User:Postpostmod/sandbox

Other controversies:

pandas and pans: http://intramural.nimh.nih.gov/pdn/web.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/magazine/22OCD.html?pagewanted=all

Blaming the patients

Hi, to all of you at WP:MED. Thanks so much for all the good work you do. It's encouraging to see this kind of pro bono service from the medical community. 

I need some help. In some parts of the Lyme disease (LD) article, patients and caregivers are blamed for the difficulties introduced by the LD controversy. I don't think that's a good policy, for either the patients or the medical field. I've shown previously in the LD discussion page, and elsewhere (diffs upon request, or see my user contributions) that the patients' complaints are justified by demonstrable and consequential errors in the mainstream science, that so far have resisted the usual self-correction process that keeps medical science moving forward. I'm not suggesting that we describe in detail the evidence that the science is bad, just that we remove the biased assumption that the patients MUST be either wrong or badly motivated. 

I wonder if there's anyone at WP:MED who would be willing to collaborate in editing the article so as to correct for the (understandable) bias of the medical community against the patients and caregivers.. I don't mean to introduce a bias against the doctors, even those who have originated and propagated the regrettable errors. 

I'm not "editing boldly" in this situation, because the debate is so polarized that even good edits might be construed as an attack on the article by "patient advocates". I've decided to be a single-issue editor so far, because as a scientist I don't feel comfortable passing along opinions that I haven't personally verified by checking the science in the primary literature. I'd be glad to help check science in other controversial fields on request, though - it's been intriguing following the chain of evidence back to its origins, and not as laborious as one might think, thanks to Pubmed. 

I do understand WP policies, including MEDRS, SYN, and OR. 

Thanks for your attention, best wishes, Postpostmod (talk) 12:25, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Doc, thanks for joining in. And hi again, Axl. I'll break this up for easy reading. 

The paragraph Axl identified is the main thing I have in mind. The problem isn't about references. 

I think It's unseemly to give encyclopedic status to such emotionally loaded material. We don't have tear-jerking stories from patients in the article, though there are plenty in the press. 

There are several emotional rants denigrating Lyme patients in the medical journals. 

And there are many factual descriptions of patient pain and disability in the medical journals. 

We need to write about the controversy, it's part of the subject. People have strong feelings about it. But there's no reason for us to actively provoke emotional reactions in the reader. 

Could we just remove the problem paragraph - the ref is from 2001, anyway - and make sure it isn't replaced by something worse? 

There's at least one other place I think needs some tweaking, but let's leave that out for now.

In brief, I'm asking that the article refrain from dissing the patients.  ;-). 

Thanks for your time, best wishes, Postpostmod (talk) 01:14, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mean to pump up anybody's adrenaline. But it does show why it's not a good idea to use such colorful language in an encyclopedia. It's kind of like "death tax" and "death panel": generates lots of heat, not much light. The purple prose is the main thing that makes the Grann article suspect as a source, in my view. Along with the fact that Steere hired a PR agent to get himself into the press (see the article - it's kind of buried in there, after the quote from Polly Murray, who discovered the cluster of patients in Lyme and called in the CDC).

If we want to have a media article in there about the controversy, how about the article published in the actual NYT (not the magazine), [here]? It's more informative about the cause of the controversy, and doesn't malign either the patients or Dr. Steere. It does treats Steere, like the patients, as fallable, albeit highly influential. Maybe that's a good thing. But then, I'd think so; I'm a democrat. ;-)

It doesn't seem like anyone's interested in why the science remains under scrutiny, particularly the current diagnostic testing scheme. I admit I'm puzzled by the lack of interest in this question. To me, it's the most interesting part of the subject - the rest of it is all hand-waving and hearsay. If anyone else would like to exercise due diligence, the papers about the testing I discussed with MastCell are PMID 18532885 last diff in thread and PMID 8903216 last diff). The one on the LD talk page is PMID 17429088 [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:MastCell&diff=prev&oldid=443400654| last diff. And the one I was going to do next is Jiang et al. 2010 PMID 21112481, last diff, which presents the Chinese CDC's independently derived criteria for Western blot analysis. You don't have to take my word for any of this, though - just get the papers and think about what the data really show, and don't show. If the conclusions aren't supported by the rest of the paper, that's a problem, in science if not in Wikipedia.