3 ms·

No, if one ends their life prematurely by suicide, then suicide is the cause of death.

Jerrrry 3y ago
[flagged]
Terr_ 3y ago
There are situations where that statistic/categorization is meaningful, but not in this context of trying to rank different causative diseases and public health risks. For example, imagine that 99% of all the euthanized are people who chose it after a diagnosis of the "Insane Agony Virus." Obviously we would want all those mortal data-points to get counted as reasons to fight IAV, even if only a tiny number of people died because the virus finally turned their brain to mush after weeks of thrashing about on a table in mind-breaking pain.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Because secondary effects are impossible to untangle or verify. Maybe IAV is just a made up term that people use, or far more people believe that they have IAV than is actually the case, or that they are wrongly convinced that IAV is incurable or untreatable, or the medical system has been perversely incentivized to encourage medically assisted suicide in the case of IAV diagnosis, or it's actually the case that it's not IAV causing the agony but actually a prescription drug side effect that interacts with the brain in such a way as to invoke IAV in certain cases, etc etc. None of that is science, of course. Separately, there should be a list of rationalizations for victims that undergo medically assisted suicide. And it should be analyzed to find ways to reduce the number of suicides.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    I read that as "What-If Something Completely Different Instead", rather than engaging with the point being highlighted by the hypothetical. The correct breakdown depends on goals. If someone is stabbed with a knife, the important cause(s) of death won't be "because a lot of cells couldn't synthesize ATP anymore", and probably not " saying the wrong thing to Stabby McStabberson."
lukev 3y ago
But that's not helpful for driving any kind of informed opinion or public health policy. It'd be like classifying nearly all deaths as caused by "cardiac arrest" even though that's the natural end state of most other causes of death. I might accept your argument in the small fraction of cases where natural death is not "reasonably foreseeable" (since that requirement was dropped in 2019).
- junofan 3y ago
  The medical certificate usually has an immediate cause and a spot to write underlying causes. It goes to the local government and is used for things like life insurance, lawsuits, etc. If there’s a concern at the policy level, usually you’d have a separate monitoring system. Driving policy with population stats is not really the gold standard, in spite of what was communicated to the public during the pandemic. Usually you’d want to run some kind of controlled experiment or very rigorous observational study. That’s where the bulk of the success stories in medicine have come from historically.

[flagged]

There are situations where that statistic/categorization is meaningful, but not in this context of trying to rank different causative diseases and public health risks. For example, imagine that 99% of all the euthanized are people who chose it after a diagnosis of the "Insane Agony Virus." Obviously we would want all those mortal data-points to get counted as reasons to fight IAV, even if only a tiny number of people died because the virus finally turned their brain to mush after weeks of thrashing about on a table in mind-breaking pain.

chrisco255 3y ago
Because secondary effects are impossible to untangle or verify. Maybe IAV is just a made up term that people use, or far more people believe that they have IAV than is actually the case, or that they are wrongly convinced that IAV is incurable or untreatable, or the medical system has been perversely incentivized to encourage medically assisted suicide in the case of IAV diagnosis, or it's actually the case that it's not IAV causing the agony but actually a prescription drug side effect that interacts with the brain in such a way as to invoke IAV in certain cases, etc etc. None of that is science, of course. Separately, there should be a list of rationalizations for victims that undergo medically assisted suicide. And it should be analyzed to find ways to reduce the number of suicides.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  I read that as "What-If Something Completely Different Instead", rather than engaging with the point being highlighted by the hypothetical. The correct breakdown depends on goals. If someone is stabbed with a knife, the important cause(s) of death won't be "because a lot of cells couldn't synthesize ATP anymore", and probably not " saying the wrong thing to Stabby McStabberson."

lukev 3y ago

But that's not helpful for driving any kind of informed opinion or public health policy. It'd be like classifying nearly all deaths as caused by "cardiac arrest" even though that's the natural end state of most other causes of death. I might accept your argument in the small fraction of cases where natural death is not "reasonably foreseeable" (since that requirement was dropped in 2019).

junofan 3y ago
The medical certificate usually has an immediate cause and a spot to write underlying causes. It goes to the local government and is used for things like life insurance, lawsuits, etc. If there’s a concern at the policy level, usually you’d have a separate monitoring system. Driving policy with population stats is not really the gold standard, in spite of what was communicated to the public during the pandemic. Usually you’d want to run some kind of controlled experiment or very rigorous observational study. That’s where the bulk of the success stories in medicine have come from historically.