False Balance Of Viewpoints

In Jeanne Fahnestock’s (1998) article “Accommodating Science: the rhetorical life of scientific facts”, she observes the distortions that occur when attempting to accommodate scientific discourse for a popular audience. Fahnestock cautions that although accommodating has its place in conveying scientific discoveries to the public, it is vital to evaluate how accommodating methods affect the accuracy of interpreting such discoveries. Through assessing the shift in genre, the shift in information and classical stasis theory, Fahnestock examines how scientific writings are altered through the process of accommodating.

Atul Gawande in his article “When the Doctor Makes Mistakes” exposes the mystery, uncertainty and fallibility of medicine in true stories that involve real patients. In a society where attorneys protect hospitals and physicians from zealous trials from clients following medical errors, doctors make mistakes is a testimony that Gawande a representative of other doctors speak openly about failures within the medical fields. In this article, Gawande exposes those errors with an intention of showing the entire society and specifically those within the medicine field that when errors are hidden, learning is squelched and those within the system are provided with an opportunity to continue committing the same errors. What you find when you critically analyse Gawande, “When Doctors Make Mistakes essay is how messy and uncertain medicine turns out to be. Throughout the entire article you experience the havoc within the medicine field as the inexperienced doctor misapplies a central line in a patient.

It is important to appreciate the current nature and status of the world because there are individuals who laid the appropriate foundation for it. As Michael Specter’s TED Talk on The Danger of Science Denial, he outlined the challenges that might emanate from science denial. There are reason that ought to be checked critically since they affect the current and future generation and these include health, wealth, mobility, opportunity and declining rates of diseases. It is critically clear that Specter performs a very relevant and excellent job to the desired audience by discussing emphatically on important issues that affect the current world. He poses a challenge to the audience to basically look at the world at its normality despite looking at it from skepticism side of it. The skepticism tend to affect the smart decision technique in the modern society as it relates to The Danger of Science Denial. He logically asks the Americans and international TED talk fans to analyze effectively the desired big picture besides both logical and ethical picture. He asked the audience to emphatically compare the pictures broadly and identify the worst picture. This could assist the audience to come up with the right decision regarding their perception of current world to the future generation.

"Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error…" (John Hopkins Medicine). This soaring number has caused medical errors to become the third leading cause of death in the United States. For many people, medicine seems foreign and unknown. People who have lost loved ones due to medical error desperately look for a reason, and many times that blame falls upon doctors. Media has put a negative connotation on doctors as well, causing their reputation to plummet whenever a hospital procedure turns badly. A renown surgeon and author, Atul Gawande, uses his knowledge and experience to give people a new perspective on medicine. In the article "When Doctors Make Mistakes," Gawande uses rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos to prove the need for a change in the medical systems and procedures. He analyzes how the public looks at doctors, giving a new perspective to enlighten the reader that even the best doctors can make mistakes.

Throughout my research, a challenge I encountered was the fact that some of the articles I encountered seemed to included biases within them especially with the primary view of

Caveat lector is a Latin phrase meaning, “let the reader beware.” Health information on the internet is growing at an alarming rate. However, some information on the internet is not accurate or current, and unfortunately, many web sites regarding healthcare offer misleading, incomplete, and incorrect information. Many consumers do not have the knowledge to judge and evaluate the quality of online information. This paper aims to discuss how the website WebMD presents information to readers. It will evaluate WebMD according to its source, where was the source obtained; type of funding, is it commercially funded or private; the validity and quality, how valid is the information and can it be verified; and privacy, is your personal information

In order to prevent the perpetuation of misinformation the reader must be able to identify bias in media. For example, “Stephon Clarkson” is essentially neutral death provides the author’s personal opinion why the cops should be charged for this. Source A offers a neutral view about his death and also bais because different sources say he was shot 20 times or 8 times or 10 times. Source B offers a slight bias by only including authoritative quotes from one side, Each analysis of this occasion has different perspective and pros and cons. Readers need to be able to differentiate if it’s bias or real.

The Atlanta-based internist is concerned with how recipients and providers of medical services receive and make health advice and recommendations, respectively. He rues the current practice of medicine, which now pays more emphasis to data or evidence: anything that the data reveals are immediately taken as hard science, with the results taken from studies that claim to “represent a consistently reliable representation of the real world of human beings” i.e., those who do not participate in the studies. For Paul, the data or studies could mean

Quality health care is an issue in America for everyone, despite our numerous tests and advances in technology. In his article, “Overkill,” Atul Gawande argues against a common assumption that our healthcare system is the best because of these medical advances. In fact, Gawande claims that our health care provides much unnecessary care that often causes harm and that costs a lot . He follows that claim by redefining “low-value care” as “no-value care” and provides considerable scientific data along with his own experience with his own patients to support his claim. He also states logical reasons by referring to expert authorities who critique our health care by viewing it from an economic perspective: like talking about information asymmetry where a doctor is more informed than the patient, thus the doctor has more power over the patient. All of these emphases strongly defend his controversial claim. But what stands out most is how Gawande uses several stories showing vastly different outcomes, depending on how informed the patient and doctor are including offering non invasive treatments. We need to explore how his unusual storytelling strategy exposes how surgeons and patients should care more about quality than the mere quantity of tests and what alternatives are available to change the unnecessary over testing and over-diagnosis which prevent good health care.

An issue in the medical world today is that expensive tests and procedures are being done unnecessarily. In his article “Overkill” Atul Gawande, surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, and a professor in the department of health policy and management at Harvard School of Public Health argues that as someone in the medical profession he sees how unnecessary some medical procedures are. “The researchers called it “low-value care.” But, really, it was no-value care” (Gawande). Many people today are easily influenced by the power of the internet it’s as easy as googling a symptom and and coming up with a diagnosis and going into doctors offices and demanding a test or procedure, what these people don’t know is the cost of these tests

“The Truth Wears Off” is an article written by Jonah Lehrer. This article discusses the issues raised by a phenomenon called the decline effect and how it impacts scientific research. On September 23rd, 2014, we had a group discussion in class about this article and our group felt a strong credibility issue with the author because he had no citations used in his article. Also, according to NYU journalism professor Charles Seife, Jonah Lehrer recycled some of his own material for the New Yorker posts and had fabricated quotes in one of his books (Moos). This credibility issue from the author is a problem for me as a reader because I am not sure if the issues raised in this article are factual. The members in my group discussion include Lisa Wallner, Lisa Spreitz, Dusty Gill, Allan Robinson and myself. An author's credibility is crucial because the level of credibility in an author could change how a reader interprets an article.

“There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as [we] are free to ask what [we] must, free to say what [we] think, free to think what [we] will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.”

In the episode “Scientific Studies” on the tv show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”, he employs a plethora of rhetorical strategies to depict his point that not all “science” is necessarily science as most might assume; and how we as a people have become blinded and misled because these scientists are contradicting each other's’ findings. He does so by using humor, making comments that some people might be able to relate to, and by presenting basic logic and common knowledge.

One problem that has plagued the medical field is the issue of “wrong surgery.” The article Electronically Mediated Time-out Initiative to Reduce the Occurrence of Wrong Surgery discusses the prevalence of wrong surgery, heavily emphasizing that the main concern surrounding this topic is the frequency in which the circumstances that comprise the issue occur. These problems include performing surgery on the wrong person, performing the wrong type of surgery, and performing the surgery on the wrong location.

More so, the usage of the Internet and other global media has expanded the ability of patients to have access to an enormous amount of information about diseased previously thought “too technical” requiring government policy that sought to limit the control and influence of physicians.