[artplumber]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

I'm terribly confused by some responses here.

What is Fox's agenda? To cure his debilitating illness?

Fox's current Meds will not cure him. They only mask the symptoms of his disease.

His is a degenerative disease.

It will only get worse, not better.

At some point the meds will likely be completely ineffective.

Why does he not have the right to fight for his own life?

Why is that wrong?

What is wrong with you people?

Fox's agenda is to try to shock or obtain empathic feelings with the general public to allow increased funding for PD (at the expense of other programs) and push for use of a morally questionable solution to the exclusion of almost any other consideration. No one is debating his right of free speech, it is his careful manipulation of the images to emphasize his illness.

His disease process is no different than numerous other chronic medical illnesses such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes. They too, are progressive and not only debilitating but much more lethal than parkinsonism. His efforts have channeled funds away from cardiovascular problems (affecting 80 million in the USA) (that's you Flattbutt) and diabetes (affecting 24 million)(that's you Zman) for approx 1 million affected.

His insistence that embryonic stem cell research is the only hope for a cure is misguided at best and completely erroneous at worst. Yet, he has sought to boil every candidate's platform down to this single issue. Notably, most chronic diseases don't have cures, there is only therapy. Replacing neurotransmitters seems esthetically pleasing, but there are numerous failed esthetically pleasing therapies in medicine (we often learn that we don't know what we thought we knew). Furthermore, it is a therapy not without a significant slippery slope, ie at what point does the fertilized egg become a human? An extension of this argument lies in a reported case of parents having a second child to provide bone marrow for a transplant when their first child was diagnosed with a malignancy and no donor marrow could be found. Harvesting marrow from a child is quite risky and luckily doesn't really have to be done anymore. He does this because he has access to a bully pulpit that Zman and Flatbutt don't. He is disenfranchising them. Same thing happened with Katie Couric and colonoscopy screening for colon cancer. A lot of dollars are going to that when they could be used better elsewhere.

So, I guess it must be wrong to ever question someone with an illness or debate their actions.