Memphis psychiatrist who used riding crop on patients now faces new charges

Brett Kelman

Nashville Tennessean
Originally published October 27, 2019

Here are two excerpts:

A Memphis-area psychiatrist whose license was suspended last year for using a riding crop on patients could now lose her license again due to an ongoing dispute with state health licensing officials.

Dr. Valerie Augustus, who runs Christian Psychiatric Services in the suburb of Germantown, was forced to close her clinic last June after a medical discipline trial proved to the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners that she had used a riding crop or a whip on at least 10 patients. The clinic was permitted to re-open six months later after Augustus agreed to professional probation, but she continued to fight the case in court.

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Augustus, 57, ran her clinic for 17 years without any discipline issues before her license was suspended last year. A board order states that, in addition to using the whip and riding crop on patients, Augustus kept the items “displayed in her office” and “compared her patients to mules.”

The government’s attorney, Paetria Morgan, argued at the medical discipline trial that Augustus hit her patients if they did not lose weight or exercise. In addition to the whip and riding crop, Morgan alleged Augustus hit patients with a “four-foot stick of bamboo.”

“Her defense is that she hit them in jest,” Morgan said. “When did hitting become funny? Hitting isn’t hilarious. Hitting isn’t helpful. Hitting isn’t healing.”

The info is here.

A Sober Second Thought? A Pre-Registered Experiment on the Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on Political Tolerance

Michael Bang Petersen & Panagiotis Mitkidis
PsyArXiv
Originally posted October 20, 2019

Abstract

Mindfulness meditation is increasingly promoted as a tool to foster more inclusive and tolerant societies and, accordingly, meditation practice has been adopted in a number of public institutions including schools and legislatures. Here, we provide the first empirical test of the effects of mindfulness meditation on political and societal attitudes by examining whether completion in a 15-minute mindfulness meditation increases tolerance towards disliked groups relative to relevant control conditions. Analyses of data from a pilot experiment (N = 54) and a pre-registered experiment (N = 171) provides no evidence that mindfulness meditation increases political tolerance. Furthermore, exploratory analyses show that individual differences in trait mindfulness is not associated with differences in tolerance. These results suggest that there is reason to pause recommending mindfulness meditation as a way to achieve democratically desirable outcomes or, at least, that short-term meditation is not sufficient to generate these.

The research is here.

The ‘cancer growing in cancer medicine’: pharma money paid to doctors

Vinay Prasad
statnews.com
Originally posted October 30, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

The fundamental problem is that, as a profession, cancer physicians are not interested in addressing conflict of interest. Too many people in prominent positions benefit from the current lax policies. Disclosure is not the solution —ending these payments is.

I want to be clear: I’m all for doctors interacting with and working with the pharmaceutical and device industries. I have lectured at major pharmaceutical companies, but without accepting money, travel expenses, or meals. Researchers should be free to work with pharmaceutical companies on trials, but there is no legitimate reason why a well-paid physician needs to take personal payments, gifts, meals, or travel expenses from the pharmaceutical industry. That practice must end.

Conflict of interest is the cancer growing in cancer medicine. It poisons the field. It leads us to celebrate marginal drugs as if they were game-changers. It leads experts to ignore or downplay flaws and deficits in cancer clinical trials. It keeps doctors silent about the crushing price of cancer medicines. It is rampant in guidelines that lead to off-label prescribing and that mandate payment. It is surely a calculated maneuver by the industry to increase their profits.

The info is here.

Super-precise new CRISPR tool could tackle a plethora of genetic diseases

Heidi Ledford
nature.com
Originally posted October 21, 2019

For all the ease with which the wildly popular CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing tool alters genomes, it’s still somewhat clunky and prone to errors and unintended effects. Now, a recently developed alternative offers greater control over genome edits — an advance that could be particularly important for developing gene therapies.

The alternative method, called prime editing, improves the chances that researchers will end up with only the edits they want, instead of a mix of changes that they can’t predict. The tool, described in a study published on 21 October in Nature1, also reduces the ‘off-target’ effects that are a key challenge for some applications of the standard CRISPR–Cas9 system. That could make prime-editing-based gene therapies safer for use in people.

The tool also seems capable of making a wider variety of edits, which might one day allow it to be used to treat the many genetic diseases that have so far stymied gene-editors. David Liu, a chemical biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lead study author, estimates that prime editing might help researchers tackle nearly 90% of the more than 75,000 disease-associated DNA variants listed in ClinVar, a public database developed by the US National Institutes of Health.

The specificity of the changes that this latest tool is capable of could also make it easier for researchers to develop models of disease in the laboratory, or to study the function of specific genes, says Liu.

The info is here.

Medical board declines to act against fertility doctor who inseminated woman with his own sperm

Dr. McMorries

Marie Saavedra and Mark Smith
wfaa.com
Originally posted Oct 28, 2019

The Texas Medical Board has declined to act against a fertility doctor who inseminated a woman with his own sperm rather than from a donor the mother selected.

Though Texas lawmakers have now made such an act illegal, the Texas Medical Board found the actions did not “fall below the acceptable standard of care,” and declined further review, according to a response to a complaint obtained by WFAA.

In a follow-up email, a spokesperson told WFAA the board was hamstrung because it can't review complaints for instances that happened seven years or more past the medical treatment. 

The complaint was filed on behalf of 32-year-old Eve Wiley, of Dallas, who only recently learned her biological father wasn't the sperm donor selected by her mother. Instead, Wiley discovered her biological father was her mother’s fertility doctor in Nacogdoches.

Now 65, Wiley's mother, Margo Williams, had sought help from Dr. Kim McMorries because her husband was infertile.

The info is here.

Moral Responsibility

Talbert, Matthew
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 
(Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

Making judgments about whether a person is morally responsible for her behavior, and holding others and ourselves responsible for actions and the consequences of actions, is a fundamental and familiar part of our moral practices and our interpersonal relationships.

The judgment that a person is morally responsible for her behavior involves—at least to a first approximation—attributing certain powers and capacities to that person, and viewing her behavior as arising (in the right way) from the fact that the person has, and has exercised, these powers and capacities. Whatever the correct account of the powers and capacities at issue (and canvassing different accounts is the task of this entry), their possession qualifies an agent as morally responsible in a general sense: that is, as one who may be morally responsible for particular exercises of agency. Normal adult human beings may possess the powers and capacities in question, and non-human animals, very young children, and those suffering from severe developmental disabilities or dementia (to give a few examples) are generally taken to lack them.

To hold someone responsible involves—again, to a first approximation—responding to that person in ways that are made appropriate by the judgment that she is morally responsible. These responses often constitute instances of moral praise or moral blame (though there may be reason to allow for morally responsible behavior that is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy: see McKenna 2012: 16–17 and M. Zimmerman 1988: 61–62). Blame is a response that may follow on the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is wrong or bad, and praise is a response that may follow on the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is right or good.

The information is here.

Suicide Has Been Deadlier Than Combat for the Military

Carol Giacomo
The New York Times
Originally published November 1, 2019

Here are two excerpts:

The data for veterans is also alarming.

In 2016, veterans were one and a half times more likely to kill themselves than people who hadn’t served in the military, according to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

Among those ages 18 to 34, the rate went up nearly 80 percent from 2005 to 2016.

The risk nearly doubles in the first year after a veteran leaves active duty, experts say.

The Pentagon this year also reported on military families, estimating that in 2017 there were 186 suicide deaths among military spouses and dependents.

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Experts say suicides are complex, resulting from many factors, notably impulsive decisions with little warning. Pentagon officials say a majority of service members who die by suicide do not have mental illness. While combat is undoubtedly high stress, there are conflicting views on whether deployments increase risk.

Where there seems to be consensus is that high-quality health care and keeping weapons out of the hands of people in distress can make a positive difference.

Studies show that the Department of Veterans Affairs provides high-quality care, and its Veterans Crisis Line “surpasses most crisis lines” operating today, according to Terri Tanielian, a researcher with the RAND Corporation. (The Veterans Crisis Line is staffed 24/7 at 800-273-8255, press 1. Services also are available online or by texting 838255.)

But Veterans Affairs often can’t accommodate all those needing help, resulting in patients being sent to community-based mental health professionals who lack the training to deal with service members.

The info is here.

Understanding behavioral ethics can strengthen your compliance program

Jeffrey Kaplan
The FCPA Blog
Originally posted October 21, 2019

Behavioral ethics is a well-known field of social science which shows how — due to various cognitive biases — “we are not as ethical as we think.” Behavioral compliance and ethics (which is less well known) attempts to use behavioral ethics insights to develop and maintain effective compliance programs. In this post I explore some of the ways that this can be done.

Behavioral C&E should be viewed on two levels. The first could be called specific behavioral C&E lessons, meaning enhancements to the various discrete C&E program elements — e.g., risk assessment, training — based on behavioral ethics insights.   Several of these are discussed below.

The second — and more general — aspect of behavioral C&E is the above-mentioned overarching finding that we are not as ethical as we think. The importance of this general lesson is based on the notion that the greatest challenges to having effective C&E programs in organizations is often more about the “will” than the “way.”

That is, what is lacking in many business organizations is an understanding that strong C&E is truly necessary. After all, if we are as ethical than we think, then effective risk mitigation would be just a matter of finding the right punishment for an offense and the power of logical thinking would do the rest. Behavioral ethics teaches that that assumption is ill-founded.

The info is here.

The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction

Stefan Schubert, Lucius Caviola & Nadira S. Faber
Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 15100 (2019)

Abstract

The 21st century will likely see growing risks of human extinction, but currently, relatively small resources are invested in reducing such existential risks. Using three samples (UK general public, US general public, and UK students; total N = 2,507), we study how laypeople reason about human extinction. We find that people think that human extinction needs to be prevented. Strikingly, however, they do not think that an extinction catastrophe would be uniquely bad relative to near-extinction catastrophes, which allow for recovery. More people find extinction uniquely bad when (a) asked to consider the extinction of an animal species rather than humans, (b) asked to consider a case where human extinction is associated with less direct harm, and (c) they are explicitly prompted to consider long-term consequences of the catastrophes. We conclude that an important reason why people do not find extinction uniquely bad is that they focus on the immediate death and suffering that the catastrophes cause for fellow humans, rather than on the long-term consequences. Finally, we find that (d) laypeople—in line with prominent philosophical arguments—think that the quality of the future is relevant: they do find extinction uniquely bad when this means forgoing a utopian future.

Discussion

Our studies show that people find that human extinction is bad, and that it is important to prevent it. However, when presented with a scenario involving no catastrophe, a near-extinction catastrophe and an extinction catastrophe as possible outcomes, they do not see human extinction as uniquely bad compared with non-extinction. We find that this is partly because people feel strongly for the victims of the catastrophes, and therefore focus on the immediate consequences of the catastrophes. The immediate consequences of near-extinction are not that different from those of extinction, so this naturally leads them to find near-extinction almost as bad as extinction. Another reason is that they neglect the long-term consequences of the outcomes. Lastly, their empirical beliefs about the quality of the future make a difference: telling them that the future will be extraordinarily good makes more people find extinction uniquely bad.

The research is here.