Just a correction: a different page I saw about the same study says that palliative care cancer patients were actually excluded, not included. It also says that the number who died was 21 instead of 19. I'm not sure what that does to my faith in the report - maybe it's a misunderstanding somewhere as the difference (2) is the number of palliative cancer care patients.
250,000 Jehovah's Witnesses have died refusing blood
by nicolaou 739 Replies latest watchtower medical
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Marvin Shilmer
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“In summary my method was:
“Anemia death rate x JW Risk Multiplier x estimated number of JW's per decade…”
A far more reliable and defensible extrapolation is to compare known hard numbers with known hard numbers. This is what my blog presentation does.
Because of Dr. Beliaev's data mining we have a known statisitcal quantity of preventable deaths due to blood product refusal within a given region of New Zealand for the span of 1998-2007.
Because of Watchtower's published statistics we have a known statistical quantity of JWs to compare with the New Zealand data source, again for the span of 1998-2007.
Because of Watchtower's published statistics we have a known total statistical quantity of JWs.
Marvin Shilmer
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Simon
What "names" exactly?
angry ad-hominems, rants, rambles etc...
You always start with dismissive and disparaging comments about others and claim you've been attacked. We've seen it from you many times. You seem unable to have a debate or discussion that involves any disagreement with you.
It seems your definition of "insult" is thus: "to disagree or contradict" If that is the case, there's no point arguing with you, since you will regard any argument or contradiction as an "insult." For this and other reasons there is simply no point getting embroiled in a debate with you, hence my eagerness to "run off". You will always have the final say. The house always wins.
Go look in a mirror. You just described yourself! You take disagreement with you to be an insult but your insults of others to always be justified and imagined.
Questioning motives is also apparently taboo - I will add that to my ever-growing mental list of things not to do on JWN... "The Ghost Posting Guidelines" I think I'll call it.
Childish, childish, childish and then some more. You know exactly what the guidelines are and why they are there. Everyone knows and understands them. Now you are trying to turn them into some underhand agenda against you.
Like I said, immature and childish.
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70wksfyrs
I would like to comment, but I have not read all the threads as funny as the nonsense is I would like to give my opinion of the stats.
As Simon said in a long winded way..................there are too many variables to get a reasonable sample of data to extrapolate any meaningful stats.
One example of this is...............how do we know if the person would have died anyway with blood?
Personally any stats like this would never be credible to an experienced analyst, or statistition.
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Simon
Because of Dr. Beliaev's data mining we have a known statisitcal quantity of preventable deaths due to blood product refusal within a given region of New Zealand for the span of 1998-2007.
Is there any indication how they got to determine the cause of death to be 'refusal of blood transfusion' for those patients, 5-15 years after the fact?
Does the article describe how they reached that conclusion? Do they claim it was noted as the cause of death in the medical records?
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Finkelstein
Arguing about numbers becomes trivial considering the consequences of this formidably dangerous WTS. doctrine.
The only possible and accurate way to come up with a number would be to have the WTS. document
the number themselves on a yearly basis.
Do you think they've done that since 1948 ?
Nope
They seem to have cataloged instances of pedophilia though, which a I find ironically surprising.
No question about it, the number is in the thousands based from when this doctrine was introduced and
the number of JWS in total. in the past 65 years.
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Simon
Personally any stats like this would never be credible to an experienced analyst, or statistition.
Yes, the sample is just way too small and the outcome of a few cases would have a dramatic effect on the figures which makes it difficult to have too much faith in especially to try and extrapolate it out. If one patient survived or died then what effect would that have on the final number? 500? 5,000? more?
Meaningful data from clinical trials is incredibly difficult to get right and needs lots of careful controls and patient qualification. I'm not sure you can reach too many valid conclusions based on a review of records after the fact (I presume without the help of the original attending physicans - this seems to be based on recorded data).
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Marvin Shilmer
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“Marvin lost me when he claimed his figures worked because New Zealand is an island. My God what on earth has that got to do with it?”
It has everything to do with a statistical extrapolation of a given demographic. For statistical purposes having an actual number of deaths offers no benefit unless you know what size population to compare it with. In Dr. Beliaev et al’s study we have a data set from specific sources. These sources are in New Zealand and are of patients served within a given region of that nation’s healthcare system. This information has the effect of capturing the overall population against which to compare the number of deaths.
Compared to other presentations of death statistics this one by Beliaev et al is important because it offers a means of establishing a number of deaths (due to blood refusal) and the population against which to compare it. When we read similar sets of data published, for instance, in the USA it’s practically impossible to extrapolate overall mortality because 4 hospitals in the USA represents a drop in the bucket against the overall USA population. In New Zealand that’s not the case. In New Zealand 4 hospitals in a given demographic region tells us a lot about mortality against the population prorated for that same region.
Marvin Shilmer
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slimboyfat
Marvin you "constructed a calculator"? You crack me up! What the hell are you talking about? Were you always this crazy? Sometimes I worry about you in a non-funny way.
Can you explain in plain English why my calculation above is wrong? I initially worked it out to be 29,000 but forgot to lower the number to account for the average number of JWs in New Zealand over the whole period and came up with 20,200 instead.
Personally that still sounds way too high. It would imply around 1% of all JW deaths are due to refusing blood. That does not seem credible to me.
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Marvin Shilmer
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“.015% is 15/100,000 expressed another way.
“That means that in this part of Marvis extrapolation NZ JW's with anemia are 75x more likely to die than non-JW's with the same condition, assuming you believe worldlifeexpectancy.com and its 0.2/100,000 figure.”
No.
0.015% does not suggest a rate of mortality statistic. Rather, expressed as a percentage it’s the actual value of deaths compared with the then population of JWs in New Zealand. This actual value is what makes Dr. Beliaev et al data set useful for extrapolating deaths among JWs refusing blood.
Said another way, 0.015% “means” 0.015% of the then population of JWs in New Zealand. It does not “mean” what you suggest.
Marvin Shilmer