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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   3090 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

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Another question for the medics among you. Shortly after I started in my previous job ~two years ago, my employer booked me in to undergo a full physical exam in a clinic. I underwent the exam and they gave me a clean bill of health. It's recently come to my attention that I may have a mild medical condition (nothing to be concerned about, before you ask), so I wanted to ask the clinic for the detailed results of my medical exam, to find out if the condition was present two years ago. They gave me a form to fill out, asking for my personal details and what information I want access to.

The form included this clause:

In certain cases, some data will be withheld by [clinic]; if it is the medical professional’s opinion that it is not safe to the data subject (yourself) to do so, or if [clinic] are not legally allowed to do so. Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners (Amended) 2019, states that “Patients have a right to get copies of their medical records except where this is likely to cause serious harm to their physical or mental health.”

Pardon my French, but what the fuck? How grandiose and paternalistic can you get? Under what circumstances could it possibly be acceptable that a medic can arrogate themselves the responsibility to decline to inform an adult of sound mind that they have a serious medical condition? What is this, fucking Love Story?* "You have cancer, but I thought that finding out that you have cancer might make you sad, so I decided not to tell you that you have cancer."

*A movie in which a doctor tells a man that his wife is terminally ill without telling the wife herself.

Under what circumstances could it possibly be acceptable that a medic can arrogate themselves the responsibility to decline to inform an adult of sound mind that they have a serious medical condition?

DNA testing reveals that the person is a child of incest.

If I was a child of incest, I'd want to know about it.

It's actually probably important to know, in that repeated incest is what drives genetic problems, so if I were a child of incest and more likely to carry recessive mutations I'd have been certain to marry one of the African or Chinese foreign exchange students to get as far away as possible.

This isn't how genetics works. Even if you are highly inbred, you can marry any member of your race who is not your relative and have as healthy babies as if you were not inbred. (Except if you're a woman and inbred phenotype affects pregnancy, but then outbreeding won't fix it either).

Maybe you know, maybe not, but incest doesn't increase number of recessive mutations at all, it increases chance of them to get in homozygote and make visible effect.

You can make argument that outbreeding is beneficial, but it won't actually depend on fixing recent inbreeding. With Africans, you'll be bringing some low IQ alleles and alleles for tropical environment that make no sense in temperate climate.

Since today it's possible to look at actual genes and being foreign student doesn't rule out they don't have recent ancestor with you, there is no reason for such far outbreeding.

This was mostly a joke about how easy it is for a white man to marry a Chinese or Nigerian foreign exchange student at any selective American college. Most likely outcome if I hadn't met my wife first, tbqh.

...being foreign student doesn't rule out they don't have recent ancestor with you.

My most recent possible common ancestor with a Chinese girl would be before the Magyars left the steppe, and my most recent possible common ancestor with a Nigerian girl might be the Great Rift Valley.

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