The FBI has finally released crime statistics for 2023!
Let's have a short thread.
First thing up is recent violent crime trends:
Now let's focus in on homicides.
The homicide statistics split by race show the same distribution they have for years.
As with every crime, it's still men doing the killing, but it's also largely men doing the dying.
What about Hispanics? Their data is still a mess, but here it is if you're interested.
The age-crime curve last year looked pretty typical. How about this year?
Same as always. Victims and offenders still have highly similar, relatively young ages.
Everything else, from locations to motives to weapons is pretty similar to previous years. What's different is that the OP might show incorrect numbers.
For the past two years, the FBI has silently updated their numbers after about two weeks.
You can use the web archive to see that the data from the OP is the data shown at release last year, and the data from 2023 is the 2022 data with the FBI's suggested reductions (i.e., -11.6% homicides, -2.8% aggravated assaults, -0.3% robberies, etc.).
But you can see on their site now that they've adjusted the numbers up, so the reduction they suggested has brought us down to a figure that's less impressive than my chart shows. The difference isn't huge so I showed the OP without updating to their new data.
For reference, 2022 as reported then had a homicide rate of 6.3/100k, and they silently updated that to 7.48/100k. The 2023 data they provided today actually has a murder rate of 6.61/100k, higher than last year's initially-reported number, but lower than the updated number. To make matters worse, if you use their Expanded Homicides Report, you get a rate of 5.94 for 2022 and 5.24 for 2023.
Methodology matters and we get to see inconsistency in this year's data, not even data that's been updated or anything. It's a mess, so take everything with a grain of salt and, in the interest of caution, only interpret trends. Trends are mostly common between all data sources even if the absolute magnitudes are off, constantly updated, etc.
Why have testosterone levels been rising over time?
The testosterone levels of American men are up compared to what they used to be, but no one has a good explanation.
Let's look through some possibilities🧵
Is it perhaps because of a racial composition change?
No.
Different races tend to have similar testosterone levels and trends within groups are similar.
Is it perhaps because of age composition change?
No.
The decline by age is much more graceful than people tend to suspect, and within each age group, levels are up without survey weighting, and in nearly all with it, they're still up.
In my latest article, I documented that the only RCT for functional medicine methods appears fraudulent🧵
Before getting into it, what's functional medicine?
It's a pseudoscience used to bilk patients by getting them on an unending cycle of tests, supplements, and more tests.
Functional medicine's practitioners claim that they can reveal and treat so-called "root causes" of people's health problems
These are proposed to be things like gut health, toxin burdens, and various chemical and hormonal imbalances
They find these things with unproven tests
If you run enough tests, you will be able to find something that looks 'off' about a patient, and if you're a functional medicine doctor, that's your 'A-ha!' moment, even if—as is usually the case—the result is just a false-positive and treating it is unlikely to do anything.
If you want to add beds to a hospital, build facilities, purchase diagnostic scanners, but you live somewhere with CON laws, then you have to prove you're not creating competition for other medical facilities in the area, which is often the whole state.
No. Competition. Allowed.
The idea behind these laws is that people will spend excessively on healthcare, so to combat that, we'll have people report if there's more spending needed before approving it.
Nutrition science is the area of science that's suffered the most in the replication crisis. It is a graveyard of theories and pseudoscientific bullshit.
Now:
The HHS is going to make doctors to sit through 40 hours of classes where they'll have to take that bullshit seriously.
This reads like a list of the things that fared the worst in all of nutrition science and stuff with NO EVIDENCE.
When I read through this, my mouth was agape.
Whoever wrote this trash needs fired for incompetence. Mentally retarded people should not hold keep government posts.
'What did you learn in your mandatory nutrition misinformation class?'
'Well, if a patient comes in with a migraine, I'm supposed to sell them a WHOOP bracelet or an Oura ring so I can help them figure out their health age.'
Strength training is a highly effective way to improve your flexibility, and I've made a graphic to put this into understandable terms:
This is from a meta-analysis of strength training trials.
What makes that so useful is that there's major publication bias for strength outcomes (pictured).
But, since authors weren't looking at it, there's no publication bias for flexibility outcomes.
Studies made their way into this meta-analysis because they had a flexibility outcome, but they made their way into the literature because they showed positive strength results.
This could indirectly biased the flexibility results because of selection on a correlated outcome.