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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Wednesday, August 18, 2004 :::
John Edwards is from the America that got rich making health care unaffordable to the other America.Linking complications during childbirth to cerebral palsy became a specialty for Mr. Edwards. In the courtroom, he was known to dramatize the events at birth by speaking to jurors as if he were the unborn baby, begging for help, begging to be let out of the womb."He was very good at it," said Dr. John Schmitt, an obstetrician and gynecologist who used to practice in Mr. Edwards' hometown of Raleigh. "But the science behind a lot of his arguments was flawed." In 2003, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists published a joint study that cast serious doubt on whether events at childbirth cause cerebral palsy. The "vast majority" of cerebral palsy cases originate long before childbirth, according to the study. Science is hard, and can take years to develop, while law (comparatively) is fast. Mistakes will be made, but that doesn't mean they need to be generated on purpose. It has been estimated that half of the difference between the cost of pharmaceuticals in the United States and that in Canada is due to differences in potential tort liability of the pharmaceutical companies. Part of the problem is a way of thinking illustrated by a vignette of liability concerns besetting a vaccination program in the seventies.Dr. Hans H. Neumann, who was director of preventive medicine at the New Haven Department of Health, explained the problem in a letter to The New York Times. He wrote that if Americans have flu shots in the numbers predicted, as many as 2,300 will have strokes and 7,000 will have heart attacks within two days of being immunized. "Why? Because that is the number statistically expected, flu shots or no flu shots," he wrote. "Yet can one expect a person who received a flu shot at noon and who that same night had a stroke not to associate somehow the two in his mind? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc," he added. That's drawn from chapter 6 of Gina Kolata's book on the 1918 Spanish Flu, which is mostly not on the original point here but is an interesting book anyway.The original link is from the Corner.
::: posted by dWj at 7:05 PM
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