Re: Medical journals are dead. Long live medical journals

From: sterling stoudenmire <sstouden_at_THELINKS.COM>
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 11:13:06 -0600

I believe, a small problem in this particular message exists.

The profit opportunity, that suggests as its prey, the consumer and
physician, does not account for the issues of enablements and entitlements.

First, the gates and passages to the knowledge and exploitation of the
medical industry (organized credentialized medicine), unlike the world of
physics, is occupied by the invisible soldiers who serve the supreme
economic being.
These soldiers:
 licence (to protect the practioner from the public),
 patent (to encapuslate the pieces of technology),
 intangible rights (to exclude non owners from existing technology)
 controlled access (so knowledge and experience is not available),
technology encapsulation as patents (so friends of the legislature can
profit), institutionalization (for behavioral control), and
 bureaucratism(to serve legislative needs)
are serving the supreme economic being through the political machinery.

Secondly, the political machinery, authorized by citizens, which is suppose
to protect the customer from exploitative profits, has instead been
persuaded, to create and support long standing monopolistic profits.
Therefore, there is a real difference between physics and medicine..
Physics is a pure science unrestricted by politics; medicine, is not
science, but a gated profit based economic system, controlled by politics,
sometimes interested in the truth, always interested in control and power.

sterling


At 08:46 AM 02/29/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>---- Original Message -----
>From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
>To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
>Sent: Tuesday, February 29, 2000 5:47 AM
>Subject: Re: Medical journals are dead. Long live medical journals
>
>
>> On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Albert Henderson wrote:
>>
>> > There are many differences between bioscience and
>> > physics. The most important is is the problem of
>> > (and sensitivity to) conflict of interest. The
>> > commercial opportunities available for quack health
>> > remedies, devices, and preventions are huge. The health
>> > audience, which includes physicians and consumers, is
>> > large and naive. There is also a mass media eagerly
>> > waiting to amplify the thinnest correlation into "tips"
>> > that can attract readers and viewers. Health claims can
>> > be made on the basis of poor experimental work and
>> > unsupportable theories. Physicists, who have little to
>> > sell, often rely on mathematical proofs that make their
>> > work more reliable even if it may be less useful and
>> > interesting to the general public.
>>
>> So biomedical science, which its researchers give away for free for all,
>> exactly as physical scientists do, should continue to be held hostage to
>> access-blocking tolls, because there's money to be made there...
>>
>> (Money for whom? And of what benefit to science and scientists?)
><snip>
>
>That's a distortion of what Henderson wrote. The money is made by medical
>quacks, who usually are not scientists and only sometimes are physicians.
>The harm is to the public, and there is no benefit to scientists other than
>the few who are medical quacks.
>
>There are already some medical journals that cater to the health-care
>fringes of dubious scientific merit. I won't be specific in order to avoid
>flames, but I observed this when looking into the merit of a new medical
>treatment that involves equipment made by a few companies and sold to
>patients. The medical literature in support of the treatment was
>concentrated in one journal, and most of the papers were by people on the
>editorial board.
>
>
Computer Aided Cell and Molecular Biology (CACMB), not medicine, will find
the cure for cancer and other diseases. There will always be a need for
the trained clinician (MD/RN) but, advanced diagnostic and treatment option
selection has become gene based, has moved from the physician's practice to
the computerized cell and molecular biology laboratory, and appropriate
treatment options should now be based on the personal biology of the
patient.
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT