Hi Jay - I'd like to add my own perspective to the controversy - it will be coming from an odd direction, but that's not unusual for me, is it?-g-
You probably know I am a lawyer, but probably don't know that I like medical malpractice cases. They appeal to my "digging" drive, can get very complex. I have been digging for about a year on a case where a young boy died of a very rare disease, hemophagocytic syndrome caused by Epstein-Barr virus. Extremely rare in the US, but for unknown reasons, probably due to genetics, it's a little more common in Japan and Taiwan. As I've immersed myself in the medical research, I've become ever more impressed by the quality of the research being done in Japan and Taiwan. On a par, at least, with work being done in the US, better, maybe, and far superior than what's being done anywhere else in the world, including Europe and Russia.
The issue I am trying to resolve is whether the physicians breached the standard of care by not using etoposide, which has been known to be effective in the US since 1980. The people who specialize in this disease, the ones who cure the most patients, use etoposide. The treating physicians in this case used intravenous immunoglobulin g, IVIgG, which, the best scientists, like Elaine Jaffee at NIH, have said for years is only effective if the patient has a deficiency of IgG, otherwise it's useless. Just superstition. But as an article of faith it's got its adherents, in France, in England, and even here in the US, at podunk medical schools out in the hinterlands. The Center for Disease Control said in 2000 that the standard of care is etoposide, but that was a year after my client's child died. So I've been hunting down and copying every research paper on the disease, to try to establish whether the other side has a shot at convincing a jury that IVIgG was within the standard of care at the time.
When I read the research coming out of Japan and Taiwan, it just blows me away. They actually test their patients to try to understand their immune system. Wow! That seems to be an alien concept even here. The interaction between the immune system and cancer and infection and chronic disease is the next big thing in medicine in the US, and the Japanese and Taiwanese have been doing really sophisticated work since the early 1980's. Much of the better clinical work that is being done in the US will have a Chinese name listed among the researchers. Some of the pure science research done in the US has nothing but Chinese names.
The Japanese work is done only in Japan and has only Japanese names, but it's the best, I think. So there's still a good reason to learn Japanese - maybe they aren't a major player in geopolitics, but they're very smart, and very sophisticated I really admire the Japanese culture. Akira Kurosawa is my favorite director of all time. Perhaps the better historical analogy isn't the interaction between the Carthaginians and the Romans, but between the Greeks and the Romans. |
