Re:Mental Disorder
by astazangasta on Thursday February 21, 2019 @10:42AM
(#19217572)
Increasing the pool of generalizations would certainly help. So would keeping this fundamental problem in front of mind.
My kid was an outlier because my genetics tend to being tall and thin. If he was being measured against a set of healthy people with similar genetics he would not be considered an outlier - but this calculus is not considered when he is measured and judged aberrant. Our doctor being Indian was able to see from her experience that he was "normal" - for a kid with an Indian parent. Another doctor (like all the ones I grew up with) might not have the same insight and conclude there is a problem.
Re:Mental Disorder
by SketchySeaBeast on Thursday February 21, 2019 @12:21PM
(#19218486)
Could I ask what concerns they had with your child being tall and thin for his age? I was a 99%'er growing up but I don't remember there being health concerns.
I think that's all evidence based medicine can really do. It's just a series of "well, people with high blood pressure tend to die early" and "people with high cholesterol have heart attacks". I don't know how they would approach it differently - if it was assumed that everyone was different with entirely different baselines, I don't know how it would be possible to make any sort of predictive assumptions. Really, the best solution would be to increase the granularity of the samples, but that's all they can do, develop more diverse pools of generalizations.