X-Message-Number: 19215
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2002 10:47:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Case Information

John de Rivaz writes: "Most people can understand the very broad concepts
of rockets, wheras medicine is a great deal more complicated. The
sociology of the desired "quick response" is also complicated and usually
most reports would not give enough of the details for the casual reader to
have a true understand of each situation."

But John, we're arguing about something that was tried and proven years
ago. You're right; I shouldn't have bothered with analogies re the space
program. Cryonics itself has seen organizations publish extremely detailed
and open reports. When I joined Alcor in the "Darwin" period, I was
pleased to find not only case histories but detailed reports of financial
and other organizational data, which encouraged me to trust the integrity
of Alcor. Generally this coincided with the highest growth rate in Alcor's
history. CryoCare also pursued a policy of complete openness, publishing
not only case histories but frank details of, for instance, some problems
we had with our emergency response notification system. We didn't
experience rapid growth, mainly because growth was not our priority at
that time; but we didn't lose any members, either. On the contrary: A
frank description of our problems encouraged our members to donate money,
which fixed the problems. Our members remained so intensely loyal, we
experienced great difficulty persuading them to *leave* CryoCare even
after we had lost our service provider. Some people are *still* CryoCare
members, even though CryoCare has been unable to provide service for a
couple of years!

So far as I can tell, from an exhaustive study of the history of
all cryonics organizations, openness has never created any problems.
Conversely, the only scandals in cryonics history were facilitated and
exacerbated by cover-ups and a secretive attitude.

This should be so obvious, I'm amazed that it needs to be debated. Where
we have an experimental procedure that produces uncertain results, of
course we need as much information as possible--to encourage trust and
confidence, and to enable improvements in procedures.

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