Batman Gotham Knights #73 — A Final Thought
One final post about Batman: Gotham Knights #73, then I’ll never talk about it again. Promise. This last one deals with statistics, logic, and the media.
In one scene in Gotham Knights #73, we see Bruce Wayne watching TV (well, TVs) in his mansion. There are six different news stations going on at length about WayneTech’s “faulty” pacemakers.
This uproar over the pacemakers is ridiculous:
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1. As covered in earlier posts, it is medically unlikely that a malfunctioning pacemaker would cause a heart attack. Plus, those autopsies were sloppy and you’d be hard pressed to prove anything by them.
2. Even assuming the pacemakers were responsible, there were 3 failures out of how many? Batman mentions “hundreds”, but it would have to be thousands if WayneTech expected to make any profit, especially since one reporter mentions that “85% of all pacemakers in the tri-state are from WayneTech”. Assuming 1,000 patients, that’s a 0.3% failure rate. True, that’s unacceptably high for a medical device, but nowhere near the catastrophe it is suggested to be. 3. Correlation does not equal causation. Just because two events appear to be related does not mean that one causes the other. A quick example: I have a handful of patients with cataracts. All of them happen to be taking the drug metformin. Does this mean that metformin causes cataracts? Absolutely not. Metformin is used to treat diabetes, and diabetes is the primary risk factor for cataracts. The metformin doesn’t cause the cataracts, the diabetes does. This comic presents a similar situation. Three patients died of a heart attack and they all had a WayneTech pacemaker. Is this proof that the pacemaker caused their heart problems? No. These patients already have some kind of heart condition or they wouldn’t have needed the pacemaker in the first place. Heart attacks are much more common in individuals with pre-existing heart disease. There is a correlation, but no evidence of any cause-and-affect relationship. |
I don’t consider this an error on the part of the writer; instead it is an all too accurate picture of how medical news tends to reported. Let’s be honest: medical news is rarely exciting. Reporters and news outlets want an eye-catching story, so they tend to pick and choose excerpts with little understanding of the underlying science. Most of the actual results get lost in the shuffle and inaccurate information rapidly spreads. Just like in Gotham Knights.
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