-Caveat Lector-
""The literature of modern medicine demands strict adherence to the rigors of
the scientific method: which includes strict intellectual honesty and integrity
and avoiding self-deception. ""
<<This is fine except how many times do the professionals indulge in activities
that would be best left on the drawing boards? Of course, there are varieties
of ways -- to approach infinity -- for "practicing" medicine but at what point
do they become means of 'self-deception' {"doing good", i.e.} or 'other-
deception' {giving hope when and where there might be little or none}.
Deification of the medical community to the point of acceptance by patients of
any and all treatments and procedures may approach the realm of the absurd.
There should be some sort of 'balance' yet the scales tip toward the 'provider'
rather than 'reason'. The article below examines a result of the deification
of the medicoes ("e" Dan?) in another emotionally charged issue. "'Cause the
doctor said so ?" A<>E<>R >>
>From NewsMax.CoM
> Scientific Misconduct By Physician Propagandists: A Perspective On Gun
> ViolenceMartin L. Fackler, MDSeptember 7, 1999
>
>
>
> ...learning how to not fool ourselves — of having utter scientific integrity —
> is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any
> particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
>
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest
> person to fool....I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that
> is...bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to
> have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists,
> certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
>
> Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman
> (Feynman RP, New York, WW Norton, 1985, pp. 342-3)
>
>
>
>
> The above citation by Richard Feynman illustrates one of the rigors of the
> scientific method. Scientists who allow their intellect to be misled by their
> emotions fall into the trap of fooling themselves into isolating their
> preconceived strongly held desires and opinions from contradictory facts.
>
> When scientists allow themselves to be drawn into political agendas their
> heretofore rigorous scientific method is often replaced by a frenzy of
> fanaticism. Are they fooling themselves, or is this conscious fraud?.
> Distinguishing fraud from ignorance is often impossible, but whatever the
> motivation, the effect of the misinformation is equally deleterious. The public
> is most easily misled by political propaganda from highly respected sources.
>
> An extensive, carefully documented study by Kates DB, Schaffer HE, Lattimer JK,
> Murray GB, Cassem EH., Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic
> of Propaganda? published in the Tennessee Law Review in 1995 (62(3):513-596)*
> tells a sad and shocking story.
>
> In the late 1970s, physicians from the American public health community
> apparently saw the opportunity for publicity (which helps to obtain funding) in
> the emotionally charged way the media presents, and dwells upon, violence
> involving firearms. Despite lacking expertise about firearms and their effects,
> and ignoring that crime (with or without guns) is clearly in the purview of the
> criminologist, these physicians declared gun violence an "epidemic,” and entered
> into a campaign to remove firearms from the hands of the citizens of the United
> States.
>
> To further this goal, these physicians allied themselves with anti-gun political
> lobbying organizations. Medical journals, including the Journal of the American
> Medical Association (JAMA), and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)
> became willing partners in this anti-gun advocacy. Most distressingly, the
> taxpayer-funded Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also joined
> this medical anti-gun political cabal.
>
> Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the resulting public health anti-gun
> advocacy literature is emotionally driven and lacks scholarly detachment.
> Prominent "researchers” openly admit an overwhelming "hate” of firearms – yet,
> contrary to the basic tenets of scientific method, they continue to do
> "research” on a subject about which their "hate” precludes rational evaluation.
> Grossly inaccurate hyperbole and failure to adhere to basic scientific method
> seem to "slip through” any editorial or peer review process — so long as it
> supports the anti-gun advocacy. And, when in print, these abuses are protected
> from the corrective effects of dissent and criticism – by editorial refusal to
> publish corrections (Fackler, ML. JAMA Writes Politically Correct Wound
> Ballistics History and Refuses to Publish Corrections Wound Ballistics Review
> 1996;2[3]:44-45).
>
> Concrete examples of deception by half-truth, failure to address contrary data,
> selecting and manipulating data to validate preordained conclusions, falsifying
> references, fabricating statistics, overt fraud, and more, in the medical
> anti-gun advocacy literature are explained in detail in Guns and Public Health:
> Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda? The first author of this
> imposing analysis is a highly regarded criminologist and lawyer, the second is a
> Professor of Genetics and Biomathematics, and the other three are physician
> academic scholars from Columbia and Harvard Medical Schools.
>
> Any reader who appreciates the necessity for scientific writing to adhere to the
> tenets of scholarship and scientific method must read Kates, et al. Readers
> unfamiliar with the subject will be shocked. Their first reaction will be
> disbelief: how could such disregard for scientific method, scholarship, honesty,
> and integrity have found its way into the medical literature? This meticulous
> analysis by Kates, et al., however, removes any doubt that the public has been
> seriously misled by the medical public health anti-gun political advocates –
> with the complicity of formerly well respected medical journals and the CDC.
>
> The literature of modern medicine demands strict adherence to the rigors of the
> scientific method: which includes strict intellectual honesty and integrity and
> avoiding self-deception. The medical community is well aware of the detrimental
> effects of self deception: the standard for evaluation of new medicaments is the
> double blind study, in which neither the subject nor the person administering
> the treatment knows if the treatment is the medicament or a placebo. This is
> precisely to avoid the well-recognized human propensity for believing what we
> wish to believe, regardless of contradictory facts.
>
> Why has Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda?
> not sparked a public uproar? One would expect the public to hold physicians to a
> high standard of honesty and integrity; to demand that they uphold the
> fundamental tenets of scientific method. JAMA and NEJM are held up as the most
> respected of medical journal; the news media apparently accepts as fact anything
> they print. And the CDC has been thought by most to be beyond reproach: That
> they have all forsaken their honesty and integrity for the promulgation of
> political propaganda demonstrates that they have lost their objectivity and can
> no longer be considered members of the scientific community.
>
> In the case of the CDC one must question the legality of their use of taxpayer
> funds for this unabashed political advocacy. The media and the public need to be
> made aware that the physician anti-gun advocates identified by Kates, et al.
> have become politicians and what they say should viewed with that in mind. It
> must be emphasized: They can no longer be considered reputable scientists.
>
> The scientific misconduct described by Kates. et al. is of the sort which,
> ordinarily, causes its perpetrators to suffer public disgrace, to be ostracized
> professionally, to lose any university appointments they might have and to never
> again have a paper published in a scientific journal. Yet none of this appears
> to have happened to the miscreants singled out by Kates, et al.; one of whom was
> the Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.
>
> The Kates, et al. study is in a form that would lend itself perfectly to one of
> the cogent exposures of wrongdoing that John Stossel does so well on ABC TV. Yet
> the media are apparently unaware of, or have failed thus far in their duty to
> expose, the professional misconduct of these physician propagandists.
>
> Such apparent lack of interest in honesty and integrity in a society that
> purports to respect the scientific method should be abhorrent — at least to
> scholars and academics – but we have heard nothing from them. Perhaps
> illustration of some of the very practical effects of the restrictive laws
> sought by the anti-gun medical propagandists might attract some attention.
> Unfortunately, gun control laws have a historical record of being worse than
> ineffective — they have been uniformly counterproductive to the purpose for
> which they were intended. Consider the following examples:
>
> • What were the effects of the California ban on "assault rifles”?
>
> In the months before the ban went into effect, rifles that would be affected
> poured into the state. The price of these guns tripled – gun dealers made lots
> of money. People who had never thought of owning an "assault rifle” were buying
> three and four of them. It is estimated that the number of such weapons in
> California at least quadrupled.
>
> Then came the time that persons possessing such guns were required by law to
> register them. Few — most likely less than one in ten — were registered. So
> overnight California’s law produced many thousands of new "technical” felons.
> Disrespect for law is certainly not conducive to an orderly society, but many
> otherwise honest American people will simply not obey laws that are irrational
> and violate their basic rights, for instance, the right to bear arms.
>
> • The Congresswoman from Long Island, NY who was elected as an anti-gun crusader
> after her husband was killed by Colin Freguson, in 1993, on a Long Island
> commuter train, fooled herself.
>
> Had she been able to consider the situation rationally she would have realized
> that her husband was killed in an area that already had anti-gun laws that are
> among the most restrictive in the United States. His death was, in fact, proof
> of the inefficacy of these laws. In addition, a rational person would recognize
> that these overly restrictive gun laws were actually counterproductive – they
> were, in fact, a cause of her husband’s death.
>
> In states where citizens cannot be denied a permit to carry a concealed handgun
> if they meet the qualifications, deaths and injuries from mass public shootings
> have been reduced dramatically (Lott JR Jr. More Guns Less Crime – Understanding
> Crime and Gun Control Laws. Chicago, U of Chicago Press, 1998, 100-101).
>
> • The medical anti-gun propagandists (including the American Medical
> Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs) have wildly exaggerated the
> wounding effects of military-type "assault rifle” bullets.
>
> Anybody conversant in military history knows that military full-metal-jacketed
> (FMJ) bullets were designed specifically to cause minimal wounding. Military FMJ
> bullets are prohibited for hunting precisely because of that – they most often
> wound rather than kill. A pernicious counterproductive effect of these
> exaggerations is that many surgeons believe them. Sadly, most trauma surgeons
> know no more than the average layman about firearms and bullet effects.
>
> Believing the propaganda that "assault-rifle” bullets cause "unpredictable
> damage at sites far from the wound tract” and that they cause mortality rates "4
> to 5 times higher than…low-velocity bullet wounds” can easily lead the
> unsuspecting surgeon to remove excessive amounts of healthy tissue from around
> bullet wounds if they suspect the wound might have been made by a dreaded
> "assault rifle” bullet. Thus a shooting victim can become more crippled from the
> damage done by the surgeon than from that done by the bullet.
>
> In contrast to the vast increase in gun ownership during the 1970s and 1980s,
> there has been a steady decline in the United States homicide rate over the past
> decade. This undeniable fact disproves the most sacred shibboleth of the
> anti-gun crusaders, who preach that more guns lead to more deaths.
>
> To divert attention from this embarrassment, the medical propagandists have
> padded the homicide numbers by adding suicides. They have surpassed the
> irrationality of that ploy, however, by redefining "children.” to include
> adolescents and young adults. I believe that most would agree that counting a 20
> year-old gang-member drug-dealer killed in a gunfight with his competition as a
> "child” is somewhat misleading.
>
> In opposing the licensing of individuals to carry concealed weapons, the medical
> anti-gun political advocates ignore the effect of firearms in the hands of
> honest, law-abiding citizens who are adept in their use. Throughout the US, we
> physicians cause many times more deaths from medical malpractice than are caused
> by the use of firearms. Yet society tolerates us – because we save a great many
> more lives than we take.
>
> Firearms do the same: studies by Professor Gary Kleck of Florida State
> University show that, in the U.S., as many as 75 lives are protected by guns for
> every life taken by guns. The apparently eternally gullible American public has,
> thus far, allowed gun prohibitionists to get away with their irrational refusal
> to recognize that criminals and the mentally deranged are not affected by gun
> control laws – such laws make the world a safer place only for the lawbreaker —
> by depriving honest and law-abiding citizens of the means to defend themselves.
>
> In conclusion, I suggest that Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence or
> Pandemic of Propaganda? gives the media the "smoking gun” – the documentation
> proving they have been duped by the medical anti-gun propagandists. Those who
> wish to set the record straight and make up for their part in misleading the
> American public will be forgiven if they do so now. If they choose to continue
> the deception, however, they must look forward to a future of uncertainty – the
> American people don’t like being lied to. The mountain of evidence proving the
> counterproductive effect of gun control laws can no longer be denied – and it
> continues to grow.
>
> Martin L. Fackler, MD, FACS, President,
> International Wound Ballistics Association
> www.IWBA.com
>
> Note* — Reprints of Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of
> Propaganda? by Kates, et al. are available from the International Wound
> Ballistics Association. Send a check or money order for $5.00, to cover shipping
> and handling, made out to the IWBA, to:
>
> IWBA
> P.O. Box 701
> El Sugundo, CA 90245
>
>
>
>
>
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A<>E<>R
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