Associated Press
Originally published June 28, 2013
A disgraced Dutch social psychologist who admitted faking or manipulating data in dozens of publications has agreed to do 120 hours of community service work and forfeit welfare benefits equivalent to 18 months' salary in exchange for not being prosecuted for fraud.
The entire story is here.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Bullying and suicide among youth is a public health problem
Press Release
Contact: Eileen Leahy
e.leahy@elsevier.com
732-238-3628
Elsevier Health Sciences
Recent studies linking bullying and depression, coupled with extensive media coverage of bullying-related suicide among young people, led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assemble an expert panel to focus on these issues. This panel synthesized the latest research about the complex relationship between youth involvement in bullying and suicide-related behaviors. Three themes emerged:
1) Bullying among youth is a significant public health problem, with widespread and often harmful results;
2) There is a strong association between bullying and suicide-related behaviors; and
3) Public health strategies can be applied to prevent bullying and suicide.
A special supplement of the Journal of Adolescent Health presents the panel's findings, introduced by an insightful editorial by Marci Feldman Hertz, MS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, and Ingrid Donato and James Wright, MS, LCPC, Center for Mental Health Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Rockville, Maryland.
Between 20 and 56 percent of young people are involved in bullying annually, as either a victim or perpetrator, or both. While bullying situations vary by type, age, and duration, middle school-aged children are more likely to be involved in bullying than those in high school. Verbal bullying occurs more frequently than physical or cyber-bullying and is more likely to happen over a longer time period. Further, lesbian and gay youth are more likely to be victimized than heterosexuals.
Poor mental and physical health among the victims and perpetrators of bullying, and those who experience both victimization and perpetration, investigators say, contribute to the problem. Further, involvement in bullying can have long-lasting, harmful effects, such as depression, anxiety, abdominal pain, and tension, months or even years later, as reported by two studies in this special supplement.
Researchers demonstrate a strong link between involvement in bullying and suicide. Dorothy Espelage and Melissa K. Holt, authors of "Suicidal Ideation and School Bullying Experiences After Controlling for Depression and Delinquency," show that the idea of suicide and attempts at suicide among middle school students were three-to-five times greater than among uninvolved students.
By applying public health strategies, researchers assert that bullying can be prevented, improving health and mental outcomes for many youth. Articles such as "Suicidal Thinking and Behavior Among Youth Involved in Verbal and Social Bullying: Risk and Protective Factors," by Iris Wagman Borowsky, Lindsay A. Taliaferro, and Barbara J. McMorris, reinforce the call for an integrated approach of multiple strategies to prevent suicide by focusing on shared risk and protective factors, including individual coping skills, family and school social support, and supportive school environments.
Notes the supplement's guest editor, Marci Feldman Hertz, "Given the prevalence and impact of bullying, it is important to move forward while public health strategies are still being developed. We can begin by implementing and evaluating strategies that have demonstrated effectiveness at increasing protective factors and decreasing risk factors associated with both bullying and suicide." Education and health stakeholders, she adds, should consider broadening their focus beyond just providing services to those already involved in bullying or suicide-related behaviors. They should also implement strategies to prevent bullying and suicide behavior from occurring in the first place.
Contact: Eileen Leahy
e.leahy@elsevier.com
732-238-3628
Elsevier Health Sciences
Recent studies linking bullying and depression, coupled with extensive media coverage of bullying-related suicide among young people, led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assemble an expert panel to focus on these issues. This panel synthesized the latest research about the complex relationship between youth involvement in bullying and suicide-related behaviors. Three themes emerged:
1) Bullying among youth is a significant public health problem, with widespread and often harmful results;
2) There is a strong association between bullying and suicide-related behaviors; and
3) Public health strategies can be applied to prevent bullying and suicide.
A special supplement of the Journal of Adolescent Health presents the panel's findings, introduced by an insightful editorial by Marci Feldman Hertz, MS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, and Ingrid Donato and James Wright, MS, LCPC, Center for Mental Health Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Rockville, Maryland.
Between 20 and 56 percent of young people are involved in bullying annually, as either a victim or perpetrator, or both. While bullying situations vary by type, age, and duration, middle school-aged children are more likely to be involved in bullying than those in high school. Verbal bullying occurs more frequently than physical or cyber-bullying and is more likely to happen over a longer time period. Further, lesbian and gay youth are more likely to be victimized than heterosexuals.
Poor mental and physical health among the victims and perpetrators of bullying, and those who experience both victimization and perpetration, investigators say, contribute to the problem. Further, involvement in bullying can have long-lasting, harmful effects, such as depression, anxiety, abdominal pain, and tension, months or even years later, as reported by two studies in this special supplement.
Researchers demonstrate a strong link between involvement in bullying and suicide. Dorothy Espelage and Melissa K. Holt, authors of "Suicidal Ideation and School Bullying Experiences After Controlling for Depression and Delinquency," show that the idea of suicide and attempts at suicide among middle school students were three-to-five times greater than among uninvolved students.
By applying public health strategies, researchers assert that bullying can be prevented, improving health and mental outcomes for many youth. Articles such as "Suicidal Thinking and Behavior Among Youth Involved in Verbal and Social Bullying: Risk and Protective Factors," by Iris Wagman Borowsky, Lindsay A. Taliaferro, and Barbara J. McMorris, reinforce the call for an integrated approach of multiple strategies to prevent suicide by focusing on shared risk and protective factors, including individual coping skills, family and school social support, and supportive school environments.
Notes the supplement's guest editor, Marci Feldman Hertz, "Given the prevalence and impact of bullying, it is important to move forward while public health strategies are still being developed. We can begin by implementing and evaluating strategies that have demonstrated effectiveness at increasing protective factors and decreasing risk factors associated with both bullying and suicide." Education and health stakeholders, she adds, should consider broadening their focus beyond just providing services to those already involved in bullying or suicide-related behaviors. They should also implement strategies to prevent bullying and suicide behavior from occurring in the first place.
Sodomy Hazing Leaves 13-Year-Old Victim Outcast in Colorado Town
By Chris Staiti & Barry Bortnick
Bloomberg News - Jun 20, 2013
At the state high-school wrestling tournament in Denver last year, three upperclassmen cornered a 13-year-old boy on an empty school bus, bound him with duct tape and sodomized him with a pencil.
For the boy and his family, that was only the beginning.
The students were from Norwood, Colorado, a ranching town of about 500 people near the Telluride ski resort. Two of the attackers were sons of Robert Harris, the wrestling coach, who was president of the school board. The victim’s father was the K-12 principal.
After the principal reported the incident to police, townspeople forced him to resign. Students protested against the victim at school, put “Go to Hell” stickers on his locker and wore T-shirts that supported the perpetrators. The attackers later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, according to the Denver district attorney’s office.
“Nobody would help us,” said the victim’s father, who asked not to be named to protect his son’s privacy. Bloomberg News doesn’t identify victims of sexual assault. “We contacted everybody and nobody would help us,” he said.
High-school hazing and bullying used to involve name-calling, towel-snapping and stuffing boys into lockers. Now, boys sexually abusing other boys is part of the ritual. More than 40 high school boys were sodomized with foreign objects by their teammates in over a dozen alleged incidents reported in the past year, compared with about three incidents a decade ago, according to a Bloomberg review of court documents and news accounts.
(cut)
About 4,000 sexual assaults occur each year inside U.S. public schools, as well as 800 rapes or attempted rapes, according to a letter the U.S. Education Department sent to educators in April 2011.
“We don’t tolerate this anywhere else in our society,” said Antonio Romanucci, a Chicago attorney representing some of the alleged Maine West victims in a civil lawsuit. “So why are we tolerating it in our schools?”
The entire story is here.
Thanks to Lamar Freed for this article.
Bloomberg News - Jun 20, 2013
At the state high-school wrestling tournament in Denver last year, three upperclassmen cornered a 13-year-old boy on an empty school bus, bound him with duct tape and sodomized him with a pencil.
For the boy and his family, that was only the beginning.
The students were from Norwood, Colorado, a ranching town of about 500 people near the Telluride ski resort. Two of the attackers were sons of Robert Harris, the wrestling coach, who was president of the school board. The victim’s father was the K-12 principal.
After the principal reported the incident to police, townspeople forced him to resign. Students protested against the victim at school, put “Go to Hell” stickers on his locker and wore T-shirts that supported the perpetrators. The attackers later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, according to the Denver district attorney’s office.
“Nobody would help us,” said the victim’s father, who asked not to be named to protect his son’s privacy. Bloomberg News doesn’t identify victims of sexual assault. “We contacted everybody and nobody would help us,” he said.
High-school hazing and bullying used to involve name-calling, towel-snapping and stuffing boys into lockers. Now, boys sexually abusing other boys is part of the ritual. More than 40 high school boys were sodomized with foreign objects by their teammates in over a dozen alleged incidents reported in the past year, compared with about three incidents a decade ago, according to a Bloomberg review of court documents and news accounts.
(cut)
About 4,000 sexual assaults occur each year inside U.S. public schools, as well as 800 rapes or attempted rapes, according to a letter the U.S. Education Department sent to educators in April 2011.
“We don’t tolerate this anywhere else in our society,” said Antonio Romanucci, a Chicago attorney representing some of the alleged Maine West victims in a civil lawsuit. “So why are we tolerating it in our schools?”
The entire story is here.
Thanks to Lamar Freed for this article.
Monday, July 1, 2013
The 'Truth' About Why We Lie, Cheat And Steal
by NPR STAFF
All Things Considered
June 04, 2012
Chances are, you're a liar. Maybe not a big liar — but a liar nonetheless. That's the finding of Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He's run experiments with some 30,000 people and found that very few people lie a lot, but almost everyone lies a little.
Ariely describes these experiments and the results in a new book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To Everyone — Especially Ourselves. He talks with NPR's Robert Siegel about how society's troubles aren't always caused by the really bad apples; they're caused by the scores of slightly rotting apples who are cheating just a little bit.
Interview Highlights
On the traditional, cost/benefit theory of dishonesty
"The standard view is a cost/benefit view. It says that every time we see something, we ask ourselves: What do I stand to gain from this and what do I stand to lose? Imagine it's a gas station: Going by a gas station, you ask yourself: How much money is in this gas station? If I steal it, what's the chance that somebody will catch me and how much time will I have in prison? And you basically look at the cost and benefit, and if it's a good deal, you go for it."
On why the cost/benefit theory is flawed
"It's inaccurate, first of all. When we do experiments, when we try to tempt people to cheat, we don't find that these three elements — what do we stand to gain, probability of being caught and size of punishment — end up describing much of the result.
"Not only is it a bad descriptor of human behavior, it's also a bad input for policy. Think about it: When we try to curb dishonesty in the world, what do we do? We get more police force, we increase punishment in prison. If those are not the things that people consider when they think about committing a particular crime, then all of these efforts are going to be wasted."
The rest of the article is here.
All Things Considered
June 04, 2012
Chances are, you're a liar. Maybe not a big liar — but a liar nonetheless. That's the finding of Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He's run experiments with some 30,000 people and found that very few people lie a lot, but almost everyone lies a little.
Ariely describes these experiments and the results in a new book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To Everyone — Especially Ourselves. He talks with NPR's Robert Siegel about how society's troubles aren't always caused by the really bad apples; they're caused by the scores of slightly rotting apples who are cheating just a little bit.
Interview Highlights
On the traditional, cost/benefit theory of dishonesty
"The standard view is a cost/benefit view. It says that every time we see something, we ask ourselves: What do I stand to gain from this and what do I stand to lose? Imagine it's a gas station: Going by a gas station, you ask yourself: How much money is in this gas station? If I steal it, what's the chance that somebody will catch me and how much time will I have in prison? And you basically look at the cost and benefit, and if it's a good deal, you go for it."
On why the cost/benefit theory is flawed
"It's inaccurate, first of all. When we do experiments, when we try to tempt people to cheat, we don't find that these three elements — what do we stand to gain, probability of being caught and size of punishment — end up describing much of the result.
"Not only is it a bad descriptor of human behavior, it's also a bad input for policy. Think about it: When we try to curb dishonesty in the world, what do we do? We get more police force, we increase punishment in prison. If those are not the things that people consider when they think about committing a particular crime, then all of these efforts are going to be wasted."
The rest of the article is here.
Book Review: Moral Perception
Robert Audi, Moral Perception, Princeton University Press, 2013, 194pp.
Review by Antti Kauppinen
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Originally published June 29, 2013
In everyday parlance, we sometimes report having seen that an audience member's standing up to a sexist keynote speaker was morally good or having heard how a husband wronged his wife. In philosophy, the idea that we can literally perceive moral facts has not exactly been popular, but it has had its proponents. In this volume, Robert Audi, who can lay claim to being the leading contemporary moral epistemologist in the intuitionist tradition, develops what is perhaps the most comprehensive defence of the possibility of moral perception to date.
What is moral perception? Suppose I see a teenager drowning a reluctant hamster. I may form the moral belief that the action is wrong straight away, without any conscious inference. This much is common ground between proponents of moral perception and sceptics about it. But where sceptics think that the quick belief is based on non-conscious inference or association or perhaps emotional response, those who believe in moral perception take it to be based on a distinct moral perceptual experience, which can justify the belief in the same way perception in general does.
The first step in making the case is clarifying what happens in perception in general. Audi takes this task up in the first chapter. As is his wont, he makes a series of careful distinctions, starting with three main kinds of perception. They are simple perception (seeing a flower), attributive perception (seeing a flower to be yellow), and propositional perception (seeing that a flower is yellow). The content of perceptual experience is formed by properties that are phenomenally represented in it. Such experience is distinct from belief -- we need not have beliefs corresponding to the content of our perception. For us to perceive something is for it to "produce or sustain, in the right way, an appropriate phenomenal representation of it" (20). We see an object by seeing some suitable subset of its properties. Roughly, an object instantiates an observable property, which causes me to instantiate a phenomenal property (such as being appeared to elliptically).
How about moral perception? Audi does not claim we can perceive that drowning the hamster is wrong in the same way we can perceive that a hat is red. Moral properties are not perceptual like colours and shapes, but they are perceptible. We perceive them by way of perceiving the non-moral properties they are grounded or consequential on. The phenomenal aspect of moral perception is a non-sensory "sense of injustice" (37) or a "felt sense of connection" (39) between the moral property, such as wrongness, and the perceived base property, such as intentionally causing pain to an animal. This representational element isn't "pictorial" or "cartographic" (37) as it might be in paradigmatic cases of perception, but, Audi says, we shouldn't expect that to be the case when it comes to moral properties. Nor are moral properties directly causally responsible for the phenomenal properties; rather, the relevant causal connection obtains between instantiations of base properties and instantiations of the distinctively moral phenomenal states.
The entire book review is here.
Review by Antti Kauppinen
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Originally published June 29, 2013
In everyday parlance, we sometimes report having seen that an audience member's standing up to a sexist keynote speaker was morally good or having heard how a husband wronged his wife. In philosophy, the idea that we can literally perceive moral facts has not exactly been popular, but it has had its proponents. In this volume, Robert Audi, who can lay claim to being the leading contemporary moral epistemologist in the intuitionist tradition, develops what is perhaps the most comprehensive defence of the possibility of moral perception to date.
What is moral perception? Suppose I see a teenager drowning a reluctant hamster. I may form the moral belief that the action is wrong straight away, without any conscious inference. This much is common ground between proponents of moral perception and sceptics about it. But where sceptics think that the quick belief is based on non-conscious inference or association or perhaps emotional response, those who believe in moral perception take it to be based on a distinct moral perceptual experience, which can justify the belief in the same way perception in general does.
The first step in making the case is clarifying what happens in perception in general. Audi takes this task up in the first chapter. As is his wont, he makes a series of careful distinctions, starting with three main kinds of perception. They are simple perception (seeing a flower), attributive perception (seeing a flower to be yellow), and propositional perception (seeing that a flower is yellow). The content of perceptual experience is formed by properties that are phenomenally represented in it. Such experience is distinct from belief -- we need not have beliefs corresponding to the content of our perception. For us to perceive something is for it to "produce or sustain, in the right way, an appropriate phenomenal representation of it" (20). We see an object by seeing some suitable subset of its properties. Roughly, an object instantiates an observable property, which causes me to instantiate a phenomenal property (such as being appeared to elliptically).
How about moral perception? Audi does not claim we can perceive that drowning the hamster is wrong in the same way we can perceive that a hat is red. Moral properties are not perceptual like colours and shapes, but they are perceptible. We perceive them by way of perceiving the non-moral properties they are grounded or consequential on. The phenomenal aspect of moral perception is a non-sensory "sense of injustice" (37) or a "felt sense of connection" (39) between the moral property, such as wrongness, and the perceived base property, such as intentionally causing pain to an animal. This representational element isn't "pictorial" or "cartographic" (37) as it might be in paradigmatic cases of perception, but, Audi says, we shouldn't expect that to be the case when it comes to moral properties. Nor are moral properties directly causally responsible for the phenomenal properties; rather, the relevant causal connection obtains between instantiations of base properties and instantiations of the distinctively moral phenomenal states.
The entire book review is here.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Biological psychiatry’s false paradigm—still no proof mental illness is a biological disease
By René J. Muller
Baltimore Sun
June 18, 2013
Days before the official May 22 publication date of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM-5), a number of psychiatrists who were closely associated with the project scrambled to do some preemptory damage control, mostly by lowering the expectations for what was to come.
Michael B. First, professor of psychiatry at Columbia, acknowledged on NPR that there was still no empirical method to confirm or rule out any mental illness. “We were hoping and imagining that research would advance at a pace that laboratory tests would have come out. And here we are 20 years later and we still unfortunately rely primarily on symptoms to make our diagnoses.” Speaking to The New York Times, Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, insisted that this failure had not been for lack of effort.
In the same Times article, David J. Kupfer, chairman of the DSM-5 Task Force, admitted “a failure of our neuroscience and biology to give us the level of diagnostic criteria, a level of sensitivity and specificity that we would be able to introduce into the diagnostic manual.” Drs. Kupfer, Insel and First agree that the new paradigm envisioned for psychiatry — the reason the new edition was undertaken — remains elusive.
The entire article is here.
Baltimore Sun
June 18, 2013
Days before the official May 22 publication date of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM-5), a number of psychiatrists who were closely associated with the project scrambled to do some preemptory damage control, mostly by lowering the expectations for what was to come.
Michael B. First, professor of psychiatry at Columbia, acknowledged on NPR that there was still no empirical method to confirm or rule out any mental illness. “We were hoping and imagining that research would advance at a pace that laboratory tests would have come out. And here we are 20 years later and we still unfortunately rely primarily on symptoms to make our diagnoses.” Speaking to The New York Times, Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, insisted that this failure had not been for lack of effort.
In the same Times article, David J. Kupfer, chairman of the DSM-5 Task Force, admitted “a failure of our neuroscience and biology to give us the level of diagnostic criteria, a level of sensitivity and specificity that we would be able to introduce into the diagnostic manual.” Drs. Kupfer, Insel and First agree that the new paradigm envisioned for psychiatry — the reason the new edition was undertaken — remains elusive.
The entire article is here.
The Problem with the Neuroscience Backlash
POSTED BY GARY MARCUS
The New Yorker Magazine
Originally published on June 19, 2013
Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood. That seems ludicrous now; through neuroscience, we know more about the brain and how it works than ever before. But, over the past several years, the field has given rise to pop neuroscience, which attempts to explain practically everything about human behavior and culture through the brain and its functions.
A backlash against pop neuroscience is now in full swing. The latest, and most cutting, critique yet is “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld. The book, which slams dozens of inconclusive studies that have been spun into overblown and downright dubious fields, like neurolaw and neuromarketing, is a resounding call for skepticism of the most grandiose claims being made in the name of neuroscience. The authors describe it as “an exposé of mindless neuroscience: the oversimplification, interpretive license, and premature application of brain science in the legal, commercial, clinical, and philosophical domains.”
Unfortunately, the book is also prone to being misread. This is partly because it focusses largely on neuroscience’s current limitations rather than on its progress. Some, like David Brooks in the New York Times, are using books like “Brainwashed” as an excuse to toss out neuroscience altogether.
The entire article is here.
The New Yorker Magazine
Originally published on June 19, 2013
Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood. That seems ludicrous now; through neuroscience, we know more about the brain and how it works than ever before. But, over the past several years, the field has given rise to pop neuroscience, which attempts to explain practically everything about human behavior and culture through the brain and its functions.
A backlash against pop neuroscience is now in full swing. The latest, and most cutting, critique yet is “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld. The book, which slams dozens of inconclusive studies that have been spun into overblown and downright dubious fields, like neurolaw and neuromarketing, is a resounding call for skepticism of the most grandiose claims being made in the name of neuroscience. The authors describe it as “an exposé of mindless neuroscience: the oversimplification, interpretive license, and premature application of brain science in the legal, commercial, clinical, and philosophical domains.”
Unfortunately, the book is also prone to being misread. This is partly because it focusses largely on neuroscience’s current limitations rather than on its progress. Some, like David Brooks in the New York Times, are using books like “Brainwashed” as an excuse to toss out neuroscience altogether.
The entire article is here.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Book raises alarms about alternative medicine
Liz Szabo
USA TODAY
Originally posted June 28, 2013
Doctors diagnosed her with acute pancreatitis, in which pancreatic enzymes begin digesting not just food, but the pancreas itself.
The most likely cause of the girl's condition: toxic side effects from more than 80 dietary supplements, which the girl's mother carried in a shopping bag, says Sarah Erush, clinical pharmacy manager at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where the girl was treated last summer.
The girl's mother had been treating her with the supplements and other therapies for four years to treat the girl's "chronic Lyme disease," a condition that, experts say, doesn't actually exist. While some Lyme infections cause pain and other lingering symptoms, the infections don't persist for years. And, according to the Infectious Disease Society of America, the infections don't require years of antibiotics or other risky therapies given by some alternative medicine practitioners.
Doctors were able to control the girl's illness with standard therapies, Erush says, and she was discharged from the hospital after two weeks.
Although the child's story was unforgettable, Erush says, it wasn't unusual. Parents now "routinely" bring children to her hospital with a variety of alternative remedies, hoping that nurses will administer them during a child's stay.
(cut)
Arthur Caplan, the director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, says alternative healers satisfy patients' needs for more personal attention.
"Medicine does a very poor job of addressing the emotional, spiritual and even psychological side of things," Caplan says. "When you are not good at doing important things, other people rush into that vacuum."
Yet people who put their faith in alternative healers and supplements may be putting themselves at risk, Caplan says.
The alternative therapy industry capitalizes on a number of common sentiments, Offit says, from a naïve belief in the safety of all things natural to distrust of government regulation.
The entire story is here.
USA TODAY
Originally posted June 28, 2013
Doctors diagnosed her with acute pancreatitis, in which pancreatic enzymes begin digesting not just food, but the pancreas itself.
The most likely cause of the girl's condition: toxic side effects from more than 80 dietary supplements, which the girl's mother carried in a shopping bag, says Sarah Erush, clinical pharmacy manager at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where the girl was treated last summer.
The girl's mother had been treating her with the supplements and other therapies for four years to treat the girl's "chronic Lyme disease," a condition that, experts say, doesn't actually exist. While some Lyme infections cause pain and other lingering symptoms, the infections don't persist for years. And, according to the Infectious Disease Society of America, the infections don't require years of antibiotics or other risky therapies given by some alternative medicine practitioners.
Doctors were able to control the girl's illness with standard therapies, Erush says, and she was discharged from the hospital after two weeks.
Although the child's story was unforgettable, Erush says, it wasn't unusual. Parents now "routinely" bring children to her hospital with a variety of alternative remedies, hoping that nurses will administer them during a child's stay.
(cut)
Arthur Caplan, the director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, says alternative healers satisfy patients' needs for more personal attention.
"Medicine does a very poor job of addressing the emotional, spiritual and even psychological side of things," Caplan says. "When you are not good at doing important things, other people rush into that vacuum."
Yet people who put their faith in alternative healers and supplements may be putting themselves at risk, Caplan says.
The alternative therapy industry capitalizes on a number of common sentiments, Offit says, from a naïve belief in the safety of all things natural to distrust of government regulation.
The entire story is here.
For some, it matters who's donating an organ, blood
University of Michigan
Press Release - June 18, 2013
ANN ARBOR—Some people feel so "creeped out" that they would decline an organ or blood that came from a murderer or thief, according to a new University of Michigan study.
In addition, they express concern that their personality or behavior may change to become more like that of the donor, as a result of the donation.
Recipients prefer to get an organ or DNA transplant or blood transfusion from a donor whose personality or behavior matches theirs, said Meredith Meyer, the study's lead author and a research fellow in psychology. People think that people's behaviors and personalities are partly due to something hidden deep inside their blood or bodily organs, she said.
What surprised Meyer and colleagues were that the results from blood transfusions were just as strong as the results from heart transplants.
"Since blood transfusions are so common and relatively straightforward, we had expected people might think that they have very little effect," Meyer said.
"This suggests an interesting intuitive belief—that behaviors and personalities are inherent, unchanging aspects of who they are," said study co-author Susan Gelman, the Heinz Werner Collegiate Professor of Psychology.
The study's participants viewed a list of possible human donors and judged whether they wanted someone who shared similar traits, such as age, gender, sexual orientation and background. Possible donors also included two animals: a pig or a chimpanzee. For human donors described as having the same gender, the characteristics could be positive (e.g., high IQ, talented artist, kind person or philanthropist) or negative (e.g., low IQ, thief, gambler or murderer).
Respondents ranked how much they liked the idea of each being a donor, as well as assessed their beliefs that the transplant would cause the recipient's personality or behavior to become similar to the donor's. Questions also involved feeling "creeped out" or "contaminated" by the transplant.
The entire press release is here.
Press Release - June 18, 2013
ANN ARBOR—Some people feel so "creeped out" that they would decline an organ or blood that came from a murderer or thief, according to a new University of Michigan study.
In addition, they express concern that their personality or behavior may change to become more like that of the donor, as a result of the donation.
Recipients prefer to get an organ or DNA transplant or blood transfusion from a donor whose personality or behavior matches theirs, said Meredith Meyer, the study's lead author and a research fellow in psychology. People think that people's behaviors and personalities are partly due to something hidden deep inside their blood or bodily organs, she said.
What surprised Meyer and colleagues were that the results from blood transfusions were just as strong as the results from heart transplants.
"Since blood transfusions are so common and relatively straightforward, we had expected people might think that they have very little effect," Meyer said.
"This suggests an interesting intuitive belief—that behaviors and personalities are inherent, unchanging aspects of who they are," said study co-author Susan Gelman, the Heinz Werner Collegiate Professor of Psychology.
The study's participants viewed a list of possible human donors and judged whether they wanted someone who shared similar traits, such as age, gender, sexual orientation and background. Possible donors also included two animals: a pig or a chimpanzee. For human donors described as having the same gender, the characteristics could be positive (e.g., high IQ, talented artist, kind person or philanthropist) or negative (e.g., low IQ, thief, gambler or murderer).
Respondents ranked how much they liked the idea of each being a donor, as well as assessed their beliefs that the transplant would cause the recipient's personality or behavior to become similar to the donor's. Questions also involved feeling "creeped out" or "contaminated" by the transplant.
The entire press release is here.
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