Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Medical controversies

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was delete (12d/5k/1redirect). Additionally, the arguments in favour of deletion were quite strong. A more valid List of medical controversies merits inclusion in Wikipedia, though. Mindmatrix 21:09, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Medical controversies

Turn into a real list of current, serious controversies or delete - as it stands, it's useless. QEDquid 15:20, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

• Delete but allow a new page to be created with same name. Alternately, Rewrite article to be a list of actual medical controversies (for example, include mention of the Angel of death) Zordrac (talk) Wishy Washy Darwikinian Eventualist 17:18, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Okay, I meant the guy that killed a lot of terminally ill people and was charged with murder. That guy. Zordrac (talk) Wishy Washy Darwikinian Eventualist 17:19, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
    • Presumably you were referring to Jack Kevorkian, a.k.a. Doctor Death. •DanMS 01:38, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
• Keep The article is a stub, but with potential. Expand it! --JWSchmidt 17:37, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
• keep: A hub for sorting through the breadth of such articles is needed. Ombudsman 19:00, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete or rewrite into article format. A list cannot do the subject justice. Durova 20:37, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
• Comment. Needs to be rewritten to be useful and has the potential to be a magnet for original research. Capitalistroadster 21:10, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete - The controversies listed aren't even real, just pseudoscience cruft. This is just a vehicle for POV-pushing. --Cyde Weys _talk^contribs 21:35, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. While the article as it stands is not worth much, this topic has the potential to become an interesting and informative list as the focal point, or a kind of directory for many other topics, such as MMR vaccine, homeopathy, and even acupuncture. This article should probably be a List of... type article, simply pointing to all of the associated articles, where the associated topics are more thoroughly discussed. No more than a brief description of each topic would be required on this page. •DanMS 23:18, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete: impossible to maintan relevant and unbiased content over time. If such articles are intented as honey pot for warriors I am all for it, otherwise get rid of it. Pavel Vozenilek 00:54, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete: "controversies" is not useful for categorization. Billbrock 05:04, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. This is about external attacks on the current medical paradigm, not the numerous controversies within medical science. It is already becoming a list of pseudocontroversies. JFW | T@lk 12:34, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. A real Pandora's box, so great to take the lid off. Scary for the physicians. john 16:05, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete: it will be used as a vehicle for promoting quackery and pseudoscience, not for talking about real controversies such as euthanasia or medical cannabis.--CDN99 17:31, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
• Comment "The belief that HIV doesn't exist, let alone cause AIDS" may certainly be worthy of study from the POV of the social sciences (why do people have a certain set of strange beliefs?), but it's emphatically not a MEDICAL controversy. Emphatically repeat my call for deletion of psuedoscience Billbrock 06:40, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

  Comment on the comment Of course there are real medical controversies. But is this a useful list? Scientific controversies are distinct from cultural controversies, which in turn may be distinct from political (funding) controversies.... Billbrock 19:36, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

  Comment on the comment on the comment: well, let's start with the famous controversy whether hemolytic uremic syndrome and thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura are one disease, a continuum, two different diseases with identical treatment or two diseases with radically different treatment. That is a medical controversy, not the attacks of higher superstition. JFW | T@lk 20:06, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

• Delete: nothing noteworthy controversial in the article right now. --WS 17:49, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
• Redirect to Alternative medicine. (Or merge and redirect if distinct content is identified.)--Arcadian 18:23, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
• Comment I think that it has a lot of potential as a list. I think that it's a huge topic with many different aspects to explore. Right now, the vaccine controversy and controversies in autism links offload the discussion from the primary pages and allow them to remain readable. I think that there could easily be homeopathic medicine controversy, chiropractic controversy, etc. This list could include links to the individual articles. Otherwise, I think that an ideal article which adequately addresses the many controversies in medicine would be many, many pages long. Basically, if we do it right it will have to be a list to accomodate the many necessary discussions. We might as well plan from the beginning! InvictaHOG 21:04, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Comment²: I don't think homeopathy and chiropractic need their own controversy pages, because they are dangerous by nature (that needs to be in the main article). The article was started by Whaleto whose separate website promotes very dangerous pseudoscience/quackery, so this article will reflect that website. After reading JFW's comment above, I now know what a medical controversy is, as opposed to a sociomedical controversy; this article will definitely not talk about real controversies. --CDN99 12:58, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete: as per JFW, these are not the controversies within medicine, but the sociopolitical/media speculation/ignorance/rejection of EBM and the scientific process. If a drug on more detailed analysis proves to have a hitherto unrecognised side effect, its not a 'controversy' but scientific development. If people would value a page on 'Cultural Controversies re Health' (aka misbeliefs/scaremongering/quackery) then good - probably quite an interesting sociological topic.
  • P.S. In the article 'Several high-profile cases have called into question the efficiency of the current evidence-based approach to deciding the value of medical practices' - is untrue, the issue is not the 'current evidence-based approach' (vs what, andecdotes or guess-work ?) but rather whether it is accurately performed without bias (unintension or intensional): re issue of recent events & COX-II, the suggestion was that some evidence may not have been disclosed, resulting in a failure to apply an 'evidence-based approach'.
  • P.P.S. further investigation is hinting that the COX-II in question may not have any greater risk that other COX-II or even the older group of NSAIDs (they might all have some small risks, but what else is one to give people in chronic immobilising pain?). The issue is under ongoing investigation - which is a fact, not a 'medical controversy'. David Ruben 01:25, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Needs time to develop. -- JJay 02:12, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. There is no content developed enough to keep. It's like a list of 5 medical topics about which someone has criticized a doctor or doctors or a drug company or a medical system or... You could retitle it "random grumbling from a hospital waiting room." The problem is that not a single topic is developed into anything interesting and they have virtually nothing else in common. If the author actually put some work into developing any one of the topics as a separate article it would probably be worth keeping, but right now it is like a handfull of random gripes by someone who doesn't know very much about them, hasn't thought them through, and hasn't taken the trouble to understand both sides of any one of them. alteripse 08:00, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
• Delete After consideration, I don't think that there's anything here that could not be resurrected were someone to want to create a list of medical controversies. As it is, there's not much of note - InvictaHOG 13:54, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.