Neil deGrasse Tyson: Doctors

A short exceprt from his Keynote presentation at the Amazing Meeting 6 in Las Vegas, NV. Tyson talks about UFO's and Inept Aliens. For more information about The Amazing Meeting go to www.amazingmeeting.com

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[pe ve]

Neil making the same mistake at the end by adopting an expert opinion from the audience and proving thereby he is no better than the doctors he tries to ridicule.

Anyhow, Neil is a great entertainer of astro science in general.

[imfuckinpissedoff]

Yeah... my opinion of him lowered a bit from this nonsense.

[Skeptic E]

As usual chronicler is dead wrong. Cancer is by definition malignant. Neoplasms may be benign cancers cannot. Also you realise that one if the co-discovers of p53 was an oncologist? You know one of those stupid stupid doctors...

[shadowknight88]

When telling a patient his/her time to live, doctors do so according to epidemiological studies based in statistics. That is, there is a mean time of survival, with standard deviations broadening the possible range. In this case, the doctor quoted the average, but the person in the example is a standard deviation or two above due to various factors. It's just statistics and a bell curve; the doctors were not wrong in what they said. I thought this was obvious to a physicist/mathematician.

[chroniclerofthe70s]

Cancer was a death sentence in the 90,s? Medicine has never known the actual mortality rate of the U.S. population with cancer. Cancer can be benign or malignant. Cancer is far more prevalent in the human population than medicine leads the public to believe. Most cancers never get to stage IV where they can potentially harm the individual due to the bodies immune surveillance system and innate cell death program ( apoptosis ). It was science that discovered the p53 gene among others.

[LFTRnow]

I disagree. As one example, cancer was a death sentence in the 90s, not so much the case anymore.

[chroniclerofthe70s]

Tyson is referring to pre-med students who became physicians.

[chroniclerofthe70s]

Applied Chemistry, Applied Physics, Biotechnology, computers, and AI systems have advance each year; medicine has been relatively stagnant since the early 90s.

[MrMeYouAndNo1]

Pre-med students isnt exactly a fair representation. 50% of them don't make it anyway