Monday, May 4, 2020

Remember These @$$clowns?















I would've linked to their original viral video, but YouTube unfortunately pulled it.

I say unfortunately, not because I want to give these two jackholes more views, but because such ass-blisteringly stupid blathering should have been preserved intact in perpetuity, to remind their future patients what a couple of chuckleheads Beavis and Butthead here are.

As we noted at the time:
Dr. Fucktard is another innumerate shit-for-brains.
Kern County has 6% infection from those they've tested. They aren't doing widespread testing; they're testing symptomatic sick people. That skews the positive rate up YUUUUGELY. If Dr. Fucktard didn't know this, I know which half of his medical school class he graduated in (hint: it's not the top half). He then repeats that stupidity when he talks about CA's numbers. We aren't doing drive-by testing here. Mainly, it's only those who're symptomatic and sick.
So what he's noting is a high rate of infection among the 1.5% of the state tested, who already show obvious symptoms. Duh. That means among everyone else, he has no fucking clue what the infection rate is, because he's too fucking stupid to differentiate between testing the sick, versus testing a valid, RANDOM, age/sex/race/geographically corrected SAMPLE of the state's population, using an accurate test.

I can tell you this based on watching 5 minutes so far, of a 68 minute video.
I'm not in favor of YouTube censoring this.
But Dr. Shit-For-Brains probably shouldn't go on the internet to advertise being this fucking stupid, because patients will be able to see what a non-scientific moron he is, for years to come.

And if he can't set the problem up correctly from the get-go, nor understand basic statistical analysis, he clearly can have no wild idea WTF "science" is, nor what it means, and any conclusions he draws in the rest of this talking abortion are going to be First Class Gilligan Logic.

He should have taken Will Rogers' advice, and not passed up a good opportunity to STFU.

If you meant to illustrate why just because someone has "Dr." in their title, it doesn't mean they're not still idiots, you get 5 stars *****.

If, OTOH, his babble sounded good, I urge you to dig deeper.
This was like watching a gun "expert" who shoots himself in the foot in the beginning minute of his lecture.

I asked four doctors at work this week about the (now banned) video; they'd all seen it, and I got three facepalms, and one double facepalm, by way of their thoughts on the content. The latter from someone who went to medical school with them. Emergency medicine is a very small pond, as it turns out.

But it also turns out I wasn't the only one to see through their bullshit in about a minute.
Besides about a hundred YouTube and Twitter takedowns of their ascientific horsesh...er, rose fertilizer, everyone not wowed by their name-imprinted scrub tops has pretty much debunked every bit of malarkey they pimped last week. To the point that even the MSM has taken official notice of what legendary internet idiots they were:
(KQED) Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care, which offers Bakersfield’s only private walk-in COVID-19 testing site, held a press conference on April 22 to report their conclusions about COVID-19 test results. During the conference, broadcast on YouTube, the doctors said that 12% of Californians tested so far have been infected. Extrapolating that to the general population, they estimated that as many as 5 million Californians have likely contracted the virus. They then used the total number of COVID-19 deaths statewide (roughly 1,200, as of last week) to calculate a death rate of just 0.03% — similar to the average death rate from seasonal flu. 
"Millions of cases, small amount of death," Erickson stressed repeatedly during the press conference, saying fears about the virus were overblown and questioning the need for widespread quarantine measures. 
But public health experts were quick to point out the major flaws in the doctors’ methodology – namely that only a tiny percentage of Californians have actually been tested, a group that is more likely to test positive and is not representative of the larger population.  
They were also quick to debunk the doctors’ findings as misguided and riddled with statistical errors — and an example of the kind of misleading information they are forced to waste precious time disputing. 
The doctors should never have assumed that the patients they tested — who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who sought urgent care for symptoms they experienced in the middle of a pandemic — are representative of the general population, said Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” And most credible studies of COVID-19 death rates are far higher than the ones the doctors presented. 
“They’ve used methods that are ludicrous to get results that are completely implausible,” Bergstrom said. 
In a rare statement late Monday, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine declared they “emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”  
Those who support continuing to shelter in place described the doctors as self-promoters whose chain of urgent care centers would benefit from reopening. Non-COVID medical visits have plummeted during the pandemic, they note, endangering the practices of many doctors. 
“As struggling business owners, their economic frustration is understandable. But it can’t be mistaken for science. People trust doctors,” Michigan emergency room doctor Rob Davidson wrote on Twitter. “When they tell Fox viewers to ignore recommendations from real experts, many will believe them. ... The impact of rejecting science-proven recommendations in exchange for these erroneous ideas would overwhelm health systems and cost lives. While re-opening the economy might be good for their Urgent Care Centers (sic), it would kill medical personnel on the actual front lines.”
Word to your mother: ACEP and AAME aren't political organs, they're professional organizations, representing not two urgent care doctors, but 31,000  and 37,000 (respectively) board-certified emergency room physicians, and they tend to stay apolitical. So when they tell you you're full of shit, jointly, in public, in front of everyone, and make a special web page to make an example out of you and call you out as poster children for how not to do your job, it's the equivalent of the Pope telling a priest he'd better re-think his doctrine, as the archbishops start pilling up bundles of kindling, straw, and wood around the priest's feet.

The inside-baseball word is that these two wingnuts may have their board certifications challenged with BCEM, and have it pulled as a result of being this egregiously and publicly stupid. They're concerned, based on video views before it was pulled, that the average person can't tell the difference between these two jackasses, and any other ER doctor.

There are limits, it seems, to how big a jackass ACEP /AAEM will tolerate, and still allow someone to practice as a certified emergency doctor.

Which means business at those two idiots' urgent care center is about to take an even bigger turn for the worse.

I've told you before, half of all doctors (nurses, veterinarians, and everyone else) graduated in the bottom half of their class. There's no crime per se in that, but it also means their degree or license doesn't trump everyone with more IQ points than they have, who subsequently points out their shortcomings. With a flamethrower.

But those of you desperate for anything to bolster a weak position probably shouldn't so quickly latch onto guys willing to set themselves on fire, personally and professionally, just to tout conclusions based on something they mined from deep up their own hindquarters.
It never ends well, for anyone.

But it's always fun to watch from the third-person perspective.







9 comments:

  1. Now the real question is, will the Right Wing Barking Moonbats who latched on to this as evidence proving that Kung Flu is Just the Flu give this bad info up?

    I'm going to guess that the answer is no.
    ~Rhea

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  2. Ouch! That's gonna leave a mark. I never watched this video, but heard Chris Martenson's fisking of it, which was appropriately harsh.

    "People trust doctors" That's no doubt less true every day. As with trust in pretty much all authorities; which is part of why we are where we are with this thing, of course.

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  3. I asked four doctors at work this week about the (now banned) video; they'd all seen it, and I got three facepalms, and one double facepalm....

    Did you unintentionally create 3 asepsis failures here?

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  4. When I started out as a med tech (USAF 1977), I used to marvel at those cynical old grouches who'd spent thirty years in the field. Now that I am one of those cranky old coots, I know exactly why they have so little respect for medicine in general. I've known many brilliant and wonderful doctors who I respect highly, and many, many others who can most charitably be described as quacks.
    I would not be alive today if not for the wonders of trauma medicine following a bad car wreck. But when it comes to the "diseases of civilization", modern allopathic medicine doesn't even know which tree to bark at.
    An aunt of mine who spent her career in surgery as a nurse was fond of saying: "They call it the practice of the art of medicine. It's an art, not a science, and they're still practicing."
    I didn't watch the video you reference but I've read a good deal of commentary on it, both pro and con. I remain skeptical of all of it, as there is no one anywhere that I believe 100%. But that's just me as a radical agnostic of the Robert Anton Wilson school of thought.

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  5. I was in medical device sales for 15 years, most of it in scrubs just outside the sterile field. I can tell you this, 80% of surgeons (I've seen just about every type of surgery) are competent, 20% (like Ben Carson, Paul Manson, Charles Cummings, et al) are brilliant. The other 20% I wouldn't let near my dog.

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  6. Sorry for going off topic here.

    Military.com has an interesting article:

    Army Says It Has Found the Best Fabric for DIY Face Masks

    https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/04/28/army-says-it-has-found-best-fabric-face-masks.html


    28 Apr 2020
    Military.com | By Matthew Cox

    The U.S. Army's Chemical Biological Center just ran an extensive round of tests that officials say has revealed the best fabric to use for making homemade face coverings for preventing the spread of coronavirus.

    The center, which falls under the Combat Capabilities Development Command, began testing materials around the same time that the Pentagon's April 5 announcement allowing service members to make their own face coverings opened up a flood of discussion on social media.

    "We knew that claims about masks and face coverings were exploding all over the internet, and we wanted to make sure that any decisions about materials ... will be based on proven science," David Caretti, who leads the effort as the chief of the Center's Chemical Biological Protection & Decontamination Division, said in a recent Army news release.

    The center is one of only a handful of agencies that is experienced in performing tests that precisely measure materials' filtration efficiencies in strict accordance with National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health standards, according to the release.

    "The challenge is to pick a material that effectively blocks the virus particles from going through the material while not being too hard to breathe through," said Caretti, said in the release. "If the resistance is too high, airflow will simply bypass the covering and go around the edges."

    The Pentagon's broad guidance has authorized service members to use everything from T-shirts to their issued neck gaiters as face coverings when social distancing is not possible.

    The test team started out by testing materials that defense and federal agencies sent in for evaluation but then then broadened out the effort to evaluate materials likely to be found at home that could be used to make face coverings.

    The testing involves spraying a salt aerosol at a swatch of material, according to the release.

    "The testing team measures the density of salt aerosol suspended in the air on one side and compared it to the density on the other side after it passes through the material, the release states, describing the process that is similar to the one used when N95 filters are certified to NIOSH standards.

    After running about 300 tests, the team found that one of the best readily available materials to use in a homemade face covering is four-ply microfiber cloth, which is popular for cleaning and polishing surfaces, according to the release.

    "It filters out over 75% of particles," according to the release. "In comparison, the N95 mask used by healthcare workers in hospitals can filter 95 percent of particles or greater."

    Testers also found that "even a polyester bandana can be reasonably effective if it is used in layers, according to the release, which adds that it will filter out "40 percent of suspended particles."

    In early April, Army senior leaders said the service is working on a plan to produce and issue some type of face covering that's either black or camouflage. For now, the color of the face masks is up to unit commanders as long soldiers don't use old Operational Camouflage Uniforms, because they have been treated with chemicals to help repel insects and reduce wrinkles

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  7. It's the censorship that bothers me the most. Bad ideas are replaced by good ones. And it's a short step from banning one set of ideas to the next, and it becomes easier every time.
    -JW

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  8. YouTube censorship is out of anyone's hands.
    And it's stupid; the best thing they could do was leave the video up as a cautionary tale for similar low-IQ soopergeniusii.

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  9. Your censorship has YouTube beat by a country mile, Black-pot Buffalo-Jump.

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