Science-Based Medicine - Latest Comments

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Anthony Jackson — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:49:07 -0000

Well, he cares -- he considers people who make sacrifices like that useful suckers.

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Renate1 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 16:31:28 -0000

I get the impression Trump doesn't care about sacrifices made by others.
Prisoners of war - No heroes
Death soldiers - Losers

Trump - evaded the draft

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Rogue Medic — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:14:30 -0000

We have a pile on directed atby Trump.

The politics of human sacrifice - children will be hospitalized and some will die. The Republican party action can take action to prevent the hospitalizations and deaths of children, but that might take impeaching their leader, convicting their leader, and their new leader revoking the executive order. SCOTUS could also declare the executive order unconstitutional, but with the current SCOTUS, impeachment may be much more likely.

Executive orders are not legislation; they require no approval from Congress and Congress cannot simply overturn them. Congress may pass legislation that might make it difficult, or even impossible, to carry out the order, such as removing funding. Only a sitting U.S. president may overturn an existing executive order by issuing another executive order to that effect. [1]

Like both legislative statutes and regulations promulgated by government agencies, executive orders are subject to judicial review and may be overturned if the orders lack support by statute or the Constitution. Major policy initiatives require approval by the legislative branch, but executive orders have significant influence over the internal affairs of government, deciding how and to what degree legislation will be enforced, dealing with emergencies, waging wars and in general fine-tuning policy choices in the implementation of broad statutes.

https://tmcf.org/policy-advocacy/executive-orders/

Will the Republican party protect the children of America from the Republican party?

This is just 2/3 of Americans demonstrating that they are unreasonable and willing to sacrifice their children to prove how unreasonable they are.

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Philadelphiensis — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:38:45 -0000

...historical materialist analysis and challenging ownership of the means of production.

None who these knew of Woo Woo? You must be joking Earthling.

Apart from Stalin, Lysenko, The Cultural Revolution acupuncture toting Chinese barefoot doctors and several left sects in Europe to my knowledge, who also got onto the GMO bandwagon 'cos corporations. Curiously echoed by Cultural Revolution 'kill all the birds' campaigns, which, frankly, were as unscientific as the almost inverse ecological disaster Mosquito Joe is helping along for reasons of shameless commerce in the more superficially sciency USA with its addiction to lawns and turning the outdoors into a living room extension/nation wide car park. Which, if you think about it, makes little rational sense?

Depends what you mean by 'woo woo' I suppose?

As it happens, and the science of the time he wrote it clears him really of the woo woo charge, Engels thought Miasma theory to be plausible and correct. He also seems to have recognized the dangers of coal dust, some but not all, 'real' doctors in the UK denied it for some time using 'gold standard' arguments.

The best of all of them though being a Trotskyist sect in Italy/Argentina the Posadists . I can personally vouch they were great fun actually and mostly forgot their official doctrines; like the rest of us.

The reasoning roughly was a crude Marxist materialist one: "any society that can achieve intergalactic travel must be socialist: therefore we must unite with the UFOs". They took as a premise that 'they' were here already.

I do consider by the way 'barefoot doctors' to have been likely a 'net' positive. In fact I would go for an enhanced 'nurse practitioner' system here in the USA currently: knowing there might be some loss of one to one, as it were, scientific medicine. On the exact same basis, at scale, as current individualized 'risk/benefit' thinking. Net gains as it were.

As Mark Twain said of the Terror of Thermidor in France, "then there is the terror of 500 years of Monarchy and Feudalism to weigh against it". The first 'you can't make an omellete without breaking eggs' quote I know of. Machiavelli pre dates perhaps?

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Renate1 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:46:55 -0000

Well, I suppose it's not just that they hate Palestinians more than the hate Israelis. There might be something else at work as well. If all Jews are in Israel, they are no longer a problem. In 1940 there was a plan to move all Jews to Madagascar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

And there seem to have to have been some indirect ties between the Muslim Brotherhood and Nazis.

In the years preceding World War II the Muslim Brothers likely received indirect funds from Nazi Germany, maintained via the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro in Cairo and Amin al-Husseini,[74] who himself received funds from Italian intelligence[75] and the Abwehr.[76] Being interested in strengthening a militant anti-British organization, Germany may have funded the Brotherhood as early as 1934. One later British source claimed that in 1936 alone, Germany transferred over £5.000.[74] The author Francis Nicosia found in his research however that the Germans had generally refused to assist Arab independence movements and related activities before 1938 due to a desire to keep positive relations with Britain.[77] al-Banna and other members of the Brotherhood voiced admiration for aspects of Nazi ideology, including its militarism and its centralization revolving around a charismatic leader,[78] but opposed others like its racial policies and ethnic nationalism.[79] The outbreak of the war ended any relationship between Germany and the Muslim Brothers.[80] al-Banna denied that he had ever received German funding.[81] Italian funding of the Brotherhood is unlikely, as the latter vehemently opposed the Italian occupation of Libya.[80]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Rogue Medic — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:12:21 -0000

Bigotry is emotional, not logical.

Maybe the right wing hates both Palestinians and Israelis, but they hate Palestinians much more than they hate Israelis. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, is a popular saying among people who have no friends.

As long as the bigots have somebody to blame for the problems caused by the ignorance of the bigots, the bigots are happy. They don't have to acknowledge reality.

Accepting reality is the worst thing possible for bigot. The cognitive dissonance of the bigots is sacred. Besides, a war in the Middle East could bring on Armageddon, which is the goal of a lot of bigots - these are not reasonable people.

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Blog Design — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:10:09 -0000

https://stateline.org/2026/08/12/trump-vaccine-order-takes-aim-at-states-that-limit-exemptions/

We have a pile on directed at Trump.

A largely overlooked part of the executive order President Donald Trump issued this week scaling back the schedule for childhood vaccines threatens legal action against the four states that don’t allow personal or religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements.

Those states — California, Connecticut, Maine and New York — are among the states with the highest immunization rates, and they are among those that have been most successful in controlling the worst measles outbreak in more than three decades.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia require students to have certain vaccines before attending public school. All allow exemptions for children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. Forty-six states plus the District of Columbia also allow exemptions for religious and/or personal beliefs.

Trump’s order, which he signed on Monday, says the attorney general will take legal action against states that do not provide “religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”

Some health officials said that Trump’s order, which has questionable legal authority, is unlikely to prompt the states without nonmedical exemptions to change course. And any legal action would take years to wend its way through the courts.

But they criticized the executive order, and its legal threats, for contributing to the misinformation and skepticism that have lowered vaccination rates nationwide.

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Philadelphiensis — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:35:45 -0000

Counterpunch could try sometimes to get basic facts right. However we do have already a K shaped for health care. Surreal really, you get ill you lose care until Medicare kicks in.

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Renate1 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:01:54 -0000

I think you have a point there. It's in a way the other way round in Germany, that seems to feel that any critique on Israel is anti-semitism. Which might have a lot to do with WWII.

Weird part is the German right-wing extremist party, which is pretty popular, especially in the eastern part of Germany, is a supporter of everything Israel does, even though a former leader, considered the Holocaust Monument in Berlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_of_Europe as a disgrace and a monument of shame and that Germany should be proud on it's history.

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Rogue Medic — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:31:27 -0000

The country in Europe that is most aggressively supporting Palestine (condemning the killing of civilians by Israel) is Ireland. Why didn't the people of Ireland fall for the same propaganda that everyone else saw that tried to justify killing unarmed civilians?

How would a skeptic approach this? A skeptic would want to see the evidence that the unarmed civilians were so dangerous that blowing the civilians up was a reasonable way of managing things.

Apparently, a history of having similar things done to Irish citizens, on a much smaller scale, has allowed the Irish to see through the propaganda.

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Philadelphiensis — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:24:31 -0000

You mean the faction of the right that is the Democratic Party will win out? I admit there are encouraging developments within the Uniparty at present. The donors and so on are working hard to undo it or make sure it runs into sand..

My own feeling, though I don't see it like you do, is that we, the people as it were, will pull everything round and perhaps faster than most of us think?

As for Trump, I don't know. Basically he is a propaganda creation in my view and a product of skilfull media manipulation over a fairly long term. I admit for some of us the Lysenko 2.0 moves came as something of a shock? I never saw it coming frankly and it has caused a lot of re thinking on my part. However in many ways this is McCarthy 2.0 or Business as usual in the Manufacture of Consent.

However that did involve Trump being 'all things to all people' as you imply. Bearing in mind that 20% or more of the population of any country is pretty much open to manipulation by anybody and everybody. Enough often to tip plebiscites and formal elections, often against their own interests and in a context of total ignorance. That is true in Wales and In Mississippi. I believe we can overcome that though. Not by trying to close an information deficit with a bunch of morons and sclerotic loons.

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Philadelphiensis — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:13:46 -0000

Spooky! I was just putting away from the wash my "Bigfoot" comedy underwear Mrs. P finds infinitely amusing, when I saw this from you. We must be psychic! I want to go there too.

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Renate1 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:03:22 -0000

I saw this cartoon I liked:
https://www.gocomics.com/claybennett/2026/08/16

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Renate1 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:54:48 -0000

You might be right on that one.

We seem to see a kind of simular thing in The Netherlands, though we never had a 2 party system. But we seem to get more and more parties on the right, that seem to draw the moderate right-wing parties even more to the right. Our left-wing party, that is a fusion of social-democrats and the green party, might have moved a tiny bit to the left (by critisizing Israel) and gets accused of being radical left by the (formerly) moderate right-wing party. It's a reason why we are now basicly with a minority government.

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

KayMarie — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:23:56 -0000

Now I want to go the Sasquatch Festival not that far from me. https://marionbigfootfestival.wordpress.com/

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

KayMarie — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:21:50 -0000

For some reason I thought of this video I just saw, about conspiracies then and now.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/anfbKy_rfgU

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

KayMarie — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:21:25 -0000

What made Trump unique, IMO, is he was all things to every variety of the fringe along with enough of the hard right to win. I don't think any of the splinter folks have that same kind of appeal.

Trump is squishy enough that all the factions think they will get what they want, most of the splinter folks may be able to grab the attention of one of the factions, but they won't get all of the factions.

I predict a Balkanization of the right. Once the strong man is gone, all the old grudges and differences cause things to break up. It will likely be messy. For me the question of who will be able to come along and make a big enough coalition of the people who are center right to moderate and won't need the far right to get elected.

Every time they try a "Unite the Right" they either end up annoying each other or annoying everyone else.

A lot of the moderate unaffiliated and more conservative Democrats are finally fed up with how far to the right the Republican party has gone. I saw an alnalysis of the polarization of the two parties. While Democrats moved only the tiniest bit to the left, the Republicans have move a whole lot to the right - even though everyone believes the line that Democrats went way too far to the "loony" left so they had to go the extreme right to balance it out.

So it feels like the brand is damaged and while they are trying, going even farther right seems to be a losing strategy, but to move back to center right means they lose a lot of the base who finally got a taste of power and will likely just stop voting or some extreme right third party with no chance of winning big will get on the ballot to suck those votes away from the Republicans.

Just it seems rare for someone to be both charismatic/enthralling and firmly in the middle pushing for moderation and incremental change in a direction that benefits almost everyone while appealing to what used to be the actual traditional values shared by most Americans.

Re: AI And Pseudoscience

regisqus — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 06:24:11 -0000

I share some of the alarm about the uncritical acceptance of LLM responses to open-ending queries. That said, AI-assisted software development is a revolutionary in productivity, perhaps eclipsing the development of high-level languages compared to machine-language coding. The specific social and economics consequences of radically reducing the cost of application development are risky to enumerate, but the general direction isn’t.

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Renate1 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:14:42 -0000

We have a Dutch saying, that translates as "it makes little difference whether you get bitten by the dog or the cat".

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Renate1 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:10:54 -0000

Yeah, I see the splits in the MAGA coalitition, but I'm not sure if that's really an improvement. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon may have left Trump, but their ideas are just as bad as his.

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Potatriot King — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:55:29 -0000

Correct.

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Gracie Spicewood — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 21:09:14 -0000

Agree that CBS has gone to sh*t in the Bari Weiss era. Normally Margaret Brennan is just as bad, but I have to concede she was asking the right questions in the excerpts quoted by JH. (I also did not watch the entire interview, because Bhattacharya.)

Brennan’s schtick typically goes something like this: “Oh, you’re fighting a war? Why isn’t it an even bigger war?”

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Rogue Medic — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 20:40:37 -0000

There is no need to determine the worst of a group of deadly disinformation sites. All of the sites that provide deadly disinformation are encouraging people to endanger their children, their neighbors, and themselves. Worst is not an important distinction.

They all produce information that causes the deaths of children.

Re: “I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”

Potatriot King — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 18:25:23 -0000

Which site is worse: Whale To or Educate Yourself or the multitude of sites ran by Mike "Danger Ranger" Adams?

Re: Trump’s Frontal Assault on Vaccines

Rogue Medic — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:13:43 -0000

The minimum clinically important difference (MCID) is used to interpret the relevance of treatment effects, e.g., when developing clinical guidelines, evaluating trial results or planning sample sizes. There is currently no agreement on an appropriate MCID in chronic pain and little is known about which contextual factors cause variation.

Results
We included 66 studies (31.254 patients). Median absolute MCID was 23 mm on a 0–100 mm scale (interquartile range [IQR] 12–39) and median relative MCID was 34% (IQR 22–45) among studies using the mean change approach. In both cases, heterogeneity was very high: absolute MCID I2 = 99% and relative MCID I2 = 96%. High variation was also seen among studies using the threshold approach: median absolute MCID was 20 mm (IQR 15–30) and relative MCID was 32% (IQR 15–41). Absolute MCID was strongly associated with baseline pain, explaining approximately two-thirds of the variation, and to a lesser degree with the operational definition of minimum pain relief and clinical condition. A total of 15 clinical and methodological factors were assessed as possible causes for variation in MCID.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0895435618301240

The 23 mm measurement for MCID (Minimum Clinically Important Difference) is roughly the same as a difference of a little more than 2 on the 0-10 scale of pain.

If a difference of more than 2 is necessary to make a difference that matters to the patient (MCID is what matters to the patient), does anything beyond one decimal place matter? No. It only matters for making it seem as if there is greater precision in the number, but the number is just something that is reported in whole numbers. If any patient has provided a decimal portion of their pain rating, I do not remember. OTOH, I have had patients refuse to give me a numeric rating of their pain, because they did not feel that anything suggesting the amount of precision of a whole number would be accurate. They would tell me "mild," or "moderate," or something like that. For documentation, the pain number had to be documented as a number, so I was required to translate that word into a number.

People reporting results that indicate precision probably do not understand statistics or medicine.

This is not limited to pain management. Some blood pressure medicine research includes significant differences that are not clinically significant - do not matter to the only person who matters, the patient. Medical research that is not patient-oriented is often bad research, intended to promote the product that can be sold to the patient (who doesn't understand) by the drug raters (sales representatives for the drug companies who push new, still on patent, brand name drugs to doctors) to doctors who do not understand that New and Improved means with mostly unknown adverse effects. A lot of physicians are susceptible to PowerPoint sales presentations that include a bunch of irrelevant decimal points that mean nothing to patients.

Research regularly shows that physicians are not good at understanding statistics. They are a little better than the average person, but not a lot. Humans are animals that need to stop and focus on problems to even recognize that there is a problem. This is why an important part of the hiring criteria for drug raters is their distractingly good looks. Some know their product very well and will find out the answer to anything you ask (if they do not know the answer), but plenty seem to only know what is in large print on the handouts.

How to lie with statistics is something people worry about, but it is much less of a problem than the people who lie with words. The people who lie with words try to distract from their lies by blaming statistics for being unreliable. statistics are much better at exposing lies, than at lying. The problem is that humans are horrible at statistics, so they listen to lies told with words.