Personally, I find astronomy quite depressing. Learning that humanity is stuck on this rock; at least for my lifetime if not forever. As a kid I dreamed of exploring space. As an adult I learned that is impossible.
The term "observable universe" is depressing enough for me.
"Welp, that's enough of looking at tens of thousands of places I'll never see up close."
smashes telescope, grabs another beer, and buys some tickets to visit Spain before going to bed with a little bit less defeat and despair than usual
>> so excited because future kids won't have to endure the same. When cochlear implants became routine there was a brief protest by the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. The line between people with a disability and a person who is simply different is a longstanding debate. How and when medicine should intervene is a hot button issue. I had a relative born with a malformed ear canal. The doctors rushed to get her t…
Brief? Many are still strongly against it, especially doing this very invasive surgery on babies.
It's a fair enough point, it being invasive, but at what point do the benefits outweigh the negatives?
What isolation? The children just become fluent signing with their parents, just as any child will spontaneously pick up their parents' language.
Do you think you'd feel as connected to your family if you could only communicate with them by writing, while you can communicate with everyone else by talking? Yes, there would be a level of isolation. It needn't be extreme, but I can't imagine there would be none
It's really no different from immigrant families where the parents don't speak English, but the children speak both languages.
I've known plenty of people and families like that, it was never an issue.
There is an entire class of YouTube video of the first moments that people see color, or hear, and it is absolutely, without question, the most joyous and wonderful class of video out there. Just so many happy tears. Little kids hearing their mother's voice for the first time. Friends seeing color for the first time after being given corrective glasses as a gift. Highly recommended watching.
As the father of a deaf girl who had cochlear implant surgery a few years ago, I despise these videos for misleadingly representing the reality of the situation for most patients. Those videos you mention are designed to invoke “happy-feelies” to maximise engagement and monetisation, nothing more. The doctors warned us not to expect any reaction in our daughter like in those videos. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for jus…
As someone who has had cochlear implant surgery myself, that is 100% true. Luckily as a member of the Deaf community I knew full well what to expect so I didn't expect to hear straight away and just looked forward to taking my time learning how to hear. Even now I still can't hear 100% (and will never be able to) but that is fine as I still use our national sign language which will always be the language I can communicate best in. It took a bit of adjustment for the hearing members of my family. Even though I kept explaining I won't be able to hear perfectly from day 1, it was still a shock for some who realised the switch on was only the start of an incredibly long journey which I am still on. Ironically, only those who had deep involvement in the Deaf/sign language community understood exactly the reality of cochlear implants -- showing that even with medical advancements, the Deaf community is still an important part of any Deaf person's life and sign language will remain a useful toolkit for all Deaf people.
I'm deaf in one ear and 70db loss in the other, just wanted to say nobody cares what you call it as long as you aren't an asshole about it. Being pediatric helps nobody
People care. Just because you (n=1) don't doesn't mean "nobody cares". It is always good to be openminded and understand other people's point of view.
i thought this as well! you wouldn't say "autism cured". to many this must seem like a semantic argument, but Deafness is an entire culture and identity with hundreds of years of history
They can call it anything they want, but the moment they leave their "culture" and try to police our language they have to justify it on facts and not just assert that they feel a certain way. It's completely irrelevant to medicine if they have a culture or identity based around their disability.
Can you explain your reasoning behind putting culture in double quotes. You may do well to remember you also need to justify your use of your own words. The medical industry does not (and shouldn't) have the last word on language relating to disability. It would well be worth you reading into the medical model of disability vs the social model of disability. In short: medicine doesn't always work out in the best interest of people with disabilities, hence society becoming more aware and accommodating of people with disabilities actually supports people with disabilities more than medicine.
i thought this as well! you wouldn't say "autism cured". to many this must seem like a semantic argument, but Deafness is an entire culture and identity with hundreds of years of history
Sorry to see you've been downvoted. For those not familiar with the Deaf community, it is correct there is a Deaf culture with many people who identify as Deaf and indeed there is hundreds of years of history.
I'm 80% deaf on my left ear due to measles carried by my mom before my birth. I couldn't gather from the article whether this would help my case, but I'm hopeful regardless.
Gene therapy has been an extremely slow game. Part of that is ethics, and part of that is technology. A single death in a single trial slowed down gene therapy for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger I dedicated much of my biology training to learning how to carry out gene therapy only to conclude that it will continue to be the underdog in disease therapy for a long time. I do not expect to see lar…
I expected to read that and find it was a fluke accident. Instead, it reads like the scientists shrugged before the injection and said, “What’s the worst that could happen?” That’s unreal. It killed monkeys under similar circumstances and the kid wasn’t at his healthiest at the time of treatment either. Did they not care or was there some reason to believe that outcome was virtually improbable?
Bioethics is a lot stricter than you think. They did not simply shrug and say that.
Medical science is about the only thing in modern life that consistently delivers hope. While all the other terrible things are going on, something like this comes along and I’m just extremely happy to be alive right now.
What's the end goal of modern medicine though? Immortality? You can perhaps reduce suffering to nil, but you can't cheat death.
Why does there have to be an end goal? Why cant things just do the thing they do?