[Insight-users] Re: [Insight-developers] IJ Volunteers : THE MATRIX : RED PILL

[Bill Oliver]

On Sat, 16 Sep 2006, Luis Ibanez wrote:

>
>
> Hi Gaetan,
>
>
>
>
>
> Members of our community read technical journals with the same level
> of critical thinking that a watcher of TV-reality-shows exercise while
> sitting empty-minded for hours in front of the TV-set. The concept that
> they are actually entitled to question the content of papers is too
> alien for them. The notion that a published paper may contain mistakes,
> is a sacrilege for them. The notion that the claims made in a paper
> are supposed to be verified, is a blasphemy to them.
>
>
>

Funny you should mention that.  I just got through with a deposition in
a case where this kind of thing came up.

For those who don't know me, I am a forensic pathologist.  I did an
investigation of an in-custody death of a young woman who was shot
with a TASER shortly before she died.  Her death had nothing to do
with being shot with a TASER, and had everything to do with a lethal
ingestion of methamphetamine, malignant hyperthermia, rhabdomyolysis,
renal failure, disseminated intravascular coagulation, and all the other
things associated with sympathomimetic toxicity syndrome.

However, because the police used a TASER, the family sued the police
and TASER (and a host of others).

One of the foundations of the plaintiff's case is an article published in
the Journal of the National Academy of Forensic Engineers that purports
to show that TASERs (in contrast to a stack of studies in the medical
literature) provide a current sufficient to cause death.

Unfortunately, while the article looks good on superficial reading,
the peer-reviewers obviously did not work out the the numbers as they
read along.  It turns out that the only way the author could have come
up with his surprising (but lucrative) results was for him to make some
fundamental mistakes in the use of an oscilloscope.

While his results have been debunked, they are used as the basis of a
enormous number of lawsuits, and have been quoted by Amnesty International
and the ACLU in their position papers against the use the of TASER.  For
some reason the ACLU and Amnesty International ignore the many, many
articles in the medical literature that debunk it.

There have been multiple jurisdictions now that have abandoned the
use of TASERs in favor of the previous policy of simply shooting these
people to death because of these lawsuits based, in large part on this
article.  There is less liability in killing them than in saving
their lives.

Reading academic articles uncritically can, literally, cost lives.

billo