Leaders and Breasts: Michigan players & coaches to don pink gear Saturday
From the Michigan twitter account.
I remember that article that exposed the NFL's pink gear sales.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:12 AM ^
More like Followers and Best. Pinktober is a sham.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:19 AM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 11:31 AM ^
Please provide the relevant journal article to back up your claim. Thanks. Otherwise I'll treat this the same way I treat the "anti-vaccination" people.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:39 AM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 11:56 AM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 12:20 PM ^
There are peer reviewed scientific articles on the subject. Many say that the screening and treatment approach of recent years has benefits, but also drawbacks, and in many cases and among certain populations the harm outweighs the benefit and/or provides no statistically significant improvement in long-term prognosis.
But again, it's a very nuanced and complicated issue, so we aren't going to solve it before kickoff.
October 18th, 2013 at 12:39 PM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 11:49 AM ^
vaccination" people usually don't have time to look for relevant journal articles to back up their claim, as they are too busy attempting to get their previously alert and content child to again respond to his or her name, like as soon as a week after the needle offensive is complete.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:51 AM ^
(They might also have trouble finding journal articles that back their position because the one that started all of this has been debunked several dozen times.)
October 18th, 2013 at 11:53 AM ^
But lets not go down the road of the do-vaccinations-cause-autism* debate. There be dragons at the end of that conversation.
*No.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:56 AM ^
you mean Dany Stormborn than I badly want the conversation to continue.
October 18th, 2013 at 5:05 PM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 7:10 PM ^
you see it happen in front of your own two eyes you tend to be less inclined to require proof or repeatability, you are too busy trying to plan the rest of your life to deal with it. I did see it, and yeah, whatever, sample size, yayada, but people who have seen it will tell you that if and when they have another kid they(i) are not taking them anywhere close to those needles. Think what you like, but for the scientific and medical community to be as smugly dismissive as they are about that discussion is outrageous and insulting. Autism spectrum disorders and the number of children being given regular vaccines have increased at an alarmingly similar rate in the last 50 years. What do you go that is better? "Partly genetic, partly environmental, partly nutritional, partly auto-immune, but only maybe and not really any of those."? Certainly does not seem like the tight little diagnistic package capable of lableing another possibility as absurd to me.
October 18th, 2013 at 10:35 PM ^
sigh...I don't know where to start with this post. It is filled with scientific illiteracy. You do realize the Dutch research group that started the entire anti-Vaccine campaign completely falsfied there experimental data.Scientific fraud as in the autism-vaccine controversy is the reason we have double blind peer review for publication of experimental results.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704739504576067801877449500
There has been NO link or even any positive experimental correlation produced in either the lab or clinic between vaccines and autism that has been published in any high impact scientific journals. The only time a study did come out to show positive correlation was found to have completely falsified their empirical data. '
Sorry, but I will save my trust in the scientific method and peer review. Not the observations of crooks with education from diploma mills. We in the community of science and medicine are dismisssive as there never been a published positive correlation without falsifying data. People who push fraudulant beliefs such as links betwen autism and vaccines, in my honest opinion, are nothing but ignorant frauds.Sorry, to be harsh, but I hold my trust in the scientific method much more than any other philosophical arena including religion.
I have seen the heartbreak of having a child on the spectrum. My cousin is on the spectrum. For her sake and others, I will follow the current understand and state of peer reviewed observations and data. Scientists can say it could be multiple causes for autism as the community is in a still early state of research and understanding of the molecular basis of autism. There needs to be patience and education in the public not panic of early empirical results.
The false vaccine panic harmed MANY children by exposing them to diseases that were thought to be eradicated, such as MMR.
October 18th, 2013 at 5:06 PM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 9:51 PM ^
I won't try to argue that there is a connection between vaccines and autism, but I will say unless you buy into some romanticized notion of scientists, their methods, and the peer review process, it should be apparent that there have been and always will be collossal failures and errors that sometimes continue for years, decades, and even centuries propagated by the scientific community. Yes, they are eventually corrected, but the kind of group-think, turf wars, battles for promotions and research dollars, not to mention petty jealousy and arrogance that affect every group also lead scientists to sometimes forestall any independent research that would challenge accepted scientific dogma. The scientific method does not occur in a political or social vacuum.
I hope you also include in your course examples where the scientific community (or sections of it, such as peer review boards) acted in concert to close off any contrary points of view. It's not always the lone scientist falsifying research and leading the non-scientific community astray--sometimes it's the scientific community itself that is the problem.
October 18th, 2013 at 10:25 PM ^
Of course there will always be incorrect hypotheses in science. That is why we do science. That is the reason Copernicus performed his observations of the constellations to show the validity of heliocentritism. We constantly revise our hypotheses based upon our observations and data analysis.
I always tell my students what makes science special is the emphasis on independent repeatability in observations. The requirement of repeatability protected the community from: fraud in cold fusion, false links between evolutionary science and eugenics during the Holocaust, fraud in autism-vaccine research, and certain industrial sources attempting to create a false sense of heated debate in climatology.
Science or the scientific community is not the problem, it is panic and ignorance in the populace that takes published reports OUT OF CONTEXT is the problem. STEM education in the country is woefully inadaquate, particularly in a basic understanding of the scientific method and experimentation. I feel many of my colleagues in science education do not prepare their students with a decent understanding of why we do science. We spend too much time having our students learn a bunch of random scientific concepts. At least the newly adopted Next Generation Science Standards emphasizes education in experimental skills and the scientific method over memorizing random scientific understandings.
Edit: removed section, which could be taken to be political or ideological. Not my intent.
October 18th, 2013 at 10:49 PM ^
Science is conducted by people, and there is nothing special about scientists. They are prone to the same human failings as everybody else, and conduct themselves accordingly. Yes, there is a self-correcting aspect, eventually. But if you think science is somehow immune to politics (both within the scientific community and without--perhaps the part you removed proved my point), greed, professional jealousy, arrogance, you are mistaken. We can look back through the history of science continuing through today and be thankful for the corrections that have been made while at the same time recognizing oftentimes those corrections were delayed by decades due to a whole host of factors, some of which I listed in the previous sentence. One of the greatest arrogances, I believe, is that somehow this generation is not prone to the same kinds of mistakes as previous generations and the lack or understanding that some of the very views scientists are so sure about today will be proven false by the next generation of scientists.
And I don't really mean this as an attack upon you or what you do. I commend you for teaching the scientific method and I am probably much closer to your view on the value of science (I certainly share your view on the whole vaccine-autistic issue) than may come across.
October 18th, 2013 at 5:09 PM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 12:49 PM ^
are iffy at best.
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001877/screening-for-breast-cancer-with…
The Cochrane review group is pretty well-received. Read the whole article if you can--it's really fascinating and daunting how far we have to go just to do something as basic as diagnose cancer. But, the money line:
If we assume that screening reduces breast cancer mortality by 15% after 13 years of follow-up and that overdiagnosis and overtreatment is at 30%, it means that for every 2000 women invited for screening throughout 10 years, one will avoid dying of breast cancer and 10 healthy women, who would not have been diagnosed if there had not been screening, will be treated unnecessarily. Furthermore, more than 200 women will experience important psychological distress including anxiety and uncertainty for years because of false positive findings.
Now, they only look at mortality--i.e., how many lives are saved--rather than how many cancers are actually detected. But it's still...not what you'd expect.
October 18th, 2013 at 1:06 PM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 3:35 PM ^
My wife is a radiologist with extensive experience in women's imaging and has talked about this topic on several occasions. Like many things, this area, testing and procedures for breast cancer, is in a great state of flux. Ultimately, the big gorilla in the room for screening and procedures that may be unnecessary.is the magic dollar sign. It is a work in progress (like our O-line...couldn't resist).
October 19th, 2013 at 1:24 PM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 11:50 AM ^
You're passing false information. Individuals with risk factors for breast / prostate cancer most certainly should be screened beginning at middle age; the reason why breast and prostate cancer death rates have declined drastically is because of early diagnosis and treatment.
I'm especially interested in how you think a prostate exam does more harm than undetected prostate cancer.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:56 AM ^
The truth is somewhere in the middle. The general consensus is that there is value in cancer screening for some people, but in many circumstances the one-size-fits-all approach can do more harm than good and can actually have a negative impact on long-term overall health.
But we probably aren't going to ferret out the truth on MGoBlog, so let's not start this particular war today.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:58 AM ^
I agree, hence my statement that individuals with risk factors (family history, most notably) should definitely get screened early and often. The knucklehead up above saying that early screening is always bad is, as I said, passing false information.
October 18th, 2013 at 12:01 PM ^
Hence my call for a truce.
October 18th, 2013 at 2:30 PM ^
Not trying to be a truce-breaker, since that makes sense at this point, but please do pay attention to growths on your skin and moles that change.
Melanoma is a bitch, very hard to treat and often deadly if caught late. However, early detection can provide a cure, because it can be excised. If caught while still in situ, excision is something like 93% successful for a permanent cure.
And please don't go tanning - oops that probably started something new.
October 18th, 2013 at 12:00 PM ^
I would be really interested in reading some info on this if you have anything credible that you trust please pass along via email. (i'm assuming you can get my email address since i think you're a mod or whatever)
Not being a sarcastic dick - totally serious. Hard to know what you can believe on the internet these days when i'm researching stuff.
Thanks!
October 18th, 2013 at 12:13 PM ^
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/our-feel-good-war-on-breast-…
I can't vouch for everything, but the information about Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS) is pretty interesting.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:59 AM ^
But I think he's talking about prescribing chemotherapy treatments for a false positive. I think that's a misfire on his part, as that's a totally separate issue.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:58 AM ^
That's quite the thing to say with nothing to back it up.
If you have ANYTHING to add, we're waiting....
October 18th, 2013 at 12:00 PM ^
anything that brings attention and money is not a sham.
October 18th, 2013 at 12:55 PM ^
The grotesque amount of $ at stake causes it's own problems.
October 18th, 2013 at 4:26 PM ^
Problem is, it doesn't bring in much money, and the attention it brings is out of proportion to other equally pressing health issues.
October 18th, 2013 at 3:39 PM ^
Again, I agree with you here. It's a sham just like all the other gimmicky things that television powers think we all need. We are on the verge of becoming Idiocracy. For real.
October 18th, 2013 at 5:08 PM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 6:17 PM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 8:02 PM ^
Drywall awareness month!
October 18th, 2013 at 11:16 AM ^
The tweet has some information on specifically what will be worn:
Tmrw, as part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, players will wear pink wristbands & gloves; coaches will wear hats w/ pink & emblem on shirt
— Michigan Football (@umichfootball) October 18, 2013
October 18th, 2013 at 11:16 AM ^
However, see that NFL article for why I will be extremely upset if Michigan makes even a dime of profit off of this.
October 18th, 2013 at 11:21 AM ^
Breast Cancer "Awareness" /= Breast Cancer Research
The former is CEO-pocket-lining bullshit, the latter is legit
October 18th, 2013 at 12:00 PM ^
+1 insightful
October 18th, 2013 at 11:26 AM ^
They are one of the most litigious groups out there -- they'll go after your kid's sidewalk lemonade stand for charity if it has "for the cure" on the sign.
http://randazza.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/who-knew-susan-g-komen-was-so-…
October 18th, 2013 at 11:28 AM ^
October 18th, 2013 at 11:55 AM ^
Holy Shit Indeed.
What % of people do you think are completely unaware of this? I was in that % until threads on mgoblog the last 2 days (this link and the Oregon pink helmet thread yesterday).
The problem is, who is going to spend time/$ trying to make people aware of what Komen foundation is/isn't doing? It's a PR nightmare cause no matter how you frame it you look the guy fighting AGAINST breast cancer awareness.
The only way is to spread the word about other ways to be charitable where your $ goes directly to research to cure the disease, whatever it may be, including breast cancer.
October 18th, 2013 at 12:02 PM ^
It's the same reason OSU's band does USA-themed hafltime shows when they come to the Big House. They're still dicks, but booing America is bad form.
/yes, when I was in the band, we did the same thing when we headed to Columbus.
October 18th, 2013 at 12:49 PM ^
When I was in the band we did a Led Zepplin show in Columbus. I also found the people in their band to be friendly and respectful
October 18th, 2013 at 3:42 PM ^
That was exceptionally poor wording on my part. I meant that we want to boo OSU, whether it's classy or not, but booing America is pretty much taboo.
October 18th, 2013 at 5:17 PM ^
They got a lot of bad pub because of that. They also took a big hit when they cut off planned parenthood as a partner due to pressure from pro-lifers (don't want to get into that debate, just presenting what happened) a couple years ago. I think their participation rates were down for a while, not sure if they recovered or not. As you say, it's touchy to be anti SGK without sounding anti-cancer research (as some here have found out).