Using Numbers May Be Helpful For Quantifying Human Health, Somewhat...
But they may not necessarily be the best indicators.
When I was doing my Masters in environmental engineering, I looked at trace micropollutants and their treatment in wastewater prior to discharge.
These micropollutants are small molecules, and their concentrations in wastewater have to be carefully regulated, because they could cause undesirable damage to the environment — especially if too much of it were to be released to the environment.
We looked at these micropollutants in terms of their concentration in water, and how low we could bring these concentrations to during ounr cleanup operations.
We were looking at concentrations to the order of parts per million (ppm) or parts per billion (ppb).
Imagine you have a million dollars in $1 bills, and you are to find a specific dollar bill out of that million bills. That specific bill is 1 part per million.
Imagine you have a billion dollars in $1 bills, and you are to find a specific bill out of that billion bills. That’s what we’re looking at as 1 part per billion.
Simply put, in terms of the micropollutant molecules, we’d be looking at 1 molecule out of every million molecules that we’re screening (the other 999,999 molecules being water).
The lower the concentration we’d want to detect accurately, the more expensive the equipment/detection techniques would be.
If our equipment couldn’t detect any of the micropollutants in the test samples, the micropollutant concentration cannot be considered to be zero. But we can say that the micropollutant concentrations were undetectable according to the analytical techniques that we used.
And when it comes down to our health…
Whenever a medical checkup takes place, the doctor takes blood samples, urine samples and whatever else samples, runs some analytical tests on them, and returns with the numbers that were crunched.
We’d know how much glucose there is in our blood, for instance.
We’d know how much low density lipoprotein (LDL) there is in our blood, for instance.
We’d know if our livers are overproducing certain enzymes, for instance.
Based on the analytical tests that have been done.
That gives the healthcare side an inkling of what ought to be done, based on the prevailing best practices that are put in place by the standard operating procedures (SOPs) enforced by the administrative boards in their organisations.
Would it necessarily be the “best” option to pump someone with drugs?
Well, the doctor’s hands are tied - but if it is a procedure that is approved by the administration boards, it’s a procedure that keeps the doctor safe from lawsuits.
So when the numbers tell a patient that they do have cancer, the first line of action a doctor would recommend would be a procedure such as a chemotherapy or radiotherapy, for instance.
When it’s an issue with diabetes, it would be the introduction of drug such as metformin.
Or with high cholesterol, a drug such as a statin. That’s the safest thing to do - they’d be fried if they were to recommend an “alternative lifestyle” such as going on a ketogenic diet, for instance, and it didn’t work on the patient.
And that’s the biggest concern ever if one were to be a smart employee, no? Always cover your rear end!
In cancer treatment…
Our doctors usually take cell samples from our bodies to test in the form of a biopsy. If we do have a visible tumour, the types of cells in the tumour can be extracted in a sample and analysed via the biopsy to determine how bad it is for us.
When someone does go for a chemo/radio/whatever therapy session, they therapy is designed to kill as many of the cancer cells in a certain way.
This therapy then continues for a certain period, where biopsies are taken and the patient is left to deal with the nasty side effects of the therapy.
If the detection equipment is unable to detect any malignant cells within the biopsy samples, the doctors can then say that the cancer is “in remission”.
But does that mean that someone is “free of cancer”?
Nope — it just means that their cancer cell count is low. Low to the point where the detection equipment cannot put a definitive number to it. It is below the equipment’s detection limits.
When each biopsy sample contains millions or billions of cells, it could be very easy to miss out one defective, malignant cell. If someone could manufacture a piece of detection equipment for being able to narrow down the detection limits to just that one singular defective cell out of a trillion cells… that person would be a genius and a multibillionaire, and every medical unit in the world that could afford that equipment would be using that equipment.
Unfortunately, no technology in the world is able to do that yet.
Even in a workplace that has hundreds of employees, we’re sometimes left scratching our heads as to why a certain lazy slacker can stay on in their job for so long, whereas other hardworking colleagues can get fired so easily. If the detection of one unproductive worker out of hundreds is already so difficult, how much more difficult would it be to detect one out of a billion?
Therefore, the numbers (or the lack thereof)…
They aren’t there to give us a sense of security.
Neither should they be inciting fear in us.
(Right, the COVID test kits also use numbers to tell you whether you’ve been infected or not.)
By acting irrationally and out of fear, we’d be playing directly into the hands of the profitmongers, and that’s exactly what we don’t want to do, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, the mainstream media will help to push the fear factor up very subtly.
Keeping a clear head and understanding what those numbers actually do mean would be much more helpful!
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