I am calling you skeptical, and it's a compliment. The procedure sounds like those hair regeneration products with laser light from SkyMall unfortunately. The closest stuff I could find was: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?Db=pubmed&term=percutaneous laser disk decompression But I suggest you...

Sure, people that have to make decisions all worry about these things, but my rules are: 1) don't accept authority if you can't do the right thing and 2) you gotta be able to sleep at night. Try getting a nice nights sleep after the guy you put through for too many failing performances murders a doz...

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing, right? *I've* reported people to the medical board after seeing their incompetence in a few hours, and my partner and I have reported trainees as incompetent to be advanced on several occasions, so I know this can be done. I've a...

I didn't mean "psycho" as in "not guilty by reason of insanity" or "unable to tell right from wrong." I meant it in the way I refer to all fanatics. I have not heard anything so far that leads me to believe he was not culpable for his actions, and barring such evidence,...

I regret that foreign aid is only 1% of the budget because that means so little can be saved by cutting it. But in truth a lot of that is for Egypt's military and Israel's fighters and stuff anyway. As for AIDS, yeah, agree, there are some things that can more cheaply be fought. The problem is with ...

Stevie I only argue if I think there's a point to be made, and Bill and I don't disagree about anything. I can only say that appropriate quality / process measuring is cool, but wouldn't likely have helped here because there are few more red flags and incompetencies that could possibly ave been rais...

Glenn, Agreed. To so many it's as simple as "Drill baby drill," and "maybe the caribou need to take one for the team." It stays that simple until they understand the system. However, oil is marvelously portable. Hydroelectric dams and wind farms, solar energy, nuclear--these thin...

W.M.B. was a real eye opener for me too. Made me wish the entire enterprise was reconsidered down to the last cent, and driven entirely by rewarding locally successful projects and punishing failure with defunding, not double funding. And I realized there's no switch to be thrown; a proper state and...

Found this via a google news break midway through a weird shift... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=133459867 "The Senate report was released Thursday by Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and its ranking Republican, Sen. ...

Bill, I think you still aren't reading me clearly. "I occasionally build predictive models in my professional life, and have tried building some to predict rare events. (So has the Secret Service, by the way...) Ian would have us believe that there's nothing anyone could have done (short of una...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-arizona-mental-health-20110120,0,3628622.story Yet, in 2010, Brewer agreed to cut in half state funding for the Department of Health Services, reducing services to about 14,000 mentally ill Arizonans. Brewer's reluctant acquiescence to the cuts re...

And now, some reflection: Has this entire thread been about my being offended and reminded of your critiques of clinicians who saw Cho, because you launched into a "no excuses" mode on these events instead of just starting off by recapping how difficult these events are to predict and sugg...

1) "I read the comment when it came out, and dismissed it outright. Consider the source, Ian. He can be a professor of psychiatry, medicine, law, pottery, and basket weaving for all I care. But he doesn't do predictive modeling for a living, does he? That's a very special expertise. He isn't qu...

"You presume the worst in me. Moreover, you're a jerk about it." Everyone has their own perspective. From where I sit, I read your posts, I respond to your points, I try to agree with many of them and offer amendments rather than refutations where applicable. Your posts commonly come out v...

"Are you a physician first or a human being first? When you wake up in the morning. When you are on the job. After hours." Here's your response: I don't really know what you're getting at. I am a person who is a physician, all the time. Is being a physician on my mind when I wake up? Frequ...