Palin: Obama "death panel" could kill my Down's baby

You ineffable rotter Setanta, after Contrex's lovely turn of phrase.

You've been warned before about vituperative obloquy.

Regarding the use of eponyms in medical nomenclature, I found an interesting paper on the (American / USian / Great Satanian / Gringo) National Institutes Of Health website. It says that there is widespread inconsistent and arbitrary variation between the possessive (e.g. Down's Hodgkin's Alzheimer's Wilson's etc) and non-possessive (e.g. Down) forms. Concentrating on Down/Down's, it notes that the possessive form is more common in European medical publications and the n-p form more common in US publications, but that over time the n-p form seems to be gaining.

The authors assert that "Because of linguistic simplicity and technical advantages, the non-possessive form should be used uniformly worldwide" and cite ease of word searching in databases as a reason.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2667526

I have a number of problems with this, due, I will freely admit, in part to a dislike of America telling the rest of the world how to use words, a scepticism about the enforcibility of such a fatwah against the possessive form, and a sentimental attachment to my UK/European mindset. I concede that this may well be irrational and Luddite, and clear proof that I am a far-left Euro-weenie, but there it is.

Regarding the difficulty of word searching, I typed "Down Syndrome" into Google and got around 4,000,000 hits, whereas "Down's Syndrome" got me 876,000. In each case I used quotes around the search term as you see here.

When I searched for "Cushing's Disease" I got 201,000 hits, but when I typed "Cushing Disease" I got 195,000 hits, but -- interestingly -- it looks like they mostly lead to pages where the disease name is actually spelt with an apostrophe and an 's'. I have Google Suggest (which, as you type, offers a dropdown list of suggestions based on frequently entered terms) enabled and it showed me that plenty of people type "Cushing Disease" or "Cushing Syndrome". One result was "symtons of cushing diease" [sic] which is hardly evidence of any particular trend.

Yeah . . . as though i give a rat's ass . . .

It's a hyper reaction from the far right on Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel's position that limited medical resources should be allocated to individuals with the greatest possibility of recovery and becoming functioning participants of society. He's been labeled Dr Death by the scare-mongers because he feels that euthanasia laws, such as those in Oregon, are a viable alternative to lingering and languishing. He's also been called to task for including the "mentally retarded" in the list of those for whom extensive medical intervention may not be warranted. He doesn't want to kill off old people or restrict regular care to invalids (physical or mental), but is on record as saying that the high costs of extreme interventions should be evaluated on a case by case basis.

Here's one of the articles coming out of the fear factory.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/07242009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/deadly_doctors_180941.htm

You're all so excited about this newest Ann Coulter clone, but with possibly less gray matter and unbleached hair.

But you do, that is, give more than a rat's ass, Set. You get all whiny when someone disagrees with you and when it's pointed up you get even whinier complaining how the other person started it. You've actually posted on why you do this, trying vainly to defend yourself but you seem unable to contain yourself.

And what's worse, you don't even have the integrity to admit you were wrong and apologize to Contrex.

It'll be interesting to see how this develops. Thanks for posting that.