Tag: hysteria

NEJM: Ebola Quarantine “Like Driving a Carpet Tack With a Sledgehammer”

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From the leftist pinkos at the New England Journal of Medicine, who are totally in Obama’s evil, Marx0-fascist totalitarian pocket or something: 

The governors of a number of states, including New York and New Jersey, recently imposed 21-day quarantines on health care workers returning to the United States from regions of the world where they may have cared for patients with Ebola virus disease. We understand their motivation for this policy — to protect the citizens of their states from contracting this often-fatal illness. This approach, however, is not scientifically based, is unfair and unwise, and will impede essential efforts to stop these awful outbreaks of Ebola disease at their source, which is the only satisfactory goal. The governors’ action is like driving a carpet tack with a sledgehammer: it gets the job done but overall is more destructive than beneficial.

Read the whole thing here, and stop living your life sprinting from one crisis spelling imminent doom to another. In other words, stop being this: 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjC6aGY4Po8]

Balance the Humours

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There is a spate of “Tourettes-like” symptoms – tics and involuntary movements – among a particular group of girls in the LeRoy school district. Convinced that these girls aren’t faking it (I have no idea how), public health officials have reached a logical conclusion for what’s behind this:

…but at least one local expert in the field of movement disorders stated Thursday that what most of these girls experienced is likely the result of mass hysteria.

It’s describing a mass psychogenic (psychosomatic) group of symptoms shared among a large population, but doesn’t it sound medieval? Doesn’t that sound like the treatment would involve leeches or a stoning or visiting a shrine. In other words, it sounds like a junk, throwaway diagnosis that loosely translates into “we don’t know what the hell is going on” and has the added bonus of being backhandedly sexist.