Pro-life atheists

[Autumnlicious]

Citing personal experience?

I can't these are things I have read over the past years, as much as I would love to back them up I never thought this topic would arise in where I would have needed to save such links or posts.

The best I can do is 'google' to pull them up or even find them.

So I guess I can't really back them up. Believe what I said is -plausible- or don't.

Again I apologize in most cases I do back my sources up, but this is a recant from awhile ago.

Interesting, but not a strong assertion.

So I will indulge a side study to illustrate the common sense holding of overdiagnosis is often wrong due to ill consideration of all factors.

Let's take a common assertion espoused by others with similar modes of thought: Autism.

Some people assert autism is over diagnosed due to the increase in diagnoses over the years. However, let's look at it skeptically by examining the recent changes in our environment:

1. Increase in data collection abilities and improved analytics - the emergence of Big Data. Compared to a decade ago, we store hundreds to hundreds of thousand times more data.

2. Loosening of criteria to allow for borderline diagnosis of autistic sufferers and differentiate between severe and less severe cases.

3. Increased health care access

4. Increased awareness (ties into #3) as parents are vigilant to catch problems earlier, increasing the absolute number of false positive and false negatives as the medical system struggles to catch up.

5. Increased population.

Assume a fixed false positive rate M - for any population N, the absolute number of false positives will increase with an increase in population.

By the above criteria, any vegetable without even a shred of sense will claim Autism is over diagnosed, even if we lower the false positive rate, population increases, access to health care and frequency of health visits will continue to offset all but massive reductions in false positives.

Since nothing is perfect and significant scientific break throughs are rare, slow to deploy and unpredictable, it is clear that the bounds on reducing absolute numbers of autism overdiagnosis are difficult to overcome.

Now consider PTSD and tell me it is over reported and diagnosed and show that analogous changes listed above do not sufficiently control for that to make your claim valid.