As for the right dosage of Warfarin, there are genetic tests that allow to make a better initial guess at least in some cases. Genetics itself involve a lot of math, and there's also economic aspects (healthcare costs) on top of that. I hope to see more and more mathematicians and programmers participating in healthcare.
The author is a mathematician, and thus used to thinking about percentages and numbers.
Gerd Gigerenzer has a nice book, Reckoning with Risk (or Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You in the US), in which he calls for people to stop using percentages and to use natural numbers numbers instead.
When you say that someone's risk has increased by 33% they usually have no idea what that means, but they think it's scary. But if the risk used to be 0.001% then a 33% increase isn't much to worry about.
The book has many examples from real world medicine of people having great disruption caused because they took medical treatment based on a faulty understanding of the numbers. It wasn't just lay people making the mistakes either; many doctors and consultants were getting the numbers wrong.
How does it interact with the colloidal silver I am taking? What about my magnetic wristbands? I'm also having problems getting to the clinic these days because big oil stole my car that runs on water.
(links to sites linking to university funded medical researchers)
It doesn't take long to do a GOOGLE SEARCH. For a supposedly tech themed discussion site there's a lot of closed-minded and google-challenged folk on here.
If you write with sufficiently strong terms that you sound like you're blindly evangelising rather than rationally advocating, the average HN reader is going to go "eep" and adjust their prior expectation of your being right -way- down.
This effect is, I'm afraid, largely independent of whether you're -actually- right or not - so assuming your goals include "maximise the number of readers of your comment who go on to do some research about the technique", adjusting the language you use to try and put across that they should go and research it is probably a good idea.
Disclaimer: The above in no way indicates a judgement as to whether the technique in question is sufficiently awesome to deserve the language you used.
I think you're making that mistake a lot of people in medicine make and what separates them from the tech industry. They're huge pessimists because they don't grok things like physics or computing and are trained/selected for their ability to pass tests out of a textbook. If you put your geekdom "crawl entire web/robot car/computers on every desk" hat on you'll realize you can run circles around the current medical industry.
edit: I get you're trying to give advice. If I make the claims less exciting no-one will bother. If too exciting, they think unfeasible. Getting the balance right seems hard.
> If you put your geekdom "crawl entire web/robot car/computers on every desk" hat on you'll realize you can run circles around the current medical industry.
"cure to a lot of ailments ... criminally underfunded ... potential immortality".
I mean as a mechanism, "focused ultrasound" pretty much says it all. But how successful is it in trials? I think I took a quick look at some links (or googled) based on another one of your comments, but not being in the medical field, or currently needing any repairs that involve tissue ablation, I didn't spend too long investigating the state of the art.
FWIW, I didn't downvote you. I just want to encourage you to sound less crackpottish. Focus on peer-reviewed evidence for specific applications, don't allude to some miracle cure-all.
I'm not saying it's available at your local walgreens. I'm just saying, like robot cars were a few years ago, it's an underinvested/underpromoted breakthrough sitting right under people's noses.
So you're attempting to remedy that by generically promoting it as a cure all, even claiming it's capable of providing immortality? I don't really think you are making an attempt to understand what I, or anybody else here, is saying. You're defending yourself as if we are just blind naysayers, but in fact those people didn't even bother commenting. I swear I'd seen some insightful comments from you before, so I figured that you might be open to seeing wisdom. However at this point, I give up.
You made the claim; you are familiar with the subject. If you had made the search and presented links that would have been one person spending a few minutes doing a search.
By expecting everyone who reads your post to do the web searching your asking for many people to spend a few minutes each doing a search.
I've made couple posts about it - including links - over the past week, still got downvotes. People are not realizing the unthinkable is actually thinkable.
And waste time wading through a bunch of patent nonsense put up by scammers in the often-vain hope that there is something, just one real item of legitimate information, lost in all the dross.
You say 'closed-minded', I say 'wary of wasting time on yet another example of the alt-med scammer runaround'.
I have personally spent time in the cath lab with one of the doctors mentioned on that site doing ablation therapy. By absolutely zero means whatsoever is it a cure all. More typically, it is a palliative modality.
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/a-trip-to-watford-gra...
this is class stuff. I shall try the airport shoelace tying problem out on my motley crews next week.