[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by artplumber

Fox's agenda is to try to shock or obtain empathic feelings with the general public to allow increased funding for PD

What he does is different than images of bloated starving children with flies crawling all over them while they die a slow death from starvation? Sad to say but people need a slap in the face sometimes.

(at the expense of other programs) and push for use of a morally questionable solution

He should be the martyr and not have hope for a solution at the expense of other programs? The morality of it is an opinion. Not everyone shares the same opinion.

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 right to free speech is not in question here, it's his right to want his health.

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.

So it's only 1 million PD victims. That pales in comparison to your other examples. We should just funnel all the PD money into the other illnesses. I'm sure those 1 million will understand it, greater good and all that.

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.

Basically your opinion that is shared by a great many. Does not make it right, or wrong. The slippery slope that I see in this is your position on where dollars "are better spent". What gives you the right to decide? End of day it's not about what illness kills you, dead is dead.

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

No. And that's not what this thread was about. It was about my feelings of respect for the guy. Very simple.

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