Medicine is still the youngest science

even though 24 years have passed since Lewis Thomas wrote his excellent book by that name.

Yes, we can use various scans to peer inside the body to detect abnormality in an organ, we can operate, we can fix broken bones and we can treat bacterial infection.. as long as that specific strain has not developed resistance to antibiotics.

But in most cases we can only treat symptoms that can have different causes.

More so with mental illness. Unless we are going to zombify every person whose behavior deviates from the norm, no one can predict whether a person who writes "bizarre" things, who is a "loner," who even stalks women, can end up killing people. In most cases, such writings can provide a vent to inside rage.. one hopes so, at least.

This is the price that we pay for a free society. There will always be people who go out and kill. It is our society that glorifies solving problems using guns. We don't hear about people grabbing guns and killing other people because they are mad at them in other countries, do we?

I don't have problems with NBC airing those rambling talks; I do with a cadre of psychologists and analysts trying to make sense of these incoherent rambling.

Last, please forgive me, but every time when someone talks about the "biggest" mass murder of 32 people, I have to think of numbers that double and triple this one in Iraq every day.

coupled with a profit motive (ok, prolly more the latter) has ruined it.

I'll take science that you very much.

which is why there is so much confusion about drugs, hormones, and other treatments, as well as what is called alternative medicine.

The reality is that Eastern medicine did nicely before Western came along, with all the certainty that later were proven false.