Well, and why would I want them other way around? Why would I not care? Give me a choice - and the let the kiddo choose for himself when we, as a society, agree that he is ready (probably after hitting 18/21 years of age). If you want your kids homosexual, go ahead, send them to school where they can learn about that. If not, don't send them here. You don't care? Great for you, you can just send them to school across the street, whatever they are teaching there. It is the best solution, at least in my mind: just let the education be privatized. And everything else, too, for that matter, but this is (again) different topic.
You seem to be confusing "propaganda" with just teaching basic facts.
Gay people exist. Therefore teaching that they exist and what they are is something that needs to happen in school if children are to be properly educated.
Kids also learn about criminals and wars and nazis and robber baron capitalists exploiting people all day, and slavery, etc. Do these things convince children to become slavers, nazis, or to start wars? No, because the history class doesn't or shouldn't ENDORSE them, just teach them.
If your school is going around telling kids that they should all convert to being gay, that's inappropriate propaganda.
If they're just teaching what gay is, then they're doing their job, it's not propaganda, and expecting the state to make a whole separate school for you just to promote ignorance goes against the entire concept of school and is as silly as expecting them to make a whole school that doesn't teach math.
Well that's what I mean with parents not being allowed to decide that sort of thing. It's not their responsibility to do a professional doctor's job.
Doctors don't have magical omniscience about everything related to medicine ever. Especially pediatricians, since their "specialty" covers nearly all of medicine. They're very different than, say, rheumatologists or anesthesiologists, who have a much narrower scope and can master and read up on their domain to a much higher degree of expertise.
On MANY occasions, with my internists in my own life experience (same issue as pediatricians), I have pointed out blatantly obvious mistakes they made and saved myself from large complications I would have suffered if I just blithely obeyed everything without thinking:
* On at least 3 occasions, doctors have attempted to treat me while sneezing, coughing up lungs, runny eyes, dragging along, obviously completely ill and contagious, and claim they aren't sick "because I had my flu shot this year" ...Which is ~60% effective according to the CDC, but the doctors are ignorant of this and the basics of how vaccines work apparently, and by treating it as a magical 100% force field, they endangered my health by ignorantly coming to work despite being obviously sick, literally sneezing on tongue depressors right before trying to use them on me (I shit you not), and exposing me to the flu, especially dangerous since I was already vulnerable and sick with other things too.
* I have had internists not bother to read or apply knowledge of antibiotic allergy on my chart and attempt to prescribe me stuff that would have put me into anaphylactic shock if I didn't stop them.
* I once had to actually remind an ER doctor that seemed to be missing something that maaaybe they might want to take an x-ray of my nearly compound broken angle, and they responded, I quote exactly, "...Oh yeah! Right. Okay."
* I have, on several occasions, looked up and researched my own symptoms, suggested medications or vitamin supplements or whatever that seem to fit, and had my doctors agree and go with it. They just simply hadn't had time to read everything and know about certain options or better fit explanations of symptoms, but agreed with my research.
Doctors, in general, only have about 15 minutes to spend on you. You have hours or days or weeks to spend on you.If you have half a head on your shoulders and know how to research things, you can very easily achieve greater expertise than a random internist or whatever on conditions related to you specifically (or your kids). All the same resources are available to you as them, and nothing about medical school involves implanting a special microchip that makes doctors better able to understand science than you. In fact, in my case, I have significantly more science and research education than doctors...
Is there maybe some specialist doctor out there who knows more about my condition than me? Sure. But since I'm not a billionaire, I can't afford to just waltz around hiring world experts every time I have a runny nose, so instead, I read the studies from those world experts, and fill in my actual doctors when they don't.
Frankly, I have a problem with people deciding on what their children learn. People are badly informed, biased, or just plain unknowledgeable in a large number of subjects, as laymen tend to be.
Unless you're
not a layman and/or at least have as much or more experience and background in subjects than public school teachers do.
Personally, I don't know how people have TIME to home school, and I don't think it's appropriate to try and change a whole curriculum in school just for your one kid. But plenty of people can and do know better than the public school system about various things, and it is not illogical to wish their children to also know better in those cases.
This is probably best solved in almost all cases, though, by simply sitting down with your kid later and filling them in on any mistakes or extra info that you find important. Not trying to legislate things.
But what if the professionals offer a cure that has a 50/50 chance of either curing, or killing?
Irrelevant. The media outrage alone would ensure they wouldn't bring such a cure on the market in the first place.
No, it wouldn't, because lots of drugs at least in the United States, that goes on the market MIGHT be ones that are just as likely to kill you as cure you. Due to the way FDA trials work.
Since you bring up vaccines, it's a convenient and easy to understand example (but this logic is by no means exclusive to them). A typical scheduled vaccine is given out to, say, maybe 300,000,000 people in the U.S. alone. Guess how many people they run in clinical trials, though? Usually between about 100 and 2,000, variably. Let's take the generous end of that, 2,000 (largest number I've personally seen in one)
What can a 2,000 person clinical trial tell you, exactly? Well, it can tell you that there's roughly
less than a 1/500 chance of you dying from XYZ complications if you take this drug. (Not 2,000, because you need a handful of instances in order to prove a significant result above baseline, not just one instance of something). In other words, it tells you that there are almost certainly no complications that will occur at a 1/50 rate, but there very well might be ones that happen at a 1/1500 rate or whatever.
Which is great. That's much better than knowing nothing. However, 1/500 isn't particularly rare. Let's say, for example, that that vaccine DOES in reality have a 1,000 chance of stopping your kidneys or whatever, 6 months later. If it did, the clinical trial would not detect this and it would pass. Then it would be given to 300,000,000 people, and roughly 300,000 people's kidneys would fail.
Now, if the vaccine is expected to save 500,000 lives from whatever disease it is vaccinating against, then that may still be a good choice. It might be (slightly) worth it. But if, for example, it is protecting against a disease that there's only like 10 cases of every year and which is not particularly deadly anyway, in other words, if the benefit is much smaller than 1/500, then you have NO IDEA or way to even possibly know if it is helping you or hurting you.
It doesn't matter if you're a doctor or the world's foremost virologist. You don't know and can't know, because
the data quite simply isn't there for you. There's like a 1/500,000 chance IIRC that, say, a measles vaccine will actually save your life (chance of it working * chance of getting measles * chance of having died from measles if you got it = about that number). Which is fantastic. Better than nothing! That's a benefit.
But you don't know what the associated cost is, so you can't do an actual cost benefit analysis. For all you know, it might stop your kidney 1/1,000 and the FDA trials would not have detected this, and thus it might be much worse for you than it is good. OR its only side effect might be a 1/10,000,000 chance of something that will kill you or maim you, in which case it would be much better for you than bad. We really just don't know. I don't know, you don't know, doctors don't know. And due to various statistical problems, it is often difficult or impossible to analyze statistics after the fact meaningfully (which is precisely why they run clinical trials in the first place).
There is quite literally only one way to decide: Gut instinct. Which parents have every right and logical reason to decide to apply if they so choose, as long as nobody else has significantly superior methods, which they don't. Basically, science (or rather, clinical trial funding) just isn't there yet to answer these questions definitively for us.
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Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1287740 times)