Baez on Sarfatti
Jack Sarfatti
Thanks for setting the record straight. Did you all see article that
Americans spend over 13 billion a year on New Age Healing and only about
12 billion a year on conventional medicine - I think they mean office
visits to doctors not hospital costs. No wonder, the European "health"
multi-nationals have passed me some cash to write about New Age Physics
and Healing. They are behind the new university. I am attempting to
be as objective as possible and you jerks should attempt to be constructive
rather than destructive to make the report as accurate as possible.
John, tell Fred to take the rod out of his ....
Cameron Randale Bass
We have a nearly $6 trillion economy. We spend 12 billion
sending the secret service the wrong way down one way streets.
Thirteen billion is a pittance, pocket change. Just ask the
boys at the SSC.
We have a half a billion dollar hospital sitting down
the street, and it ain't the largest hospital on the planet.
It also is not the only one in town (pop ~100,000).
NIH's annual budget is somewhere around $9 billion (give or take
a few hundred billion). Medicare was $90 billion in 1989.
Yes $90 billion. The federal spending on health care alone dwarfs
your measly $13 billion, and this does not include state,
corporate or private spending. In 1990, an estimated
$700 billion was spent on health care, and very few of those
dollars went to the local shaman. Your numbers in the low billions
are a guffaw.
One of the reasons such shamans died out in
this country early in this century is that people who got
new (now conventional) treatments lived, and those who didn't died.
Death leaves a compelling impression on the survivors.
To encourage people to be treated by witch doctors for anything
but trivial 'illnesses' is unconscionable idiocy. I repeat,
THE RECOMMENDATION OF 'NEW AGE' TREATMENT FOR ANY BUT NONTRIVIAL
ILLNESS IS UNCONSCIONABLE IDIOCY. And for the non-fatal
ones, you'd do just as well sitting there telling yourself
you feel better, and keeping the $20. The snake oil won't
heal anything. The only reason that snake oil salesmen are
coming back is because of idiots like you who imply a certainty in
medical treatment that just does not exist combined with the
exploitation of the desperation of certain people.
Medical treatment can't heal everything, but at least it can
heal something.
Besides, when your new-agers can 'heal' Hodgkins lymphoma, give me a
call. I'd also like to know where *you're* going, Jack baby,
the next time you get pneumonia. The death rate is nontrivial
if untreated, and the placebo effect is of no real use.
As far as 'European' medicine goes, I suffered it for four
years. I will admit that it is not as bad as the witch doctors
that you term 'New Age' (though at times it seemed to come close),
but it is certainly not as good as the care we
regularly receive in this country.
Anyone who longs for the rationed socialized European care is a fool.
Unfortunately, I suspect that those fools will allow us rue the day
within our lifetime, and maybe within the year.
>John, tell Fred to take the rod out of his ....
As for constructive help on your 'paper', the limit of accuracy
is attained at the zero word mark. That should be fairly easy to
achieve.
dale bass
--
C. R. Bass cr...@virginia.edu
Department of Mechanical,
Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering
University of Virginia (804) 924-7926
John C. Baez
>John, tell Fred to take the rod out of his ....
Please convey your insults to him personally at
cumm...@ucrph0.ucr.edu, if you desire.