IIRC, the guy who gave him a ride to the start of the trail tried to give him a map that would have showed the cable not far from where he tried to ford on his way back, but was prevented by high water.
McCandless had some idiotic notion that the map would degrade the purity of his experience of nature, or something like that, so he refused.
How ridiculous that someone who was a fan of the book would die trying to ford the same river at the same place that stopped McCandless. Did they not read that part of the book where Krakauer decribed the cable, or did they just not remember it?
If you look down the list of deliveries included in the article, you will see that at least one of the other doctors has an unusually low rate of weekend deliveries, but that they peak significantly on Thursday and Friday.
This is likely because many OB-Gyns induce labour for the opposite reason to that which is alleged of Shuen: so their weekend golf game doesn't get screwed up by a delivery.
In truth, there is little difference between inducing labour for financial versus personal reasons. No doctor ever said to a patient, "I have a tee-off time at 9:30 Sunday so we have to get this baby out now."
This means that the issue of consent is identical in both cases. Consent means "informed consent". It doesn't matter if you're trying to get the extra billing for a weekend delivery or if you are trying keep the weekend call schedule quiet; it doesn't matter if you pop a misoprostol in during a vag exam or go through the formal induction process with the hospital. If the patient doesn't know the REAL reason, it's still a crime because of the absence of INFORMED consent.
This has been happening as long as there have been OB-Gyns. Babies come when they want, and doctors have always tried to manipulate that for their own preference.
Shuen's crucifixion is therefore more the result of his motivation than the fact of his behaviour. He was apparently doing for money what almost every OB-Gyn does for reasons that we consider more noble, or at least understandable, but which are actually no different because they prioritize something other than the health of the baby and the mother.
Even if doctors were truly altruistic, reality would still require inductions for the banal reason of hospital staff scheduling or resource availability. We are fools if we think this is any different from what Shuen did.
Any system motivated and rewarded by money will always suffer from these sorts of imperfections, as will any system that is not motivated by money.
It is the height of naivete to think otherwise. Shuen just flew a little closer to the sun than everyone else.
Also, the article neglects the obvious problem with chain of custody. Once you throw an exam glove in the garbage, it's gone. If Shuen ever got his day in an actual court, his lawyer would tear that evidence apart to the point where it would have to be disregarded by a judge or jury. It's not fair to trot it out now in this hatchet piece as if it is the smoking gun.
Keep in mind that the nurses justifiably hated Shuen because he (admittedly) behaved like a complete asshole to them. Nurses are really good at finding clever ways to take you out under those circumstances. You have to interpret that piece of evidence in light of the unbridled hostility of those who collected it.
I applaud your motivation, and I agree with your suggestion, but that's not where most cancer comes from. Most cancer arises out of a random failure of the mechanisms underlying apoptosis.
Random mutation rates are linked to rates of cell division. There is an error every x number of times a cell divides. The faster cells divide (say, because of inflammation caused by cigarette smoke), the greater the risk of a random mutation that will disable the normal mechanisms of cell death.
Environmental mutagens and carcinogens play a part by damaging DNA or increasing cell division rates (asbestos, for example, which destroys immune cells come to engulf the invader, leading to a cycle of cell damage) but they are only a tiny part of the picture.
Cancer is caused by math, in a very real sense. Mutation rates * cell division rates = risk of cancer. You can absolutely get cancer without any adverse environmental exposure, which is why some children get cancer very early on--genetic factors increase risk.
The universe is chaotic. There is often no reason for what happens to an individual. It's just random chance. Man's search for meaning is often futile.
The real issue here goes far beyond freedom of speech; the real issue is about the nature of knowledge.
Human nutrition is not a science for the simple reason that it is not possible to subject it to the scientific method. It is unethical and impractical to divide humans up randomly and feed them different diets to observe the outcome. The NAZIs tried stuff like this, but we have tended to discount their results because the data was obtained under deplorable circumstances.
The result is that we don't really know definitively what should compose the human diet. State governments and academic institutions cover up this fact with an avalanche of highly-suspect papers and degrees and training and certification.
Unfortunately, most of the research and regulation of human nutrition is subject to interference by economic lobby groups like the dairy industry and the wheat producers.
Influence and bias tend to inform the licensing process for nutritionists. Science has little to do with it.
Even worse, the state licences a lot of so-called health professionals whose disciplines have even less to do with science than nutritionists: chiropractors, naturopaths, and homeopaths.
Just because we dress something up with training and a license does not mean that it is valid.
Anyone who wishes to challenge these unfounded and biased, but deeply ingrained, systems will have a hard time.
In a just world, only disciplines with a sound scientific basis would be regulated by the state because it is impossible for the state to know whether a licensed, but unscientific, nutritionist is creating more or less harm than this unlicensed, but probably well-meaning, woman.
No, it's not, which is largely the fault of moron doctors and the government who are idiotically conducting a campaign against vaporization.
The primary health risk of cigarette smoking comes from the products of incomplete hydrocarbon combustion. These cause inflammation (leading to chronic lung disease) and many are carcinogenic.
An intelligent realist understands that most people are ignorant and prone to addictive behaviors, and will intervene where possible to substitute a lower-risk behaviour for a higher-risk one.
Instead, stupid doctors have refocussed their (otherwise appropriate) campaign against smoking on vaporization, and the government has moronically banned it in all the same places as smoking.
This stupidity has spilled over into marijuana legalization, causing vaporization liquids to remain illegal and denying users access to a relatively safe, measured, convenient dosage format with a long shelf life.
Patients taking marijuana for medical reasons are thereby screwed.
I despise stupid people making decisions in large groups. What a clusterfuck.
The problem with Airbnb is that it transfers the cost of the increased traffic to the other residents. Some party asshat barfs in the lobby sofa and everyone in the building has to pay for that.
I applaud their chutzpah, but if I find them operating in my building, they will get tossed out with all the civil penalties we can muster.
I don't understand what is wrong with the folks over at Mozilla. Are they stupid, or are they taking bribes?
How about an option for, "No, I don't want notifications from any website, ever!"
How about an option for, "Don't auto-play video, including silent video, ever. Not audio either. Never. Just don't."
How about an option for "I know what cookies are. Never, ever warn me about them again. Ever."
I don't know if the devs are just young and inexperienced, or if they are truly brain-damaged, or if they are corrupt and some advertiser said, "Here's a million dollars to leave those notification prompts in, heh, heh, heh".
At this point it's like smoking in movies. There has to be some cigarette maven with a pallet of cash going into the production office on the back lot somewhere, because otherwise why does every young director show all the 'cool' people puffing away on something that's going to waterboard you with COPD for the last 40 years of your life?
Mozilla, we don't want any of that shit. Fuck that shit.
How about changing the bill so that men have to wear exactly the same thing that they force their women to wear? Or else no one gets to wear any religious symbols.
Because I think, subconsciously, that what makes me bananas about religious symbols is not the symbols themselves, but the gender-inequality with which they are applied.
Muslim coverings are a very thinly-disguised misogyny. Same with kippahs and the stuff they force nuns to wear.
I support very strongly people's right to wear a symbol of any ridiculous, half-assed, imaginary bullshit that some shithead told them about and they believed on zero evidence.
But when it is a symbol of unequal treatment of women, of subjugation, of silent misery, it makes me angry to see it because it is not consistent with the equal rights that I associate with our country.
That, if only subconsciously, is where this is probably coming from.
McCandless had some idiotic notion that the map would degrade the purity of his experience of nature, or something like that, so he refused.
How ridiculous that someone who was a fan of the book would die trying to ford the same river at the same place that stopped McCandless. Did they not read that part of the book where Krakauer decribed the cable, or did they just not remember it?