Friday, July 16, 2010

Medical Miracles

When you see a doctor, you present them the symptoms you have and they use that information and check for the most probable cause of your symptoms. If you get a second opinion, the symptoms have not changed, and if they both have the same level of training, they should reach the same conclusion. This does not change if you go to two, three, four, or more doctors, they are all giving an inference to the best explanation given the symptoms. Increasing the number of people saying so does not increase their probability of getting it correct. Knowing this, misdiagnosis of rare diseases that share symptoms with more common terminal diseases is inevitable. If you are diagnosed with a common terminal condition and you miraculously return to good health, it is within reason to attribute it to a misdiagnosis.

Similarly, if a condition at a certain stage has a 90% fatality rate within a year, chances are they will tell you that the prognosis is not promising and that you have less than a year left to live. When a year comes and passes, and you're still alive, it is not surprising to find out that you're part of the 10% that survive the condition. I'm sure there are some diseases that have an even higher fatality rate, but it still obeys statistical odds that some people diagnosed with fatal conditions will survive.

This is why anecdotes are not sufficient to demonstrate the claims being made, since they fall within the bounds of chance. I fail to see how these situations constitute any evidence of miracles, since it is what we would expect to see if there were no miracles. Its ludicrous when what we expect to see without a god is used as evidence for its existence.

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