General Trek Questions and Observations

Yes, I doubt you could have talked a Samurai from medieval time out of cutting his abdomen with a ritual knife (when the situation demanded it). If the prospect of a horrible death didn't deter him, nothing else would.

 

Are you sure you wanna compare a working, promising method that has the potential to cure the disease completely to a method that does none of these things?

Any plastic surgery, laser eye correction, etc. would then all be unethical.

And Starfleet uses that and only that without changes or additions?

What makes you think the treatment was close to quackery?

1. was rejected by the patient
2. was explicitly chosen by the patient

 

It wasn't quackery because, in the end, it did cure Worf completely (quackery doesn't cure you completely of something the "good doctors" say is incurable) which is why it was never mentioned again.

 

Btw, when Picard has turned into a child and then back to an old man again. Shouldn't his artificial heart have been replaced by a real one (you know given the fact that he was changed at the cellular level)... I love how they can do magic things in one episode and are unable to replace a spine (by maybe an artificial one) in another (which admittedly is much less impressive).

 

Laser eye correction doesn't kill the patient 62% of the time.

Translation: I don't agree with the principles Hippocrates laid down. Therefore, ethical doctors should reject them.

See "killed the patient 62% of the time".

You're perfectly Ok with the notion that Worf didn't want to adjust to life with reduced mobility. But you can't handle the fact that Beverly had issues with potentially killing a patient whose life was not already in danger. That such a thing might be as appalling to her as life as a paraplegic would be for Worf.

Just as a Klingon shuns weakness, a doctor shuns doing harm. Worf wasn't the only person being asked to do something nearly unthinkable for them.

Why would 40% of his body mass disappear because some genes got adjusted? And how did they get it back later on? And why don't they just recreate the accident every time a person gets old: reduce them to age 11? It's immortality in a bottle, or a beam in this case.

 

source? basis? reasoning?

 

Reread their last few posts on the subject. They're acting like Beverly was devoid of ethics because she was adhering to one of the fundamental aspects of medical ethics: "don't make the patient any worse".

 

Yeah, i never understood the rationale that since the treatment was successful that makes it ethical. Except, Worf only survives because of Klingon physiology not the treatment alone. He actually dies and his physiology saves him. It should be heavily reviewed from an ethical standpoint.

 

Just because a treatment is dangerous doesn't mean it's unethical. Some treatments of cancer used to kill people faster than the disease itself. It gave people a chance to survive cancer but at the same time, it was such a strain on the body that people often succumbed because of the treatment itself.

 

True. Modern cancer treatments are still pretty brutal. However, regarding making the patient worse, certain death (from untreated cancer) is worse than possible death (from aggressive treatment).

 

I don't think it's fair to call the method (close to) quackery. It seemed to originate from research that in itself up until that point was conducted in a valid manner- it was just still way too early in its development to test it on a real patient, and the 'unethical' part was the doctor willing to try that, despite the fact that a slower, but safer way existed to perfect the method, possibly 'preying' on the despair of the patient to get permission.

 

Listen, the Earth was a radioactive wasteland after the Nineties. History is going to have some gaps.

 

Yeah, that definitely puts us in a different universe than Star Trek, doesn't it?

 

Looking at what actually happened 1990-2020 (and possibly still going), I think Trek humanity just made up the "Eugenics War then World War III" story as it was FAR less embarrassing than the truth.

 

I never understand the people who freak out and throw a fit when Star Trek or X-Men tackles social issues or strive for the betterment of humanity. What do they think they've been watching this whole time? Next they're gonna complain that Pride Day is no longer just for straight white Christians.

 

People complain about random things. Not worth commenting on online since there is no relationship to build upon.

 

Some Comedian whose name escapes me at this hour said that he got hateful tweets for posting a picture of a cabbage.

Twit-verse is not worth the time.

 

Cabbage? Is there an allusion there that I should know about?

 

The point is that there isn't. Sometimes a cabbage is just a cabbage... unless you're a Twitterer.