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Messages - CriticalThinker

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1
It varies facility to facility and cancer to cancer.  Stage 0.5 would be in the neighborhood of abnormal cells that can't quite be called cancer during the biopsy.  It would help a shit ton if they'd just call it cancer too.  Stage 0 only applies to specific cancers like breast cancer where routine screening is the norm.  They have to call is something on reports.  It's essentially the same between 0 and 0.5 but for different locations.  It's stupid and it should all be called cancer.

CT

2
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: September 13, 2017, 10:05:54 PM »
You're probably right about other countries as well.  Trump specifically targeted rural communities, lower income working people and retirees that yearned for the good old days of American manufacturing.  All segments that have been largely ignored by both parties for a good number of years and quite frankly are sick of that bullshit.  I come from a rural community where, I'm 100% sure I would have seen a lot of Trump stickers on pickups because he was speaking their language.  They didn't want to know the details because they probably wouldn't understand some of it.  They wanted someone to, just once, give half a flying fuck about how shitty it was for them.  In this case, they got someone good at pretending and they got duped.

It's the same reason I don't use medical terminology with any of my patients.  I want them to understand, not think that I'm some douche elitist doctor that sees them as a number instead of a person.

CT

3
Flat Earth Community / Re: 50 Years Later
« on: September 13, 2017, 04:47:31 PM »
My mom wants me to come upstairs and get off the computer now.

In case you missed it elsewhere.

In other news: Is it entirely impossible for a government organization to overstate their accomplishments and provide flimsy reasons why they can't do something in order to embezzle money, avoid embarrassment or secure promotions?  I'm not implying that everything was faked.  Just that, in general, people are greedy and lazy.

Let's look at this from an outside perspective and assume that a trip to the moon is indeed plausible today.  There must be at least some market for private enterprise to attempt it.  Humans do dumber things for money every day and there are some really rich idiots out there to take advantage of.  This could happen, but it's not currently which is a tad odd.  It makes sense to me that maybe NASA isn't doing it because the average US citizen cares more about the Kardashians and fake space movies than real space.

My best guess based on the assumption that the moon landing did happen exactly as claimed is that there's another reason not to go out there besides money and I suspect it could have to do with unwanted long term side effects.  It's very normal for private enterprise to by risk adverse when it comes to losing customers.  If private enterprise were to cater to super wealthy, and let's be honest it would be a one and done flight for most people, they can't afford to lose a single customer.  It's easier to have former government employees end up with higher rates of terminal cancer than the average population because no one tracks it.

That's my $0.02 as to why we haven't gone back.  There are people that moved back to Pripyat after Chernobyl, but they didn't have many options either.  I don't think that you'd get J Lo to move there today even if you built her a mansion.  People are funny that way.

CT

4
Earth Not a Globe Workshop / Re: Zetetic Method Vs Scientific Method Notes
« on: September 13, 2017, 04:20:59 PM »
It seems that there's just a basic misunderstanding about the scientific method early in this thread.

1: Make an interesting observation
2: Create a hypothesis that could potentially explain said observation
3: Identify variables that would be testable for said hypothesis
4: Create an experiment that tests the effects of as many variables as you are able to control
5: Assume the null hypothesis (that your initial guess is wrong)
6: Analyze the data and draw a conclusion
7: Accept or reject the null hypothesis and report your findings

Truth isn't in science, it's in philosophy.  Word salads are hard to digest.

CT

5
That's really the harshest reality of all.  We are all going to die of something and there's not a damn thing we can do to change that.  What it really boils down to is risk/reward/values.  If you don't live a life that fulfills you, why would you want it to last longer?  If you want to invest in your health, it's not that hard to do.  However, nothing and I mean nothing in this world will make you live forever.  I drink black coffee daily, just not a couple of pots of it.  I love a wide variety of alcohols, I just don't drink heavily.  I love me some red meat, I just don't eat over 1 lb of steak a night.  I can't wait for my next motorcycle ride.  I could slip and fall in the shower and die instantly no matter how healthy I am.  There's no way to know when you're about to be on the ass end of Murphy's Law.

Knowledge is power and knowing that you don't necessarily have to wait and do nothing is valuable.  Every time a person is prescribed a medication, they should ask why.  Then they should ask what they need to do to get back off of it down the road.  If the doctor tells you there's nothing you can do, find a new doctor because that one is lazy.

The original title of the post would be more accurate if it were rephrased as: Some stages of cancer could be easily reversed with grocery store items.

That's not all that inaccurate.

CT

6
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: September 13, 2017, 03:25:28 PM »
That really just shows you what the US is like right now.  National reading level is only 6th grade and people don't want to feel dumb.  Talk plainly and people tend to listen.  Tell them what they want to hear and they'll love you for it.  It's not like a normal job where if you don't do what you say you can do in the first 90 days, you'll get fired.  All the hard part is in the running.

CT

7
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: September 13, 2017, 12:24:13 AM »
Sure he might have won the presidential election on variance, but not the primaries.  In some areas, he won by a large margin during the primaries so not all variance.  He beat out all of the competition during the primaries mainly because he was over the top.

CT

8
Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Dome
« on: September 12, 2017, 11:09:33 PM »
Didn't say going to church was an inherently bad thing J-man.  If it makes you a better person, it's the right place to be.  Just that the founding fathers made sure that you could without government persecution.  By adding the words under God to the pledge of allegiance, it does violate the separation of church and state to a very small degree, but I'm an American and I say it anyways because it's our official pledge of allegiance.  If you really want to live in a theocracy, try the middle east.  It's all the rage there.

In other news: If the firmament is a dome covering the flat earth and holding back the waters of heaven, wouldn't the earth be more accurately described as a hemisphere?  I mean does the atmosphere not count as part of Earth?

CT

9
One of the tests of a Lego master is to create a sphere out of rectangular blocks.  There is bound to be a slight difference circumference in that sphere if you measured from all available points because each block would still have a point somewhere but overall you would probably call it a sphere.  In technical terms, it's not a perfect sphere.  The orbit isn't a perfect circle, but darn close.  An orbit off by 3% isn't that easy to discern by eye and would look like a perfect circle.  That's because our eyes aren't that good at spotting subtle variations.  An oval could be egg shaped as in not symmetrical in both the vertical and horizontal bisections.  An ellipse, is symmetrical in both vertical and horizontal bisections.  To the best of my recollection, earth's orbit is described as an ellipse, not an oval.

However, a lot of words tend to change their meanings over a long enough time line so take it with a grain of salt.

CT

10
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: September 12, 2017, 10:50:31 PM »
I'm not so surprised he won anymore. 

It's about brand recognition, showmanship and luck more than substance.  Clinton and Trump both had brand recognition but for different reasons.  We live in the age of viral youtube stars, basic brand recognition matters more than context.

Trump did a better job of not talking about details during his campaign which allowed people to insert their own visions of how he was going to accomplish whatever he said he was going to do at any given time.  Same thing works for scary movies.  Once you show the big bad monster in full view, it loses some of its scariness because our imaginations are better.  That's showmanship.

Luck played a big role.  Trump was lucky enough to be squeezed out of the right uterus in exactly the right year to be financially, socially and physically eligible to run at a time where his message would actually resonate with the masses.  The odds of that are higher than winning the powerball jackpot once you start doing the permutations.  If he ran against Ronald Reagan in 1980, he wouldn't have won the Republican primary.  If he had run that same era as a democrat, Reagan would still have won because of the same variables that explain Trump's victory.

Doesn't mean I have to like it, just not so hard to understand.

CT

11
I'm all for healthy eating and I believe a healthy diet helps prevent and, in some cases, even cure cancer. However I, and most everyone as far as I can tell, do not agree that cancer is easily cured with a few grocery store items.

Ultimately that really boils down to an arbitrary time definition.  Technically speaking we all have cancerous cells present all the time.  The arbitrary time cutoff you are using is after critical mass has been reached and severe symptoms felt.  By that time, your immune system has been losing a slow battle for years/decades and you had undiagnosed cancer that whole time.  That's why they are graded in stages instead of a binary grading system.  Stage 4, probably not going to reverse no matter what you try.  Precancerous abnormalities, Stage 0.5 because they really don't like calling it cancer, is a sugar coated way of saying cancer that probably won't kill you right away.  One could conceivably be cured by changes in lifestyle factors, the other probably not.  However, that doesn't negate the sad reality that both are still cancer. 

Early nonaggressive cancer can easily be treated using grocery store items.  Stage 0.5 cancer is the watch and wait type of cancer but you probably won't hear that you could reverse it at this stage by making some serious life changes.  That's because many doctors have become too cynical to believe that you'll actually follow through with the changes necessary for that to happen.  Instead, they assume that you'll continue on with your mildly destructive habits until you reach a later stage and then they'll perform chemo or surgery.  Same thing happens for pre-diabetes.  Why bother teaching the patient something they don't want to learn only to have them ignore your advice.  It's much easier to just leave it be and wait until they need medication because that's how 1st world countries work.

Though I'm not a oncologist, I am a doctor with a master's in public health to boot so no clinical slouch.  Those that rapidly dismiss lifestyle factors as relevant to health typically don't want to take responsibility for their bad habits.  There's an awful lot that the medical community doesn't know and a little that they'd rather not talk about.  Take a look at the funded research by the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association and American Cancer Society and take a look at the distribution of funding between prevention research and management research.  American Caner Society is about a 1:2 ratio respectively.

Per the American Cancer Society page.
Obesity, lack of physical activity, and poor diet are major risk factors for cancer – second only to tobacco use. The World Cancer Research Fund estimates that about 20% of all cancers diagnosed in the US are related to body fatness, physical inactivity, excess alcohol consumption, and/or poor nutrition, and thus could be prevented.

Read between the lines could be prevented = early stage cure.  Doctors just aren't allowed to call patients out to their faces because yelp reviews actually matter to hospital administrators now.

CT

12
Flat Earth Community / Re: Exposing a flat earth liar: Eric Dubay
« on: September 12, 2017, 05:01:04 PM »
What does the one thing have to do with the other?  They aren't inextricably linked.

Dubay believes in FE.  Dubay believes no holocaust.  They're about a linked logically as shape and taste.  All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares right?  The link between Dubay's beliefs are more on the order of all squares are rectangles but all fish tastes bad.  Your disagreement with the second can be justified any way you want but it doesn't have anything to do with the first.

CT

13
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: September 12, 2017, 04:40:28 PM »
I personally blame both parties equally.  You gotta be rich to run and none of them give a damn about regular people.  Trump's not really that much worse than a lot of historical presidents and fortunately, he doesn't appear to be all that interested in becoming a dictator.  Not enough golf.  They'll both fade into history not unlike the hanging chad scandal of 2000.  We forget our government's general ineptitude so quickly.

CT

14
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: September 12, 2017, 03:52:02 PM »
Just wait a little longer Junker, I thought secret service was running out of funding trying to keep up with all of the travel the Trump family does for private business.

CT

15
Science & Alternative Science / Re: Genetics & Pseudoscience
« on: September 12, 2017, 03:37:14 PM »
Up until we completed the Human Genome Project, it was widely held belief that DNA worked like a recipe for cake.  When we started to read the recipe, it didn't make any sense and it didn't explain what we routinely see in a variety of heritable traits.  Epigenetic factors could potentially explain a lot of it, but it's a new line of inquiry so there's not a lot to go on as yet.

In a nutshell, if genetics was a hard coded recipe, then technically the Nazis would have been accurate.  They believed that through selective breeding we could produce the perfect human.  In all practicality, that would fly in the face of what we observe with virology every year.  Even the tiniest, most rudimentary volume of genetic material found in the common cold virus is able to adapt to its environmental threats so well, we can't create a vaccine or treatment for it.  DNA sequences don't hard code for a single protein like we thought.  They can change their output depending on a lot of outside factors which is really freaking cool.  However, we're not really that good at observing it yet, let alone testing it.

CT

16
Though Tom & Co may not be conveying the information exactly as people expect, they're not totally off on this.  Diet plays a huge role in overall body function, most pharmaceuticals are concentrated dosages of compounds found in nature that indigenous people have been eating for generations, and double-blind placebo controlled trials are inherently designed to favor medications at the exclusion of all else.  It's the result of a combination of a little bit of narrow minded science and a healthy dose of profit motive.

The reason why there isn't a single cause identified for any cancer or a single cure identified for any cancer is because that's not how chronic disease works.  Chronic disease is the accumulation of a lot of little health mistakes over time which leads to the breakdown of normal system function.  Diet is a huge component of that as are other lifestyle factors that busy people tend to ignore.  The US economy relies on a workforce that works 100+ hours per year more than any other country which leads to a lot of lifestyle fails.  Combine that with a general lack of health education and chronic disease is guaranteed based purely out of ignorance and scheduling.  It sucks, but it's true and most doctors know it.

In an otherwise healthy person, there are a few random bunches of cancerous cells.  These cells most likely ended up with deranged DNA sequences because of basic statistical probability.  DNA can't be copied and pasted with 100% fidelity.  You take an environmental stressor that causes cell turnover rates to increase and a typographical error is 100% going to happen eventually.  Fine, what happens to the deranged DNA cell in an otherwise healthy person?  Their immune system recognizes it, destroys it and everything goes back to normal until it happens again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

What happens to that small cancerous cluster in a person that has a crap diet, gets no sunlight or exercise and thinks that there's no environmental stressors they can't handle with booze, cigarettes, coffee or insert other addiction here?  Their immune system gets sluggish, can't keep up and some of those cells start to multiply and spread.  Once their numbers are large enough to cause symptoms, you get your official cancer diagnosis.

Will taking garlic like it's a medication in mega doses cure cancer?  No, that's not how the body works so when it is tested using a double-blind placebo controlled trial, it will fail.  All of the foods that I've seen listed in this thread play a role in good immune function so improving your trash diet by adding in some real food may just allow your immune system to catch up if you're lucky.  No promises, but you really don't have much to lose either by improving your diet in the earliest phases of cancer.  Current cancer treatments are wildly destructive, not targeted at all and the equivalent of using a hand grenade to kill a mosquito.  You'll get it, hopefully, but you'll damage a lot of other things that you didn't really want to as well.  When you get the wait and watch recommendation, that's when you really want to double down on fixing your lifestyle habits because it could actually work.

My very real question is this.  Why do people so easily dismiss a healthy varied diet and routine physical activity as being beneficial to health?  This should not be that hard to wrap your head around.  You treat your health like it's expendable and you'll spend it quickly.  Health is the only thing I have ever come across that people place no value on prior to losing it.

CriticalThinker

17
Science & Alternative Science / Re: I want one.
« on: September 12, 2017, 02:40:54 PM »
That is the shit.  Now I want one too.  A fresh kidney goes for like $250k on the black market so, you know, if you stumble across one you could get one with change to spare.  If you come across 2 fresh kidneys, then you could probably buy 1 and move to a tropical destination with the left over funds.  Just sayin.  In my neck of the woods, water is too damn cold most of the time to actually enjoy it.

CT

18
Flat Earth Theory / Re: Why is the earth flat?
« on: September 12, 2017, 02:13:36 PM »
Jura's right.  Most of the flat earthers threw Tom to the wolves in the upper fora.  Rowbotham was a convicted murderer, Hampden was imprisoned for something along the lines of attempted murder or stalking, not exactly sure which.  With the very small exception of the Bishop Experiment, no one has done anything of significance since around WWI.  Without the angry roundies posting to your forums regularly, you'd lose your google search rankings and participants.  When your best counterpoints boil down to nuh-uh or because reasons it gets rather stale.

CriticalThinker

19
Flat Earth Theory / Re: Why is the earth flat?
« on: September 12, 2017, 01:12:10 AM »
Don't think too hard about it, you might hemorrhage.  Essentially, you won't get a real answer because reasons.  They will wait for you to try to prove them wrong, poke holes in your logic based on some tiny assumed flaw.  If you're lucky, the short answer is because the Bible said so.  If you're not lucky, then it's 'cause aether and if you're really not lucky you'll be ignored.  Basic rule of thumb is they don't like you asking questions because they have no real answers.

Thank you,

CriticalThinker

20
Flat Earth Theory / Re: Old video footage of space
« on: September 11, 2017, 10:00:12 PM »
J-man

The Zapruder film might be fake.  Not my worry today.  You really think that any obstacle between greed and its target won't be removed quickly, forcibly and permanently whenever the opportunity presents itself?  Humans are very destructive critters.  Still doesn't make all film faked.  Too damn much effort for not a lot of payout.  Skylab maybe could be faked, but to what purpose and for how long before some low level disgruntled employee burned it all over a stupid red stapler.  The real question you should ask is why, if the skylab video was faked, they didn't make it more entertaining?  I mean, I enjoy watching half naked men play grabass in microgravity as much as the next man but if the internet has taught me anything useful, it's that they would have had a much bigger budget if the video featured half naked playmates instead.  You want to really get a big budget?  Give the people what they want.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/52/cd/45/52cd452efc17ba9470609bfe7a29a79f--staplers-demotivational-posters.jpg

CriticalThinker

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