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Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

bbc.com

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Re: Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

#81

Post by ksk »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #68
mjh2539 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an embryo is not a person > but embryos aren't in that grey area, not even close. You're begging the question. You haven't provided any reasons or arguments for your position. You've merely re-asserted it. It's akin to saying "It's true that x, because it's true that x". How is my judgement that an embryo is innocent arbitrary? What crime has the embryo committed? What did it do to warrant being killed? The trouble…

a new human life is formed, with its own ends and identity. And completely dependent upon the mother whose body it is parasitically feeding off of and canabalizing. The problem with pro lifers is that they completely dismiss the lives of adult women as being less valuable and less important than a single celled organism incapable of surviving on its own. If you don't want to talk about souls or spirituality, you are…

>you are saying the rights of a blob of cells supersedes that of a grown woman.

There are many ways to philosophically argue against a 'life begins at fertilization' position. I don't know why you feel the need to assume things that were not said.

Re: Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

#82

Post by bennyg »

I have had 4 retinal detachment surgeries on my left eye, with the last rendering it blind.

I had one retinal detachment surgery and a subsequent cataract surgery (since vitrectomy almost always results in a cataract) on my right eye. It's fairly stable but my vision is not great.

I'm hoping for stem cell therapy sometime in my life to help repair areas of my right eye that are no longer great (retinoschisis and general rod/cone dystrophy) and to make sure I'm seeing well into my later years of life.

Re: Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

#83

Post by ksk »

mjh2539 wrote: post #37
Tharkun wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moral indignity? Murder? Person? It looks like we have vastly different definitions of each of these words. Scaremongering with no basis in reality is closer to noise than it is to signal.

Watch out, I'm about to "scaremonger": 1. Murder is the intentional killing of an innocent, human life. 2. Embryos are innocent, human, and alive. 3. Intentionally killing an embryo is murder. What are you definitions for "murder" or "embryo"? How exactly is any of this "not based in reality"? Please engage with me on a rational level. Give definitions. Give an argument. This is what I'm trying to do. I'm not: a: usi…

You should make a distinction between life, independent life, and "potential future person(s)". Also :-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beginning_of_human_personhood#...

Re: Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

#84

Post by Qub3d »

jorgen123 wrote: post #70
epmaybe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article, 29- and 21- letters improvement in visual acuity. I believe this means at least 4-6 rows improvement from the chart you read off of. Think about that for a second. Nearly blind, or actually blind, to being able to read again. I'm seriously debating specializing in ophthalmology, and sub-specializing in retina surgery just became an even more appealing career plan for me.

I would applaud that choice. I had a retinal tear 4 weeks ago and then then retina detached and started sagging in front of my lens, blocking half of my field of view. Seriously scary, especially since my mother has lost most of her vision after a similar problem. I got a pneumatic retinopexy a couple of days later. Amazingly, it only took about 30 minutes in a (nice) back-room of the retina clinic with local anesthe…

Its stories like yours that give me the (good) shivers. Just routine 30 minute operations we do now that would be considered miracles less than a century ago. It reaffirms a belief that humanity is capable of doing great things and solving insanely difficult problems.

In a very sincere and unironic way, "my faith in humanity is restored".

Re: Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

#85

Post by DoreenMichele »

ksk wrote: post #81
DoreenMichele wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a new human life is formed, with its own ends and identity. And completely dependent upon the mother whose body it is parasitically feeding off of and canabalizing. The problem with pro lifers is that they completely dismiss the lives of adult women as being less valuable and less important than a single celled organism incapable of surviving on its own. If you don't want to talk about souls or spirituality, you are…

>you are saying the rights of a blob of cells supersedes that of a grown woman. There are many ways to philosophically argue against a 'life begins at fertilization' position. I don't know why you feel the need to assume things that were not said.

To me, this is not a philosophical argument. That is the de facto outcome of such a position. If you call it murder to end a pregnancy at any stage, as the GP does, then women are hostages of a life not yet able to survive on its own.

Re: Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

#86

Post by ksk »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #85
ksk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you are saying the rights of a blob of cells supersedes that of a grown woman. There are many ways to philosophically argue against a 'life begins at fertilization' position. I don't know why you feel the need to assume things that were not said.

To me, this is not a philosophical argument. That is the de facto outcome of such a position. If you call it murder to end a pregnancy at any stage, as the GP does, then women are hostages of a life not yet able to survive on its own.

>To me, this is not a philosophical argument.

Why? Determining what is and isn't life is based on human reasoning, judgement, and morality. Have you found an alternate approach that was somehow missed by everyone else? :)

>If you call it murder to end a pregnancy at any stage, as the GP does, then women are hostages of a life not yet able to survive on its own.

Perhaps you missed the stem cell therapy treatment context that was being discussed. We're only talking about embryos, not pregnancy.

Re: Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

#87

Post by bennyg »

epmaybe wrote: post #79
jorgen123 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would applaud that choice. I had a retinal tear 4 weeks ago and then then retina detached and started sagging in front of my lens, blocking half of my field of view. Seriously scary, especially since my mother has lost most of her vision after a similar problem. I got a pneumatic retinopexy a couple of days later. Amazingly, it only took about 30 minutes in a (nice) back-room of the retina clinic with local anesthe…

The one thing that drives me away is that while I feel like I am improving one's quality of life, much of my experience in medicine has been seeing my mentors and role models save one's life. It's probably the one thing I will miss most if I choose ophthalmology.

It's saving lives in a different way. Without my eyesight, everything would be difficult. I probably could no longer code, or at least in the same capacity. I love visual art.

I don't have much eyesight left, but a retinal detachment surgery helped make sure I did have some.

It's a worthy endeavor, trust me.

Re: Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

#88

Post by gwern »

Brakenshire wrote: post #10

This is a phase 1 trial (usually just undertaken to check safety before larger trials are done to test efficacy and dose), so it seems all the more amazing that such a big improvement was seen.

Strictly speaking, it's a big improvement because you're hearing about a phase 1 trial, and predictably so - not surprising at all.

Phase 1 trials typically get little publicity unless they either kill someone or turn in a statistically-significant improvement. (A phase 1 trial in which the controls do exactly as well as the experimentals and no side-effects are observed, which is highly likely for even excellent treatments because of the tiny sample size, will very rarely be written up because it's boring.) And because their sample sizes are always tiny, any statistically-significant improvement will always be an extremely large effect size. If the effect hadn't been improbably large, you would almost certainly not be reading about it now on HN.

And because of this selection bias, the effects you hear about tend to be massively overestimated. This is one of Andrew Gelman's points: the 'statistical significance filter' massively inflates effect sizes, a type M error, which then subsequently regress to the mean of the true smaller effect. This is why you're not supposed to take Phase I trials as meaningful estimates of the effect size, why statisticians emphasize they're supposed to be about safety, and why you don't do power analysis based on the observed results (either post hoc or for designing the next big ones). This is also part of why you hear about so many amazing pilot experiments in animals or humans but then the big followup trials are much more modest or nulls.

Re: Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

#89

Post by DoreenMichele »

ksk wrote: post #86
DoreenMichele wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this is not a philosophical argument. That is the de facto outcome of such a position. If you call it murder to end a pregnancy at any stage, as the GP does, then women are hostages of a life not yet able to survive on its own.

>To me, this is not a philosophical argument. Why? Determining what is and isn't life is based on human reasoning, judgement, and morality. Have you found an alternate approach that was somehow missed by everyone else? :) >If you call it murder to end a pregnancy at any stage, as the GP does, then women are hostages of a life not yet able to survive on its own. Perhaps you missed the stem cell therapy treatment conte…

Is there some new fangled means for embryos to grow into babies that don't involve a human womb?
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