Skip to main content

Baby's salt death may be accident

This story about a prosecution of a mother for poisoning her son with salt shows a key conflict between Medical Logic and Legal Logic.

The Doctor concerns believes honestly that the mother poisoned the child, but he has no evidence and was "unable to exclude the possibility that an accident was made".

We really need to be able to have criminal trials based upon evidence rather than opinion. Doctors may make educated guesses about diagnoses which on the balance of probabilities are right. However, just because a doctor thinks there is a 60% chance that someone is guilty does not mean that they are guilty. There are too many cases where people are prosecuted without proper evidence. A "medical opinion" is not evidence.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Its the long genes that stop working

People who read my blog will be aware that I have for some time argued that most (if not all) diseases of aging are caused by cells not being able to produce enough of the right proteins. What happens is that certain genes stop functioning because of a metabolic imbalance. I was, however, mystified as to why it was always particular genes that stopped working. Recently, however, there have been three papers produced: Aging is associated with a systemic length-associated transcriptome imbalance Age- or lifestyle-induced accumulation of genotoxicity is associated with a generalized shutdown of long gene transcription and Gene Size Matters: An Analysis of Gene Length in the Human Genome From these it is obvious to see that the genes that stop working are the longer ones. To me it is therefore obvious that if there is a shortage of nuclear Acetyl-CoA then it would mean that the probability of longer Genes being transcribed would be reduced to a greater extent than shorter ones.
1 comment
Read more