Wrong, wrong, wrong
Research shows there was too much wrong in medical practice in France, for at least a decade. And 鈥� or maybe but 鈥� earlier research indicates that there is way too much wrong in medical research, in general, everywhere.
The Journal of Patient Safety has a new report called 鈥溾��. Something is a little off even with that title. A year off. The text tells of examining the claims filed with a medical liability insurance company in France 鈥渄uring a period of 11 years, from January 1, 2007, to December 31, 2017鈥�. Feedback notes that the name of the insurance company is 鈥淪ham鈥�.
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The story is far from bleak, though. The report shows the problem to be widespread but not deep, and almost entirely fixable. The key passage says: 鈥淲rong-side, wrong-organ, wrong-procedure, or wrong-person surgical errors are rare but fully preventable by the implementation of a safety culture.鈥�
Medicine is a difficult undertaking, with uncertainty lurking always, everywhere. Medical practitioners and patients alike were shocked in 2005 when John Ioannidis, then based both at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and at Tufts University School of Medicine in Massachusetts, published a shocker of a paper in PLoS Medicine called 鈥溾��.
But 鈥� or maybe and 鈥� that shaking was itself a little shaken in 2022 when Ioannidis published an update with the title 鈥溾��. The correction was small, adding parentheses that had been missing from an equation in Table 2 of the original paper.
And maybe almost everything is okay, mostly. That is the quick take from a US study published in 2013 in response to Ioannidis鈥檚 original paper. It is called 鈥溾��.
Sinus fiction
Sinus problems afflict many people, yet sinuses receive not nearly as much literary or scientific acclaim as hearts, brains, lungs, hands, feet, genitals and other body regions. Their uncelebrity perhaps affects how much acclaim and research funding is applied to sinuses and sinus issues.
Fiction books explicitly about sinus problems are rare. The most clearly labelled book of this kind is a 59-pager called by Naema Gabriel, published in 2013. Google translates the summary on the author鈥檚 website thusly: 鈥淣aema Gabriel tells the story of a girl who, alongside her manic-depressive mother, somehow becomes a woman despite everything.鈥� (Disclosure: Feedback hasn鈥檛 read the novel, but expects that the book is faithful, one way or another, to its title.)
The non-fiction literary scene is less enthralling. Much of the medical research literature would strike critics and casual readers alike as dry, not much to sneeze at, something of a void, maybe something to avoid. One of the few 鈥� and most 鈥� exciting sinus adventure publications is Robert Caughey, Mark Jameson, Charlie Gross and Joseph Han鈥檚 1995 thriller 鈥溾��. Its level of excitement is low, even laconic, as is evident in the official plot summary: 鈥淪inonasal anatomic variants have been postulated as a risk factor for sinus disease. Therefore, a study was conducted to examine the correlation of sinus disease to septal deviation, concha bullosa, and infraorbital ethmoid cells.鈥�
This dearth of popularity, this sinus of excitement, can be corrected. Feedback is compiling a list of novels, movies and videos in which somebody鈥檚 sinus ailments are dominantly central to the plot. If you know of a work of fiction that should be on the list, please send basic info about it to: 鈥淪inus Fiction鈥� c/o Feedback.
Possibility studies
In the premier issue of the new scholarly journal Possibility Studies & Society, the managing editor, Vlad P. Gl膬veanu, what he says is 鈥渁 manifesto鈥� about what is possible in the journal. He manifestoises about the 鈥渟hift of focus from being to becoming, from what is to what could be鈥�.
The work is a jargon-filled festival, brimming with the locus of possibility, the relational space of action, new affordances, sociogenetically long histories, radical open-endedness, the imperativeness of an ethics of possibility, and other alphabetical phrases.
One of the possibility studies in the debut issue is 鈥溾�� by Federico Faggin, who lists only one affiliation for himself: the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, located in California.
Faggin explains that 鈥渃reative agents must be purely quantum systems interacting with quantum-and-classical living organisms that in turn interact classically with each other and with the environment鈥�. Feedback notes the possibility that this statement makes some kind of sense.
Faggin is a retired electrical engineer. He is credited with designing an early microprocessor chip, the Intel 4004, which made a lot of money. It is possible that this financial success is what gave Faggin unique insights about the interaction of creative agents, quantum systems, classical systems and the environment.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and聽co-founded聽the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is聽.
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