one is too many, just saying......
250,000 Jehovah's Witnesses have died refusing blood
by nicolaou 739 Replies latest watchtower medical
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bigmac
i was totally out of the loop by 1981---i had no idea the wts had received the new light about organ transplants till i joined this site 3 years ago.
just how stupid are jehovahs witnesses ?
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Simon
Let's try applying some common sense ... here are mortality figures for the US for 2010:
- Number of deaths: 2,468,435
- Death rate: 799.5 deaths per 100,000 population
- Life expectancy: 78.7 years
- Infant Mortality rate: 6.15 deaths per 1,000 live births
Number of deaths for leading causes of death:
- Heart disease: 597,689
- Cancer: 574,743
- Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 138,080
- Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 129,476
- Accidents (unintentional injuries): 120,859
- Alzheimer's disease: 83,494
- Diabetes: 69,071
- Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,476
- Influenza and Pneumonia: 50,097
- Intentional self-harm (suicide): 38,364
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
Given that the JWs are a predominently US / western religion we'll go with these figures as representative until someone can show good reason why they are not.
The 800 deaths per 100k population applied to group of 7m is:
7,000,000 / 100,000 = 70 * 800 = ~56,000 deaths per year.
So, just over 50k JWs are likely to die each year all together.
Applying the percentages of the different causes we get:
- 14k each from heart disease and cancer
- 2.8k each from respiratory diseases, stroke and accidents
- 1.8k from alzheimers,
- 1.5k from diabetes
- 1.1k each from nephritis and flu
- 800 from suicide / self harm
Sadly, there are no figures for 'death from boredom'
The JWs have only been 6/7m recently, back in 1970s they were much smaller so lets assume that the bulk of deaths are in the last 40 years (being super generous). This means 250,000 / 40 = 6250 per year.
About half the deaths caused by cancer or heart disease, or equal to the deaths from respiratory diseases, stroke or accidents (combined!).
Does that seem realistic?
But wait, we're talking not about just deaths but preventable deaths where refusal to take blood was the cause.
How utterly preposterous to claim 250,000 ... even if 1% of deaths for ALL causes each year had blood involved as a factor that would be 560 which x 40 = 22,400
But I think you'd really have a hard time claiming that 1% of all JW deaths were related to blood. It's a small, small fraction of that. How many cases did you know if in total in your lifetime? Many will be the same case reported that people know about ... not the many that people personally know die from cancer, heart disease, old age etc...
And it's exactly because it's a small number that it makes the news when it happens and yet doesn't cause a huge outcry in the medical community such as would happen if +20k easily preventable deaths a year were happening.
Each death is a tragedy to the family involved, especially if it could have been avoided but personally I think the total number is probably in the thousands, rather than even the tens of thousands. Even 50,000 is not a conservative figure IMO.
So why the 250k number being touted? Here's what happens:
A group decides they need attention for their cause. But people really don't care about their cause because it doesn't really affect that many people and it isn't really intrusive (i.e. you kind of sign up to be affected).
So, at some point, the aim drifts from gaining attention for the cause to just "gaining attention" ... and the JBD's of the world appear and do their crazy stuff.
Now, we've seen the tobaco lobby, big-oil and pharma / GM crop people all use the same tactics which are to spread doubt and uncertainty about facts and sources and whether they should be believed.
I am not saying the WTS is behind the JBD persona as I don't know her but man, they couldn't have invented someone better than her and the AAWA to disrupt and discredit people genuinely working on issues.
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Nathan Natas
rhetorical Q.: J ust how stupid are jehovahs witnesses?
A.: You admitted to being a JW, so how stupid are YOU?
Almost everyone here was once a JW... how stupid was I?
I'm going to try to make a General Plea for Slack. Let's remember that when we make a sweeping statement like "JWs are stupid" we are including our former selves, some people we once loved, and the previous incarnation of some of our present friends. Many people who join the Witneses do so not because of stupidity, but because of FEAR, and admit it, this planet can be a very scary place sometimes. So a soft-spoken colporteur shows up one day when we are especially vulnerable and tells us that SkyDaddy is going to make it all better, and that SkyDaddy is going the raise Dear Old Uncle Ted from the dead, and manna and Coca-Cola will miraculously appear just before you knew you wanted it... such a sweet, desirable dream... so before you know what has happened you are going to the Kingdom Hall for five meetings a week and you have convinced yourself that your dearest Aunt, who you love so much, is an agent of Satan... Your goal becomes to "endure to the end" so that you can be SAVED. It's not stupid to want to be SAVED - that desire is the PRIME DIRECTIVE of our DNA.
We were LIED to. So were they. They are no more stupid than you and I were. It's a pity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=JqowmHgxVJQ
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rip van winkle
I don't know her but man, they couldn't have invented someone better than her and the AAWA to disrupt and discredit people genuinely working on issues.
Exclamation point!!!!!!!!
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Finkelstein
Simon
Any time you take a position of being intellectually dishonest upon creating attentive value on a subject you invariably weaken that
very position your trying to point out and resolve, you also lose credibility .
Draw attention as you might but in the long run you spoil the soup in the process.
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Simon
BTW: Marvin - I think your article with the 50k claim is severely flawed as you are trying to extrapolate from an incredibly small group of 19 people over a 10 year period.
You also make the mistake of taking the 19 deaths out of 103 people suffering severe anemia who may have been saved by transfusion and then applying it to the 7m+ witnesses, most of whom were probably pretty healthy and certainly have no reason to fall into the same class.
Finally, you can't apply percentages to percentages as you do in some of your calculations.
Rather than your figure being low or conservative as you claim, I'd say it was wildly high and plucked out of the air.
Looking at it another way, it's like trying to predict the divorce rate for JWs based on a study of just 19 people in 1 congregation of 103 people.
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adamah
The figure sounds rather fantastic to me, as well, especially given that the WTBTS does allow more loopholes for blood nowadays. It seems a foolish strategy to counter lies with lies (or even estimates): why do it, when TTATT exists?
Finkelstein said-
Thats a good point BigMac death caused by refusing BTs usually makes some kind of news. Most of time but not always.
Also remember that there's more awareness in medicine within the past few decades over protecting a patient's right to privacy (eg HIPAA in the US), such that Hospitals would be sued for calling up the press to 'leak' stories to reporters.
Adam
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whathappened
I know personally several people who died refusing blood. I would bet the suicide rate is very high also in JW land.
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Marvin Shilmer
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“BTW: Marvin - I think your article with the 50k claim is severely flawed as you are trying to extrapolate from an incredibly small group of 19 people over a 10 year period.”
People who do not understand something should refrain from criticizing it.
My article does not extrapolate from a group of 19 people over a 10-year period. My articled extrapolated from a group average of 12,700 annually. Statistically, 19 is the population, not the group.
12,700 is not an incredibly small group.
“You also make the mistake of taking the 19 deaths out of 103 people suffering severe anemia who may have been saved by transfusion and then applying it to the 7m+ witnesses, most of whom were probably pretty healthy and certainly have no reason to fall into the same class.”
You mean like “most of” the annual average of 12,700 in New Zealand were “probably pretty healthy and certainly have no reason to fall into the same class”?
“Finally, you can't apply percentages to percentages as you do in some of your calculations.”
Why? Because you say so?
“Rather than your figure being low or conservative as you claim, I'd say it was wildly high and plucked out of the air.”
Besides reasons I’ve already expressed in this discussion, there is direct reason why my extrapolation is extremely conservative. I use the entire population of JWs in New Zealand to extrapolate mortality based on deaths that occurred at 4 hospitals with trauma services out of 14 such hospitals in the 2 regions. My extrapolation assumes that not one single JW died of anemia by refusing blood transfusion in any of the other 10 hospitals with trauma services, not to mention any of the other regional hospitals.
“Looking at it another way, it's like trying to predict the divorce rate for JWs based on a study of just 19 people in 1 congregation of 103 people.”
My conclusions are not based on a study of “just 19 people”.
My conclusions are based on a study of 12,700 (avg) people over a period of 10 years.
People who do not understand something should refrain from criticizing it.
Marvin Shilmer