgery, and even in anencephalic babies, which have no sensory cortex.
The key thing, Rosen says, is that pain is a psychological construct based on experience and memory, and so has to be "learned" even if the necessary brain circuitry is complete. "Pain is a complex sensory experience requiring some level of consciousness, and this is substantially different from reflex responses or stress responses."
Some experts attending the 11th World Congress on Pain in Sydney, Australia, last week disagree. Lars Arendt-Nielsen, a leading pain expert at Aalborg University in Denmark and a reviewer of the JAMA paper, says too much emphasis is placed on the idea that you need a functioning cortex to feel pain. He says patients who have had their sensory cortex removed, or have suffered a brain injury or tumour in the region, still report perceiving pain.
However, the New Zealand research, published by David Mellor of Massey University in Palmerston North and colleagues in Brain Research Reviews (DOI: 10.1016/j.brainresrev.2005.01.006), says that babies are sedated and unconscious throughout pregnancy, as both the fetal brain and placenta produce potent sleep-inducing hormones, including the neurosteroidal anaesthetic pregnanolone.
That view is backed by Maria Fitzgerald of University College London, a co-author of a report into fetal awareness by the UK Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1997. "It is unlikely that the fetus is ever awake or aware at any point during gestation, due to the high levels of endogenous neuroinhibitors," she says.
More recently, Mellor and his colleagues have reviewed experiments which challenge the assumption that towards the end of pregnancy, babies spend around 5 per cent of the time fully awake. "We've explored this at some depth and come to the conclusion that those periods of wakefulness are actually sleep transitions from one state to another," says Mellor.
His conclusions are also supported by David Walker of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who has performed experiments on sheep fetuses. These usually produce very similar physiological results to those seen in humans. Chemically blocking the production of some of the sleep-inducing hormones actually triggers a burst of electrical activity in the brain and muscles of a sheep fetus, says Walker. Other experiments show that the higher areas of a sheep's brain receive no sensory information until after birth.
That supports the notion that hormones actively suppress mental activity in the fetus. "The purpose is for the baby not to be able to perceive a lot of physical sensation, because otherwise it would be reacting to things it can't do anything about."
That also means doctors are wrong to assume that because a premature baby can feel pain, a fetus of the same age can too. If anything, it would not benefit a fetus to do so, as it cannot alleviate its discomfort or move to escape what is causing the pain.
There is concern that giving fetuses painkillers such as morphine during surgery could actually harm them. Mellor points to work showing that morphine causes vigorous breathing movements in a sheep fetus, which forces its muscles to consume more oxygen than available through the placenta. "On the basis of our review, we recommend great caution before giving analgesics and anaesthetics to the fetus if your purpose is fetal well-being," he says.
From issue 2515 of New Scientist magazine, 03 September 2005, page 8
Wow Michael, you had to post the whole thing and couldn't have just provided a link?
Seems like that article comes from the "extremist left" viewpoint.
If we believed that article we would be left thinking that the baby only becomes a "human" after it takes the "magical mystery tour" down the birth canal.
Sorry. I want a more reasonable definition. What you are proposing is just downright unreasonable.
Look, we can take this argument deeper then we need to.
How about this? If a human falls into a coma for years, does that mean during the years between the time they went into coma and the time they "woke up" they were something less then human?
Can't we keep this thing simple?
At which point do brain wave monitors point to "higher thought"?
I have tried to do a little research of my own on this subject. Seems this might not be as "simple" as I might have liked.
Seems even Doctors and Scientists argue over this.
They get all wrapped around the axle as if "when is the fetus aware of pain" which involves the development of the Cortex.
OK, but can we consider the development of the Cerebrum? According to Merriam-Webster the Cerebrum "is considered to be the seat of conscious mental processes".
So at what point does the development of the Cerebrum show the "spark" of consciousness? Even if the Cerebrum is disconnected from the rest of the body because of the lack of Cortex connectivity, at what point does an EEG show there is something going on in the Cerebrum?
As the French philosopher René Descartes stated “I think; therefore I am”. When do the synapses within the Cerebrum start firing and when does the fetus start thinking?
I had to post the whole thing because it is not available for free (the free link gives you half the first paragraph).
Furthermore, that article is not "leftist" at all, rather, it is just fact.
Unless you start splitting hairs on what you define as pain, foetuses in utero do not feel pain and they are also not conscious. That is fact.
What I did not write before and perhaps I should have clarified, is that your idea on "cognition" (or "pain") should not be used as a criteria for "yea or neah" for abortion. Although it is a "nice" idea, it is not valid from a practical point of view (simply as foetuses are not conscious).
If you want criteria, you need other ones.
At the moment, the only valid working criteria we have are simply pragmatic ones rather than "moral". At around 20 weeks gestation, a foetus is often well developed enough that modern neonatal (intensive) care can possibly lead to survival of the child (though often with significant morbidity). At around the same time, it becomes relatively dangerous for the mother to undergo a surgical abortion. Thus, the cut off is generally 20 weeks.
Do I think that we are going to find "better" criteria?
Unless we can define "consciousness" or even "life" in a meaningful way, then the answer is no.
Regards,
Michael Tam
As the French philosopher René Descartes stated “I think; therefore I am”. When do the synapses within the Cerebrum start firing and when does the fetus start thinking?
That is, unfortunately, insufficient. What is "thought"? More importantly, what is "human conscious thought?". Cats and dogs almost certainly "think" but as humans we don't have any particularly moral objection to killing them as long as it is with "purpose" and not "cruel". Thus, "thought" is almost certainly not a criteria... not to mention that an adult cat or dog has significantly more complex and refined cognitive pathways than even a delivered normal baby human.
Regards,
Michael Tam
OK, then thanks for posting the whole thing. However I do not accept the article represents fact I think it represents opinion. But that's just my opinion, grin.
While I might be arguing from the point of cognition, I am not arguing from the point of pain. Many people seem to point to pain as being the threshold, but that only then leads to further arguments.
My threshold is when does an EEG show activity in the Cerebrum since it seems to be generally accepted that this is the portion of the brain where that which we think of as "the mind" resides.
While I will accept that dogs and cats "think" it is not human thought. I think most of us accept and understand the difference. I am sorry if you do not. When the synapses within the Cerebrum of a human start firing, that is human thought, in my opinion. Just because it is not as developed and organized "thoughts" as in a normal, mature, full developed adult does not mean it is not "human thought". We do not, for example, think it is OK to slaughter a severely retarded human for food while it is OK to do this to most animals, even if the animal might possess more mental capacity then the severely retarded human. The most severely retarded human is still human and the most intelligent animal is not.
How about this? When does the EEG of a fetus show something other then that which would be defined as "brain dead" or "vegetative state" in an adult?
Perhaps this would be a good starting point?
Sorry, but I think you are completely missing the point and have a lack of understanding of EEGs.
As before, that article was not expressing an opinion. It was simply reporting a fact. Foetuses are unconscious. Just like an adult human under anaesthesia is unconscious.
If you do an EEG on an adult human under anaesthesia, it will show you minimal brain activity. That, after all, is the whole point of anaesthesia. The EEG will tell you absolutely diddly about their "cognitive powers". Indeed, an EEG of a fully awake patient will tell you absolutely diddly about their cognitive powers as well.
Assuming we develop a magical new device that could monitor the "thoughts" of a human brain, the same problem arises. The foetus is unconscious in utero. No amount of wishful thinking will make this not so.
As such, we cannot use "cognition" as some sort of criteria. If you are talking about "brain activity", that is otherwise a completely meaningless measure. Just because nervous tissue is firing off signals doesn't mean that there is any thinking and definitely does not mean that there is any consciousness. A bit of nervous tissue sitting in a nutrient vat will have electrical signals too.
Furthermore, I don't think you understand the concept of brain death in adults. It is exactly what it sounds like... dead brain. That is, there are no signals at all on an EEG.
I think that you will get into serious trouble if you want a "scientific" view of cognition or development for abortion. Using that line of thought, you could probably justify "aborting" a baby up to several months of age.
I personally feel that the current pragmatic solutions are not unreasonable. It seems unethical to me to allow an abortion to be carried out on a foetus could could possibly survive outside of the mother. That is, the 20 weeks cut off. This allows more than enough time for the potential mother to decide on whether or not they want a child. It also gives just about enough time for any antenatal diagnoses to be made.
Regards,
Michael Tam
While I will accept that dogs and cats "think" it is not human thought. I think most of us accept and understand the difference.
Actually, I don't think you do. There is no magical difference between our cerebral function and that of cats and dogs from a physiological point of view.
The difference is purely emotional. WE are humans. I think that that is enough. We don't need to pretend that there is some "human brain / thought uniqueness" that makes us "extra special".
When the synapses within the Cerebrum of a human start firing, that is human thought, in my opinion.
Well, you're easy to please then. So the synapses firing that automatically regulate your breathing is "thought"?
We do not, for example, think it is OK to slaughter a severely retarded human for food while it is OK to do this to most animals, even if the animal might possess more mental capacity then the severely retarded human.
EXACTLY!
We treasure human life not because of someone's capacity to think. It is simply because they are human. That being the case, we should not use "cognitive ability" or "cognition" as a criteria for abortion. Furthermore, when we consider that EEGs are only an extremely crude measure of cerebral activity and certainly says almost nothing about cognitive ability, to use that as a tool to judge when or when not to abort is only one step short of witchcraft.
Regards,
Michael Tam
So then it would be OK to kill someone as long as you anesthetized them first? As long as they are unconscious, and do not suffer, it is OK? That is where your argument leads.
I am not satisfied with that conclusion.
Brain activity that regulates breathing would not constitute thought. I thought I made that point earlier. I might be wrong about this, but I would imagine that breathing regulation comes from the brain stem, not the Cerebrum (although the pace of breathing can be "consciously" affected).
OK, I now understand "braindead". How about "vegetative state" then? You skipped over that one.
You label my attempts to interject some ethics into the abortion issue as "witchcraft"? Heh heh, come on.
You want a description of "witchcraft"? The "specialists" (including a 2nd opinion) who told my wife two years ago she only had 4 months to live and recommended she undergo life threatening experimental treatment, radiation therapy and wrote her a prescription for a salve known to cause cancer were practicing "witchcraft" (although the Doctors probably would have called it "modern medicine" - grin). At one point her Doctor refused to allow her to make an appointment in advance, my wife felt it was because the Doctor did not expect her to be alive to need the appointment. Two years later my wife is still alive and a good portion of her symptoms have abated because she found a treatment of natural vitamins and minerals for her disease on the internet. If she had only trusted the "witchdoctors" and undergone only the treatment they recommended she probably would be dead by now, and she probably would have went through a great deal of suffering on her way to the graveyard. Now that's witchcraft - grin.
So then it would be OK to kill someone as long as you anesthetized them first? As long as they are unconscious, and do not suffer, it is OK? That is where your argument leads.
??
Sorry, but surely, that is where YOUR argument leads and I'm glad that you don't agree with it!
I'm saying that the capacity for consciousness and cognition SHOULD NOT be used as a criterion for abortion in a foetus because it is simply not something that can be determined.
As for "vegetative state", I think you are once again entirely missing the point. The foetus is "unconscious". No amount of non-invasive probing will tell us whether the baby is CAPABLE of thought or not, because while it is unconscious, it isn't thinking.
There will always be background electrical activity in the brain. It's presence does not tell us what it means. A patient with severe brain damage in a vegetative state will have electrical signals in their brain as well and they won't be all that different from someone who is anaethetised. An EEG on an anaethetised patient or a foetus tells us nothing about their capacity to think or their cognition. Unless the foetus "wakes up" we just don't know and in utero, foetus' do not "wake up".
Thus, "cognition" or "thought" should not be used as a criteria for abortion. Sure, if the baby has severe abnormalities of the brain or is anencephalic, we can say with a fair degree of certainty that the baby does not have the capacity to think and perhaps this can be used as a justification for abortion. However, for the otherwise normal foetus, we just don't know at what stage of development when they are able to "think" and it probably is not knowable either.
As for your wife, vitamins and minerals and "natural treatments" do absolutely nothing for cancer. I don't know her clinical case but it sounds like she needed better doctors.
Regards,
Michael Tam
Well Michael,
I have posted a new article on the subject. Carl Sagan seemed to be willing to take the subject of "human thought" and abortion towards the path that I want to explore. I hope you will agree with me that Carl Sagan seems to be rather informed on the subject. He seems to disagree that we can at least make an educated guess on "human thought".
As for my wife it was not cancer. I can not get a straight answer out of her on exactly what her condition is called (I think because it is not common language) although she possessed enough knowledge of her condition to research it on the internet. I can get from her it is related to psoriasis.
Since you have a medical education you might be able to accurately tell me what it is. Doctors seem to be able to diagnose her condition, at least most of it, by simply looking at her fingernails. They were severely furrowed and pitted. At the time of her original diagnosis, she was just starting to have open sores appear on her body. She did get a second opinion.
The Doctors were able to accurately predict that the open sores would progress. They stated her disease was related to an immuno disorder. She was told that her disease, if it did not kill her, would eventually progress to severe arthritis in her joints. That it would also eventually attack her heart.
As the disease progressed the sores eventually covered enough of her body that the Doctors would "medically" state they covered 95% of her body. As a layman I can tell you that well over 50% of her exposed skin was sores. She was starting to suffer from spontaneous nose bleeds and her ears became infected and she was suffering from ear aches. She was starting to suffer from chest pains.
The treatment she came up with actually did come from a Doctor. He had been conducting a study on the disease treating it with vitamins and minerals. His study showed some promise however funding for his study was cut off. He published on the internet as much as he was able to discover before he lost funding. My wife and I conjectured that the reason he lost funding is that there is no money to be made off of vitamins and minerals.
What treatment she was offered by the specialists did nothing to help her. Soon after as she started taking the vitamins and minerals her condition started to improve. While the sores have not completely gone away, as a layman I would say normally the sores only cover about 5% of her body, although at times she is almost free from it.
While the vitamins and minerals have not "cured" her, we are hopeful they will help extend her life for several years or even more.
Firstly, Carl Sagan is not a biologist and it should be noted that some of his views are based on facts that are not entirely consistent with what we know today. That is natural since this great man has passed away even though his works continue.
Secondly, although I agree with Sagan's view that a "middle ground" can be sought, I do not agree with his reasoning on "thought", in the context of the increased body of knowledge since he developed his views.
Sagan's views are fair, but they are now known to be impractical, or at least I believe so in the short to medium term. If one day we can do a high resolution scan of a foetal brain and then model it in a computer to know whether it has "thoughts" then sure, it seems like a reasonable criterion for abortion. However, that technology does not exist and nor does anything that can provide useful information. EEGs do not provide any useful information on cognition.
With regards to your wife, I am not going to speculate what she does or does not have since you don't know exactly what it is. If you think that the vitamins and minerals help, then "power to you". However, I doubt very much that vitamins and minerals would have made much of a difference (if at all) apart from a placebo effect.
There are, by the way, hundreds if not thousands of vitamin and mineral trials. By shear chance alone, many will show "benefit". That does not mean that there is a real causal effect. All the large well controlled studies looking at vitamins and mineral supplements on a variety of things like cardiovascular disease and cancer have invariably found no effect. Rarely, something pop up which then become hotly researched (e.g., folate, vitamin D). On occasion, serious negative effects are discovered (e.g., beta-carotene supplements actually significantly increase the risk of lung cancer in smokers.
Vitamins and minerals, in addition, ARE big business because so many people are willing to buy them for "health" reasons. I am always bemused by otherwise healthy people popping several pills a day. Western governments operating public health systems (i.e., most Western countries apart from the US) would like nothing better than to discover that a few vitamin supplements would decrease the risk or treat any number of diseases (like cancer) as they are cheap compared to "real" drugs.
Trust me, vitamins and minerals have been extensively investigated for just about everything and apart for a very few special cases, they don't do anything (unless you have a deficiency but then, you'll be one of the special cases).
Regards,
Michael Tam
Hang on. Are you trying to say government is motivated to cut costs to society? Let me quote Mr Spock (from Star Trek) "This is not logical."
No one from a decreasing profit center contributes money to a political campaign that seeks to further constrict the profits.
As for my wife's disease. A learned, educated, medical Doctor thought his area of study showed promise. Before my wife followed this Doctor's suggestions she was headed for death. After she followed the suggestions her condition improved. While what occured might have been coincidence (if she had not started taking the vitamins her condition might have improved anyway) to suggest the placebo effect is quite a stretch. Her condition was so hopeless she could not "wish" it away. I saw the sores on her skin. It was not in her mind.
Something caused her condition to improve. She might be amongst the minority who's condition would have improved anyway. However logic would indicate that something in her behavior caused the change. What did she change? She started taking certain natural vitamins and minerals.
It is hard to debate logic, of course I was praying to God for miracles. Perhaps it was God's doing instead of reality?
Personally I think it is a little of both. I prayed to God for help and God led my wife to a solution to the disease while she can not even tell me what the disease is!
Ah... American medicine. You are aware, of course, the the US spends a greater proportion of its GDP per head of population on health than any other Western nation... while simultaneously, 20% of the American population is unable to afford primary health services!
It is perhaps, only illogical to an American.
In Australia, and much of the rest of the Western world, health is highly subsided by the government. For example, in Australia, health is in mostly free at point of use (we do pay taxes of course). This also means that the government foots the bill for most of our pharmaceuticals.
The effect? The government tries to limit the cost of pharmaceuticals as much as possible... meaning, it restricts the use of "new and better" (and more expensive) drugs and encourages the use of the cheapest alternatives where possible. Compared to the US, Australia's pharmacopeia probably looks antiquated (but we have better health outcomes!)
And so yes, big pharama isn't really so much of a friend when they are trying to get you to pay them more of the health budget. For example, in Australia and many Western nations, direct marketing of pharmaceuticals to the consumer is illegal unlike the US.
Remember that many vitamins and minerals are not produced by "big pharma". If they get a bigger slice of the pie by showing that something works, it is completely in their interests.
Regards,
Michael Tam
We are getting way off track.
For the record, I think that in long term America is going to have to have to adopt something along the lines of socialized medicine.
This comes from one who has fairly decent health care benefits due to being retired military.
I will note that the medical community within America is amongst those most vocal against socialized medicine.
But we are losing track. I think I am going to abandon this thread. America is unwilling to adopt socialized healthcare, and "I got mine" - grin.
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