Tomorrow, February 15, 2024 is the first West Virginia Critical Thinking Awareness Day. In recognition of this event, I am republishing this post from January of last year. This day was declared by the West Virginia Legislature. I will allow you you apply your own critical thinking to the irony of that statement. This was due largely to the efforts of the West Virginia Skeptics Society. I need to find out more about them.
Recently I have been reading about the significant increase in childhood diseases that previously had been well controlled with vaccines. There are a number of factors at play here. One is the pandemic which has reduced doctor’s visits and with it some routine vaccinations. But the most significant factor is the resistance among the vaccine deniers not just the COVID vaccine, but vaccines in general.
This is especially troubling to me. These are people, many of whom are well educated, who have chosen not to vaccinate their children or themselves. The majority of these decisions are based on misinformation which has resulted in faulty decision making. I’ve addressed this in a previous post entitled Fake News. However, I would like to address some additional issues related to what is commonly called “critical thinking”. The ability to apply critical thinking would most likely have resulted in a far smaller vaccine denial movement and fewer deaths and disabilities.
Just to start, I’m going to repeat the definition of critical thinking I used in that post. “Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”
That post was principally geared to critical thinking in adults. I wanted to discuss how to gather information, evaluate it and make a rational decision. I’ve come to realize, that by the time we are adults our method of thinking is very close to being set in stone. If we are to make a significant impact on the way our population evaluates data and makes decisions, it must start with the children.
I believe that the two pillars of early education should be reading and critical thinking. Admittedly, I am not an educator, but I believe if you can read you can teach yourself anything. But you also need the ability to decide what you should believe. The framework for being able to make these decisions is critical thinking.
In some ways critical thinking has been taught in the past, often as the Socratic method. Elements of it have been in specific courses such as philosophy, logic, and scientific investigation. These courses are usually designed for older, advanced students who most likely have already developed these skills or have a natural inclination to pursue such inquiry and evaluation.
For most students, if they haven’t learned how to gather information, evaluate competing ideas and draw coherent, fact based conclusions by the time they are in high school, it may be difficult for them to do so. Critical thinking must be a substantial part of education from the beginning. It cannot be a separate course. It must be integrated into the way every subject is taught. Students shouldn’t just be given rote information to be memorized. They should be taught how to think and evaluate and then they should be provided with all the information necessary to make their own informed decisions.
What does this mean? It means that all sides of a topic should be covered. There should be no forbidden subjects. There cannot be an effective analysis of competing information if only one side is presented. This needs to begin in the very first years of education. After all, as Americans we want education not indoctrination.
The ability to develop critical thinking and to make informed decisions requires the exposure to all varying ideas without any value judgment being attached by the teacher. The idea of an academic “safe space” where students are insulated from hurt feelings presupposes that they are unable to evaluate competing ideas and must be protected. This is the very essence of indoctrination and should be an anathema to education.
Children need to learn that the world is not a safe place. If they are not exposed to the competing ideas, how can they be expected to evaluate and recognize the harmful ones.? If they are only exposed to one side, they will come to believe that side is the only true side regardless of its value.
I will use myself as an example. There were no efforts to teach critical thinking when I was a student. We were taught that everything presented in class was the right thing, and we were not to question it. Well, this might be true in math and most science classes, it is not true anywhere else. It was not until well into my adult years that I recognized many of the things I had been taught were the result of societal prejudices and in some cases even ignorance. As a result, like many people, I tended to defend my long-held opinions even after I recognized their weakness.
I was very slow to adopt new ideas. Many of the opinions I now hold are far different from those with which I grew up. Critical thinking was not easy for me; challenging your core values never is. We don’t want our children and grandchildren to have to suffer through the same weakness of thought that we did.
How could evaluating competing information that is part of critical thinking have helped prevent the wide scale vaccine denial that we are currently experiencing? Many rumors are being spread about COVID and about the COVID vaccine, just as they have been about other vaccines in the past. There were many rumors that the disease did not exist and that the deaths were faked. These rumors are still on the Internet. They never had any verifiable source and anyone taking the effort to view the data would know that there was a significant death toll early in the pandemic.
The effectiveness of COVID vaccination can easily be checked on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website www.COVID.cdc.gov. A study in November 2022 shows unvaccinated Americans had a 16 times (not percent) higher rate of hospitalization compared to the fully vaccinated and a study from January 2022 shows the unvaccinated had a 12.7 times higher COVID related death rate.
There were many reports about side effects of the vaccine. Checking available medical sources, it was easy to discover that while there are some side effects, there are many misstatements or exaggerations about the COVID vaccines. The side effects are similar in frequency to other vaccines and medications in general. Vaccine side effects tend to diminish as the vaccine is improved in subsequent versions. A detailed review of COVID vaccine side effects can be found on www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines21.
Social media were quick to jump on every alternative to vaccination. It took very little research to realize that none of these alternatives (think Clorox) had documented medical justification and had never been effectively studied. The supposed studies that were cited were either significantly flawed or could never be duplicated or even be found. Because they had no experiencing in critical thinking, many people accepted the unsupported statements that most satisfied their desires, either politically, socially or medically and adopted them as truth. Unfortunately, this failure in critical thinking resulted in hundreds of unnecessary deaths and severe illnesses.
I have not updated this post because I am currently working on a series of articles that further develop this idea.
Stand Strong: Protect Yourself From Falls
By John Turley
On May 11, 2024
In Commentary, Medicine
Not too long ago I decided to spend my lunch break from the clinic by taking a walk around downtown. It was a beautiful day. It was warm, the sun was shining, and the sky was bright blue. I just started my walk when I thought I heard tires squealing behind me. I looked over my shoulder and as soon as I did, I felt my foot catch on a piece of broken concrete, and I went down hard. Fortunately, I fell right in front of my office and even more fortunately I work for the ambulance authority. Within minutes I was surrounded by paramedics and a nurse practitioner who made sure I was well taken care of. My CELLULAR watch also helped save the day. I’ll talk more about my experience later in this post but now I’d like to talk about falling in general.
Those of us of a certain age have gotten used to having every visit to any type of medical appointment include the question: “Have you fallen recently?” Even though I know the reason for this, it still annoys me. They always assume older folks are going to fall. (I think I’ve told you before, I preferred to use the term older folks or even old geezers for that matter but, I refused to be labeled as elderly.)
It’s been estimated that over 25% of older adults fall each year but probably less than half of those will report the incident to their health care provider. Once you’ve fallen your risk doubles that you will fall again. As we advance in age, falls become the leading cause of both fatal and non-fatal injuries.
Chronic medical conditions such as diabetes and heart disease can increase our risk of falling by affecting our blood pressure and causing dizziness. Some of the medications we take can have the same side effects. Also, older folks are less likely to eat or drink adequately leaving them more susceptible to dehydration and fainting. If these things are happening to you, it’s important to let your doctor know so together you come up with a plan to protect yourself.
Environmental factors also play a critical role in falls. Common hazards include loose rugs, wet floors, uneven surfaces, curbs, icy sidewalks, and dropped objects. As I found out, what would have been a simple stumble with a quick recovery when I was younger became a hard fall.
So why is that? As we age arthritis can cause stiffness in our joints which slows our reaction time. Loss of muscle mass and with it decreased core strength make it harder for us to maintain and regain our balance. Changing eyesight makes it difficult to tell where objects are in relationship to one another. As we get older, we tend to shuffle or drag our feet when we walk making us more susceptible to the uneven surfaces. I know that’s one of my major problems.
There are many resources people can use to reduce their risk of falling. I’m sure you all know about them: strength exercises, flexibility and balance classes, and regular stretching can be very helpful. There are many websites that tell you how to fall-proof your home and workspace. And of course, everyone should get a regular checkup to make sure that they don’t have undiagnosed health problems.
Now, I want to tell you about the one thing that I thought was very important for me in my fall. I’ve always been a gadget guy. A few years ago, I decided to get an Apple Watch. I like the idea of being able to get a weather report, check my e-mail, check my texts, check my calendar, and answer the phone all from my wrist. And, because I am a gadget guy, I got the one with cellular capability. I never really expected to make use of it, I just thought it seemed neat.
As competitive as the smart watch market is, I’m sure they all have similar capabilities. I’m not an expert on any of the others, but I do know about the Apple Watch, and I’d like to tell you about it. The watch comes with a fall alert and SOS system. If you fall like I did, you immediately get a notice on your phone that says it looks like you’ve had a hard fall, to which you can either respond “yes send help”, or “no I’m fine”. If you respond yes, it sends your GPS coordinates to 911. If you respond no, it asks if you’re sure, to which you again respond that you are sure and then that’s the end of it. If you do not respond at all or the watch detects you aren’t moving, it waits a few seconds and then sends your GPS coordinates to 911. I know a lot of people are concerned about technology tracking them. Well, I’m glad it does.
And now back to being a gadget guy. This is where the cellular option paid off for me. The SOS fall protection system only works when your phone and watch are in range of one another. You can only make calls from your watch when they were in range as well. Unless, you have a cellular capable watch which works independently.
I know most people think they won’t go anywhere with their watch without their phone. Well, that’s what I thought. But that day, I inadvertently left my phone on my desk. And when I fell, I couldn’t get up. I told my watch not to send my information to 911 because I was right in front of the ambulance authority. I called into the office and very quickly had all the help I could ever want. But if I had not had a cellular capable watch I would either have had to crawl into the office or lay there on the sidewalk until somebody stopped to help me. Which someone did almost immediately. So, there are Good Samaritans in Charleston.
So, my bottom-line recommendation to you is to get a smart watch, whatever type you prefer, and make sure it has cellular capability. Don’t do anything including housework, yard work, or even taking a walk at lunch that may have any risk of a fall without having your smart watch with you. As I found out, the risk of falling is greater than you think. I wish I were getting compensation for pitching this technology.