And you're quite wrong, my friend. My wife currently has a Jackson-Pratt Drainage Tube sutured into her, and it empties approximately 1 oz of blood and fluid from her every 6 hours. She also has a Titanium clip in her neck keeping her spine from falling apart, and she's on 4 different maintenance drugs. And as for me? I usually refuse medication (except for one), and our family doctor is about to drop me. I've been warned by two different doctors that if I don't go on a certain medication, I won't be around much longer. So, ya --- I'm used to asking God to tell nature to stand aside. And if nature doesn't stand aside --- then auf wiedersehen to this old house.
Jeez o pete, AV, your wife sounds like she's in some bad shape! I hope they are able to do something to stabilize or improve her situation! Yikes.
Sorry to hear that.
But look at what MrGhost talked about, the reconstructive surgery on his hand to regain 95% usage, and while your wife may not be absolutely cured, whatever it is that is afflicting her would have, in a not-too-distant past have been untreatable. Science does a lot. It never claims to do
everything.
You want a "final draft", you want all the answers right now. That's fully human of you. We all want that. But part of the discipline of being a scientist is to set aside that natural
lust for the answer fast in preference to the methodological approach of nearly asymptotic knowledge.
The thing scientists have to learn to live with you likely could never stand is "ambiguity". We never know if we are ever going to be right about something. The best we can do is watch and wait and try to probe the mystery until we have a workable model to predict how the mystery will respond or help us understand why it makes data in the form it does.
I think I see why you might harbor such a secretive ambivalence or outright disrespect for science (hidden behind a candy coating of "holding it to a higher standard" or "gift from god status"); clearly science hasn't answered all your questions or issues. It hasn't served you well
enough.
I work daily with statistics, and I'm not a statistician. But my curiosity and desire to get more acquainted with them has brought me to the brink of my comfort zone:
I want absolutes (like any human), but I understand there's always "error bars". There's always a "Confidence Interval" in which, at best, I can claim 95% confidence that this or that is a reasonable model.
Now, as a human, if I were to be in the tiny little tail of the distribution in getting a horrible disease, all the statistics in the world wouldn't make me feel better. If I was that 0.01% of the population to get some horrible illness, it wouldn't matter to me that 99.98%
didn't. When it comes to pain and suffering; Statistics is what happens to others. That's humanity.
We in the sciences make hay while the sun shines and try to realize that while we are all individuals, when you look at human populations
en masse we become a giant statistical pool.
That doesn't help you or your wife. It wouldn't help me in a similar situation. But what it does is keep science on track so that the tails of the distribution get smaller or the cures get better. It may not happen in our lifetimes, but if we keep science clearly focused it might happen in the next generation or after that.
Science is in the game for the
long haul. It isn't here as a miracle worker. It doesn't drift into town to sell you snake oil. The easy answers are always easy for a reason. The hard ones take time and lots of it.
This doesn't help ease your wife's pain, nor, as I said, would it help ease mine. But I hope that if and when I come to that sort of crossroads I have the strength to realize that I am not going to be thinking like a scientist but like a human and I will hope the scientists will go on thinking like scientists.
Let people attend to people, let scientists attend to science. In the end both needs are served more efficiently.
