Quotulatiousness

May 10, 2013

Colby Cosh on “gendercide”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Despite the federal government’s efforts to keep this debate from happening, we apparently are going to be having a big national debate about abortion. (For those following from outside the borders of Former Soviet Canuckistan, Canada doesn’t actually have any abortion law on the books at the moment, and Stephen Harper’s government of “bitter-clinging, right-wing, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist Christian” Conservatives is desperate not to have to bring one in.) Colby Cosh explains why the efforts by some back-bench MPs to use “gendercide” as a way to force the government’s hand won’t work:

Here, then, is my contribution to the big conversation.

(1) “Gendercide” is incoherent religious militancy in cheap drag. (Editors certainly shouldn’t be taking sides by putting it in headlines as if it were an actual thing.)

(2) However you feel about personal eugenics, which is an accurate name for “mothers choosing babies that are likely to be better in some respect they deem relevant”, the Era Of It is arriving now and will not be wished away.

(3) Sex-selective abortion perpetrated for reasons of religious superstition is, upon all evidence, a marginal phenomenon in this country, probably a fading one, and quite likely to be an inherently self-correcting one. It makes a shabby excuse for blowing up the political truce our country clings to when it comes to the topic of abortion. (It seems remotely possible that Stephen Harper has perceived this and concurs with it.)

(4) In particular, no statute is likely to be effective against sex selection by mothers. We had one, you know, and it actually made a hypothetical exception for parents at risk of X-linked gene disease. A Liberal government devoted to “reproductive choice” criminalized sex-selective embryo implantation by means of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act; a Supreme Court found that law offensive to the Constitution; and a Conservative government closed the agency that was supposed to enforce it because it had accomplished the sum total of jack squat ever.

(5) People who wish to police sex-selective abortion had better figure out what exactly kinds they don’t like. And why. And what other reasons for a woman to have an abortion don’t cut their brand of mustard. And whether they really want their wives, girlfriends, daughters or nieces to end up as a future Case 6 running afoul of the law.

(6) Fellow-travellers of Mark Warawa who think he makes an awesome test case for parliamentary purity should consider looking for one that, pardon the metaphor, doesn’t have quite so many oopsies in its DNA.

Early signs of “rejuvenation therapy”?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

An interesting report from the Harvard Gazette on some research into a possibility of reducing some of the effects of aging, specifically aging of the heart:

Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers — a stem cell biologist and a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — have identified a protein in the blood of mice and humans that may prove to be the first effective treatment for the form of age-related heart failure that affects millions of Americans.

When the protein, called GDF-11, was injected into old mice, which develop thickened heart walls in a manner similar to aging humans, the hearts were reduced in size and thickness, resembling the healthy hearts of younger mice.

Even more important than the implications for the treatment of diastolic heart failure, the finding by Richard T. Lee, a Harvard Medical School professor at the hospital, and Amy Wagers, a professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, ultimately may rewrite our understanding of aging.

Research of this type may be very important as the baby boomer generation enters retirement age … not necessarily to extend total lifespan, but to increase the chances for healthy activity longer into our existing lifespan. Few of us would want to live to 100 if the last 20 years are pain-wracked, immobile, and inactive … but being able to live that long and managing to keep doing the things we like to do for most of that time? That’d be much more appealing to many of us.

May 8, 2013

Nanotechnology comes to the aid of diabetics

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

Matt Peckham discusses a technology that may help diabetics avoid the majority of their frequent insulin injections:

Say you’re diabetic: Instead of having to inject yourself with insulin multiple times a day, imagine only having to do it once a week. Crazy, right? And instead of your syringe harboring glucose-regulating insulin, imagine it filled with nanoscopic particles you fire into your bloodstream — particles capable of detecting when your body’s blood sugar levels rise and releasing insulin accordingly.

Thanks to research conducted at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children’s Hospital Boston, what sounds like a Kurzweilian science fiction fantasy may soon be reality for the estimated 25.8 million children and adults in the U.S. alone — 8.3% of the population, according to the American Diabetes Association – with high blood sugar (and 366 million in all worldwide).

“We’ve created a ‘smart’ system that is injected into the body and responds to changes in blood sugar by releasing insulin, effectively controlling blood-sugar levels,” says NC State University biomedical engineering assistant professor Dr. Zhen Gu, the lead author of a paper describing the work (via NC State news). ”We’ve tested the technology in mice, and one injection was able to maintain blood sugar levels in the normal range for up to 10 days.”

May 2, 2013

Cherrypicking the result you prefer from a recent Medicaid study

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:43

Megan McArdle explains why a recent study’s results may be much more important than you might gather from the way it’s been reported so far:

Bombshell news out of Oregon today: a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) of what happens to people when they gain Medicaid eligibility shows no impact on objective measures of health. Utilization went up, out-of-pocket expenditure went down, and the freqency of depression diagnoses was lower. But on the three important health measures they checked that we can measure objectively — glycated hemoglobin, a measure of blood sugar levels; blood pressure; and cholesterol levels — there was no significant improvement.

I know: sounds boring. Glycated hemoglobin! I might as well be one of the adults on Charlie Brown going wawawawawawa . . . and you fell asleep, didn’t you?

But this is huge news if you care about health care policy — and given the huge national experiment we’re about to embark on, you’d better. Bear with me.

Some of the news reports I’ve seen so far are somewhat underselling just how major these results are.

“Study: Medicaid reduces financial hardship, doesn’t quickly improve physical health” says the Washington Post.

The Associated Press headline reads “Study: Depression rates for uninsured dropped with Medicaid coverage”

At the New York Times, it’s “Study Finds Expanded Medicaid Increases Health Care Use”

I think Slate is closer to the mark, though a bit, well, Slate-ish: “Bad News for Obamacare: A new study suggests universal health care makes people happier but not healthier.”

This study is a big, big deal. Let me explain why.

April 25, 2013

What we “know” as opposed to what is actually true

Filed under: Business, Football, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:36

We all know the NFL is in serious trouble as more evidence comes out about the relationship between playing professional football and brain damage in later life. But what we know may not be true:

Dr. Everett Lehman, part of a team of government scientists who studied mortality rates for NFL retirees at the behest of the players’ union, discovered that the pros live longer than their male counterparts outside of the NFL. The scientists looked at more than 3,000 pension-vested NFL retirees and expected 625 deaths. They found only 334. “There has been this perception over a number of years of people dying at 55 on the average,” Dr. Lehman told me. “It’s just based on a faulty understanding of statistics.”

The scientists also learned that, contrary to conventional wisdom, NFL players commit suicide at a dramatically lower rate than the general male population. The suicides of Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, and Andre Waters don’t represent a trend but outliers that attract massive attention, and thereby massively distort the public’s perception. More typical was the death of Pat Summerall, who passed away quietly last week at 82 after a productive post-career career.

Indeed, a 2009 study by University of Michigan researchers reported that NFL retirees are far more likely to own a home, possess a college degree, and enjoy health insurance than their peers who never played in the league. The myth of the broke and broken-down athlete is just that: a myth. A few surely struggle after competition ceases; most apply their competitive natures to new endeavors.

It’s true that skill-position players on rosters for five or more years in the NFL faced elevated levels of Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s, and Parkinson’s disease deaths. But some perspective is in order. Of the 3,439 retired athletes studied by Lehman’s group, less than a dozen succumbed to deaths directly attributable to these neurodegenerative killers. Had Parkinson’s killed one rather than the two retirees it did kill, for example, its rate would have been lower among players than among the general population.

It’s quite possible the NFL is concerned (and ensuring that it is seen to be concerned) primarily because of the need to address public perceptions, rather than as a defensive move against future or ongoing legal challenges.

April 24, 2013

QotD: Welcoming the DSM-V appropriately

Filed under: Books, Health, Humour, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The much-awaited arrival of DSM-5 (the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) should ensure that every human being is classed as insane. At this point we might be able to start again and consider what psychiatry is for. Genomics is keen to help in the effort by finding the loci that are associated with all sorts of mental disorders. Enter a huge population based study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health: “Our findings show that specific SNPs are associated with a range of psychiatric disorders of childhood onset or adult onset. In particular, variation in calcium-channel activity genes seems to have pleiotropic effects on psychopathology. These results provide evidence relevant to the goal of moving beyond descriptive syndromes in psychiatry, and towards a nosology informed by disease cause.” Hmm. I think that when authors have to use words like “pleiotropic” and “nosology” there is a high chance that they do not know what they are talking about. So before welcoming the marriage of genomics and psychiatry, let us remember that there is a strong history of madness on both sides.

Richard Lehman, “Richard Lehman’s journal review—22 April 2013”, BMJ Group blogs, 2013-04-22

April 14, 2013

Differing national philosophies on child-raising

Filed under: Europe, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:56

In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan compares the way American parents interact with their children to the rather more relaxed parenting styles of other nations:

The biggest difference between American parents and their counterparts in Europe might be that they are far more relaxed about enrichment than we are, according to a study released this week by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super at the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Not only are Americans far more likely to focus on their children’s intelligence and cognitive skills, they are also far less likely to describe them as “happy” or “easy” children to parent.

“The U.S.’s almost obsession with cognitive development in the early years overlooks so much else,” Harkness told Slate.

For part of their research, the authors focused just on parents in the United States and the Netherlands. The differences are stark: American parents emphasized setting aside “special time” with each of their children, while Dutch parents spent a few hours each day together with their kids as an entire family.

American parents said they struggled to manage the sleep schedules of their babies and young children, explaining that they try to entertain or distract them when they wake up in the middle of the night.

April 12, 2013

Conor Friedersdorf: “Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story”

Filed under: Health, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:34

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf explains why the Philadelphia horror story should be front-page news, but isn’t:

The grand jury report in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I’ve read. “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors,” it states. “The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels — and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.”

Charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, Dr. Gosnell is now standing trial in a Philadelphia courtroom. An NBC affiliate’s coverage includes testimony as grisly as you’d expect. “An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions,” the channel reports. “Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.’ He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, ‘it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.'”

One former employee described hearing a baby screaming after it was delivered during an abortion procedure. “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” she testified. Said the Philadelphia Inquirer in its coverage, “Prosecutors have cited the dozens of jars of severed baby feet as an example of Gosnell’s idiosyncratic and illegal practice of providing abortions for cash to poor women pregnant longer than the 24-week cutoff for legal abortions in Pennsylvania.”

April 11, 2013

“Elite Panic” and the media gatekeepers

Filed under: Health, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:57

There’s a pretty horrific tale unfolding in a Philadelphia court room, but most people won’t have heard about it because — while it’s bloody and otherwise eminently newsworthy — it will “send the wrong message” if it gets the traditional full-court press of media attention. At Ace of Spades H.Q., this is noted and explained by Ace:

I think this is how those who imagine themselves to be elite justify their complete embargo on the Kermit Gosnell serial-murder trial.

People who do evil generally don’t imagine they’re doing evil. In fact, some of the worst evils are perpetrated by those who’ve convinced themselves they’re doing good. One’s conscience tends to restrain one from evil; but if one can trick one’s conscience into thinking one’s doing good by doing evil, well. Then you’ve really got something.

I imagine the media believes it’s “doing good” by being so cautious about What Truths the Public Is Capable of Hearing. After all, if this Gosnell trial were publicized, people would Get Angry, and come to All the Wrong Conclusions, and put the allies of those in the media (such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood) on the defensive.

Hell, these maniacs might even get in into their skulls to hurt people!

Well, we can’t have that. We can’t let the Wrong Kind of Information — true information, but the sort of information the non-enlightened may be confused about — passing into the Wrong Kinds of Brains.

Thus, this embargo on the Gosnell story is not just partisan bias, fronting for the Democrats by refusing to mention anything that might be used as a wedge issue against them.

No, this embargo is done for the Public Good, even if the public is too stupid to understand that. If the public heard about these things … Well, that’s not gonna happen. Not on our watch.

It’s been occurring to me lately that much media behavior is explainable by this prism. They don’t want to report certain facts, not because the facts aren’t true (they’re facts by definition), but because they’re Concerned About The Capacity of Non-Journalists to Successfully Interpret These Facts.

April 10, 2013

The former players’ class-action suit against the NFL

Filed under: Football, Health, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

John Holler opines that the players are morally right, but that the legal system probably won’t give them the vindication they hope for:

Inaccurately known as the City of Brotherly Love – a more appropriate definition would be the City of Unholy Beat-Downs In the 600 Level – Philadelphia was the site Tuesday of the first big meeting on men in $5,000 suits and matching ties and pocket splash.

Judge Anita Brody heard arguments Tuesday from the NFL and a class-action group of more than 4,000 NFL players concerning the NFL’s culpability for not diagnosing concussions in the formative years of the NFL becoming the financial juggernaut it is today.

It’s a complicated and sometimes emotional battle. From a personal perspective, I teared up (that’s a generous description of it) after interviewing Brent Boyd at a time when he was a lone candle in the wind seeking justice for his injuries at a time when the NFL denied any connection to playing the game and post-concussion symptoms. Boyd was in an a cappella group at that time. Now he has a loud chorus of backup singers in the choir. Boyd was right when he told Congress that the NFL’s policy toward worker’s compensation claims were characterized – in his words – as, “Delay, deny and hope they die.”

On the other side of the coin is the legal question. It’s not a coincidence that Lady Justice, the sculpture of a woman holding the scales of justice, is blindfolded. The intent of that symbolism is that a jury can only render a verdict on the facts presented. A former NFL player from the 1970s once posed the question to me, “Does Boeing owe former employees more benefits now because the company became successful?” That was a hard pill to swallow considering that, even in the 1970s and 1980s, there were enough former players suffering from dementia and game-related debilitation that an impartial juror could see the connection between playing NFL football and the results that have followed in post-football life for thousands of former players. Yet, what does the current NFL owe them?

April 3, 2013

Parenting classes are a waste of time and money

Filed under: Education, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Elizabeth and I took parenting classes, as neither of us had much experience of dealing with infants or small children before our son was born. Although the instructor was good at being re-assuring that we’d do fine as parents, almost none of the “skills” we were taught were actually of much use after the baby arrived. Since those early-90’s days, parenting courses have become even more common, but as Frank Furedi points out, no more relevant to the actual needs of parents and their newborns:

The parenting programmes promoted by government are based on a mixture of prejudice and the pseudoscience of so-called parenting research. Such ‘research’ is underpinned by a fundamental transformation in the meaning of parenting, which has been turned from a relationship into a skill. The core assumption in the government’s proposal for parenting classes is that childrearing consists of a set of practices that need to be learned by mothers and fathers. These practices are depicted as skills which can be taught by those who have the requisite professional qualifications.

No one could dispute that childrearing is something that is learned by mothers and fathers. Every human relationship involves a continual process of learning and gaining an understanding of the other person. Parents need to learn how to engage with the imagination of their child, how to stimulate her and when and how to restrain her from doing something harmful. Successful parents learn on the job. However, the really useful lessons we are learning have little to do with abstract skills, but rather are about understanding the relationship we have with our children.

The question is not whether parenting has to be learned, but whether it can be taught. Not everything that has to be learned can be taught. Parenting cannot be taught because it is about the forging and managing of an intimate relationship. And it is through the conduct of that relationship that people develop the insights and lessons suitable to their lives and conditions. One reason why professional intervention into family life is unlikely to have beneficial results is because each relationship contains something unique, which is only grasped by those involved in it.

[. . .]

However, the project of transforming parenting into a skill does have negative and potentially harmful consequences. When human relationships are recast as skills to be managed by professional trainers something very important happens in the way we conduct our personal affairs. As I argue in my study Paranoid Parenting such policy interventions cultivate a kind of learned helplessness among parents. Through exaggerating the complexity of child-rearing, parenting experts contribute to the eroding self-reliance of modern mums and dads. Inevitably, the principal outcome of such interventions is to distract parents from learning from their own experience. And yet learning from experience is the key to developing the confidence for making those crucial judgment calls that confronts parents on a daily basis.

March 29, 2013

Demonizing smokers hasn’t forced them to quit … let’s start sending them to psychiatric care instead

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

When the all the persuasion, “nudging”, shaming, harassment, and legal shenanigans haven’t worked, try taking a leaf out of the old Soviet Union playbook for dealing with dissidents:

Smoking may be a sign of psychiatric illness, experts say. Doctors should routinely consider referring people who smoke to mental health services, in case they need treatment, they add.

The controversial recommendation from the British Lung Foundation, a charity, comes in response to a major report, Smoking and Mental Health, published this week by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists with the Faculty of Public Health. It says that almost one in three cigarettes smoked in Britain today is smoked by someone with a mental disorder. When people with drug and alcohol problems are included the proportion is even higher.

The reason is that smoking rates have more than halved over the past 50 years, but the decline has not happened equally in all parts of society.

“Smoking is increasingly becoming the domain of the most disadvantaged: the poor, homeless, imprisoned and those with mental disorder. This is a damning indictment of UK public health policy and clinical service provision,” the report says.

March 26, 2013

Take diet change recommendations with a pinch of salt

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Yes, yes, I know salt is one of the most dangerous substances known to man. Well, this week, anyway. Next week they may decide to recommend doubling your daily intake instead of reducing it. It’s an example of the nanny state’s long history of providing inconsistent — and sometimes even dangerous — dietary advice:

The government told people to switch from saturated animal fats to unsaturated vegetable fats. But that advice may have killed a lot of people. As David Oliver notes, a recent study “in the British Medical Journal” shows that ”those who heeded the advice” from public-health officials “to switch from saturated fats to polyunsaturated vegetable oils dramatically reduced their odds of living to see 2013,” incurring up to a ”60% increase in risk of death by switching from animal fats to vegetable oils.” This possibly deadly medical advice has a long history:

    Fifty years ago the medical community did an about-face … and instead went all in on polyunsaturated fats. It reasoned that since (a) cholesterol is associated with cardiovascular disease and (b) polyunsaturated fats reduce serum cholesterol levels, it inescapably followed that (c) changing people’s diet from saturated fats to polyunsaturated fats would save a lot of lives. In 1984 Uncle Sam got involved – Time magazine reported on it in “Hold the Eggs and Butter” – and he made a big push for citizens to swap out animal fat in their diet for the vegetable variety and a great experiment on the American people was begun.

As Oliver, an expert on mass torts, points out, it is hard to ”think of any mass tort, or combination of mass torts, that has produced as much harm as the advice to change to a plant oil-based diet” may have done.

Some federal food-safety regulations have also harmed public health, such as the “poke and sniff” inspection method “that likely resulted in USDA inspectors transmitting filth from diseased meat to fresh meat on a daily basis.” The Obama administration has foolishly discouraged potato consumption, even though potatoes are highly nutritious, even as it has subsidized certain sugary and fatty foods, and promoted bad advice about salt.

March 24, 2013

Humans are very good at spotting patterns … even when they aren’t really there

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Slate, George Johnson explains why the human ability to detect patterns can sometimes work against us:

Lay a chessboard on a table. Then grab a handful of rice and let the grains fall and scatter where they may. They won’t spread out uniformly with the same number occupying each square. Instead there will be clusters. Now suppose that the chessboard is a map of the United States and the grains are cases of cancer.

Each year about 1.6 million cases of cancer are diagnosed in the United States, and epidemiologists regularly hear from people worried that their town has been plagued with an unusually large visitation. Time after time, the clusters have turned out to be statistical illusions — artifacts of chance.

The Erin Brockovich incident, one of the most famous, is among the many that have been debunked. Hexavalent chromium in the water supply of a small California town was blamed for causing cancer, resulting in a $333 million legal settlement and a movie starring Julia Roberts. But an epidemiological study ultimately showed that the cancer rate was no greater than that of the general population. The rate was actually slightly less.

March 14, 2013

The scare stories about increasing antibiotic resistance

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

In sp!ked, Robin Walsh debunks some of the scare factor from recent reports about antibiotic resistant diseases and the looming pandemic:

The UK’s chief medical officer (CMO), Professor Dame Sally Davies, made a splash in the media this week with her warning that antibiotic resistance is the new climate change. There is a ‘catastrophic threat’ of ‘untreatable’ diseases, she said, which promise to return us to a ‘nineteenth century’ state of affairs. The CMO has form: she warned the House of Commons health select committee about the same problem in similarly stringent terms back in January — a case not so much of apocalypse now, as apocalypse again.

As with all such stories, reading the actual CMO’s report leavens some of the hysterical excesses of the press, which were stoked up by the CMO’s excitable media appearances. Setting out the epidemiology of infectious diseases in the UK, the report highlights that while some drug-resistant infections, such as the well-known Clostridium difficile (C diff) and MRSA, are becoming less widespread, there is an increasing occurence of harder to treat multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, which, although still only in the hundreds of cases per year, are on the rise. The report states that only five antibiotics to fight such infections are currently in phase II or III trials, so the cupboard seems worryingly bare of new, necessary drugs.

So if we’re running short on drugs, how can we make more? A sensible article in the British Medical Journal from 2010 clearly set out the challenges facing the development of new antibiotics. Firstly, there are many regulatory hurdles that make running clinical trials in this area difficult. More importantly, there is a major financial disincentive for drug companies to develop antibiotics. Currently, drugs which are profitable are those for chronic conditions that are prescribed lifelong: painkillers for arthritis, diabetes drugs, and the like. A drug that you take once to cure you is unprofitable; doubly so if it is likely to be husbanded to prevent resistance developing until the patent runs out. A change in government payments to incentivise new antibiotics, like that which already applies to so-called ‘orphan’ drugs for rare diseases, would be an easy and rational step towards producing more drugs that meet our needs.

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