A few more comments.##
I'm not sure that I agree that Toufu has a 'vow' to
preserve life. Perhaps under western medicine. There
are several stories and fables to support such a view
in Asian medicine. But there is also, in Japan, the
Samurai code which superceeds everything else. This
MAY be assumed to be in operation here. (Or not. There
is room for either view)
-
The effort to give Dr. Toufu a personality is
commendable; but I don't think that
a healer could make the decisions that Toufu does
here. A healer's first
obligation and most serious vow is to preserve life.
For Toufu to propound and
*permit* a suicide plan is directly in contravention
of this vow. I cannot see it
happening. Also, he appears to have a time machine;
the last I heard, an AIDS
test takes three days to work.
A nice
scene could have been Toufu
completing the blood examination and debating
internally whether or not to tell
an already depressed and suicidal Ryouga the bad
news.
##My big complaint is medical/statistical. A NEGITIVE
HIV test is informative. A POSITIVE HIV test provides
only a 50/50 chance of actually showing the person has
HIV.
Bad news from Dr. Tofu? Well, maybe not.
The Centers for Disease Control(CDC) state that two
tests, enzyme immunoassays (EIA)
and Western Blot (WB) combined have >99% accuracy in
ID-ing HIV-1. BUT only if they're done REPEATEDLY. ONE
test won't do it.
FURTHER
out of a population of 10,000 tested, 9,900 would
receive correct results BUT 100 would get erroneous
results, EITHER false positives(+) or false
negatives(-).
As far as I know there is NO data on HOW MANY are (+)
or (-).
Using 99% as an example the false positives(+) would
have to be < 4/10's of the erroneous results since CDC
estimates 0.4% of Americans are HIV positive.
We don't know the figures for Japan. Officially there
is NO HIV in Japan, or China, or India or Africa.
Isn't it nice to see how disease free the rest of the
world is? ^_^ (My information of the rest of the world
is out of date. This information may now be available.
It might even be accurate.0
If we assume that false positives account for 4/10's
of errors then the 0.4% of people who are HIV positive
would ALL be false positives. This is not the case.
Assume that false positives = 0.2, and false
negatives = 0.8
Therefore of 100 people with wrong results 20% = false
positives
80% = false negatives
BUT
if 0.4% of Americans are HIV positive in a population
of 10,000
0.4% x 10,000 = 40 people with HIV
BUT this number includes False positives (20%) which
leaves ONLY 20 people/10,000 with HIV.
THEREFORE: IF the test(s) are 99% accurate (and
applied correctly MANY times) a positive test means
ONLY a fifty/fifty chance the person is actually
infected.
Under conditions of this fanfic there is almost NO
chance that Ryouga is actually infected.
What's Tofu doing giving this test any way? And where
is he getting the equipment? and the expertise? IMO
another factual blooper.
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