Post your questions etc. (But take some time to enjoy Spring Break, too!)
T 12 - Beyond 18-20; Report: Brandon Alston-Selecting Traits, Selecting Children.We forgot to turn in exams, please bring them to turn in today.
T 12 - Beyond 18-20; Report: Brandon Alston-Selecting Traits, Selecting Children.We forgot to turn in exams, please bring them to turn in today.
1. Why does every doctor boast of being guided by the New England Journal of Medicine?
2. What happened when Dennis Cotter submitted an editorial on the drug epoetin?
3. Who are "the best drug reps of all"?
4. Give an example of how bad drugs can be made to look good.
5. What's the paradoxical result of being published in a medical journal?
6. How did the publisher Elsevier damage its own reputation?
7. What was Jonas Salk's view of "entities beneficial to all humankind"?
8. What would likely happen if the baby trade moved to a donor model?
9. What preferences account for warning labels and dosage information on drugs?
10. What's a "mundane" example of appropriate parental control over the fate of their offspring?
2. What happened when Dennis Cotter submitted an editorial on the drug epoetin?
3. Who are "the best drug reps of all"?
4. Give an example of how bad drugs can be made to look good.
5. What's the paradoxical result of being published in a medical journal?
6. How did the publisher Elsevier damage its own reputation?
7. What was Jonas Salk's view of "entities beneficial to all humankind"?
8. What would likely happen if the baby trade moved to a donor model?
9. What preferences account for warning labels and dosage information on drugs?
10. What's a "mundane" example of appropriate parental control over the fate of their offspring?
DQ
- Are there any truly objective and reliable forums for presentation and discussion of the latest medical research?
- Do you look at journal ads? Are you influenced by them? In general, do you consider yourself immune to illicit marketing appeals presented under a guise of "evidence" and "ground-breaking research"?
- Would you ever be liable to undue influence from "advertorials," "educational opportunities," and "junkets" sponsored by the Pharmaceutical industry? How can you be sure?
- How can we tell the difference between legitimate clinical trials and those whose results have been "tarted up"? 204
- How can "medically illogical but financially strategic moves" be effectively regulated in our system? 206
- Should medical journals drop all pharmaceutical advertizing? Why haven't they?
- Should patients be compensated when their contributions to biobanks lead to profitable products and innovations? 214
- Is laissez-faire the right regulatory response to the baby market?
- Should there be age limits on fertility treatments? 218
- Is it wrong for biological parents to profit from relinquishing their offspring? 220
- Should we favor policies that promote and favor adoption over fertility treatments? 222
- Should society regulate gender demographics?
John Oliver on marketing to doctors... on gene editing... on vaccines... on opioids... on Dr. Oz & nutritional supplements... on mental health... on scientific studies
Th 14 - Beyond 21-22
Th 14 - Beyond 21-22
1. What is the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's position on elective non-medical egg freezing?
2. The U.S. is the only developed country in the world without what?
3. Henrietta Lacks's cells became the first what?
4. Henrietta's chart described her "household" as what?
5. Elsie Lacks was described as "touched," meaning what?
6. Why wasn't carcinoma in situ treated by most doctors in 1951?
7. Who was George Gey?
8. Why wasn't Gey's assistant excited about the new cell sample?
9. The HeLa cells weren't merely surviving, they were _____.
10. What were Henrietta's children's consuming questions?
2. The U.S. is the only developed country in the world without what?
3. Henrietta Lacks's cells became the first what?
4. Henrietta's chart described her "household" as what?
5. Elsie Lacks was described as "touched," meaning what?
6. Why wasn't carcinoma in situ treated by most doctors in 1951?
7. Who was George Gey?
8. Why wasn't Gey's assistant excited about the new cell sample?
9. The HeLa cells weren't merely surviving, they were _____.
10. What were Henrietta's children's consuming questions?
DQ
- What family-friendly workplace policies would you advocate?
- Is the egg freezing benefit at Apple and Facebook a progressive or retrograde policy, with respect to gender equality?
- Is Henrietta Lacks still "all but forgotten"?
- Is consent to "any operative procedures... deem[ed] necessary" too broad? 234
Supplements Won’t Prevent Dementia. But These Steps Might.
Scientists still have no magic shield against Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Yet there is evidence that some strategies may help
....the most helpful approach Donna Kaye Hill uses to protect herself from dementia probably isn’t taking fish oil.
It includes using medication to control her blood pressure. And reading biographies and mysteries and joining a book group with friends. And taking a four- or five-mile walk, five days a week, with a yellow Labrador named Annie.
==
Family Medicine, Blood Relations
At the end of his life, my father went from doctor to patient, from scientist to subject.By James Marcus
It includes using medication to control her blood pressure. And reading biographies and mysteries and joining a book group with friends. And taking a four- or five-mile walk, five days a week, with a yellow Labrador named Annie.
==
Family Medicine, Blood Relations
At the end of his life, my father went from doctor to patient, from scientist to subject.By James Marcus
a staffer at the hospital introduced my mother to words we didn’t want to hear: “palliative care.”
It shouldn’t be so. The word comes from the Latin pallium, which is a cloak. It means that the patient will be enveloped, protected, wrapped in a mantle of painkilling techniques that are often pharmaceutical but may also consist of old-fashioned human tenderness. It’s what we should want for the people we love. But it also signals that the fight is over. It is a white flag, a coming to terms with extinction.
My mother was given a choice between moving my father to a nursing home and moving him to a hospice facility. She wasn’t sure. The decision was further complicated in late April, when he sat up in bed for a moment and told her, “I don’t know if I can beat this, but I want to live.” How could she now consign him to a hospice, which was a terminus—the end of it all? She was terrified that he might regain consciousness there, ask the nurse where he was, and abandon all hope when he heard the answer. She couldn’t stand the thought...
The New Yorker (@NewYorker) | |
Measles is highly contagious and potentially deadly—and entirely preventable through vaccination. So why would people choose to ignore the solid, evidence-based recommendations of the government and the health-care system? nyer.cm/NQ3Xj5h
|
By Masha Gessen
...Measles is a quintessential political issue of the late two-thousand-teens, one that turns on the conflict between facts and lies. There has even been some reporting that Russian trolls have been spreading anti-vax propaganda. If they are, they are tapping into existing tensions and preconceptions, just like they do when they spread electoral propaganda. On Facebook, a tiny cluster of anti-vax pages seems to have disproportionate reach. And, just as with other kinds of propaganda, the key question is what makes the soil fertile for it.
Why would people who care about their children’s health choose to ignore the solid, evidence-based recommendations of the government and the health-care system? The simple answer is because they don’t trust the government or the health-care system. Theirs is not an unreasonable position. The American health-care system is opaque and profit-driven. Working in concert with the pharmaceutical industry, it gave us the deadly opioid epidemic. It gives us the highest infant-mortality and the lowest life-expectancy rates among the world’s developed countries—as well as the highest bills...
==
Samantha Bee Update-
Slugging the Sacklers
A lawsuit against Purdue Pharma has thrown back the curtain on the Sacklers, one of America’s wealthiest families. Their company produced OxyContin and subsequently covered up the drug’s addictive qualities, according to the suit. Until recently, the Sacklers have been known for their philanthropy more than their business. But that is changing, as Samantha Bee pointed out in a withering segment of “Full Frontal” on Wednesday...
& SB on the Fox News White House
==
Directions to the Undiscovered Country
Why would people who care about their children’s health choose to ignore the solid, evidence-based recommendations of the government and the health-care system? The simple answer is because they don’t trust the government or the health-care system. Theirs is not an unreasonable position. The American health-care system is opaque and profit-driven. Working in concert with the pharmaceutical industry, it gave us the deadly opioid epidemic. It gives us the highest infant-mortality and the lowest life-expectancy rates among the world’s developed countries—as well as the highest bills...
==
Samantha Bee Update-
Slugging the Sacklers
A lawsuit against Purdue Pharma has thrown back the curtain on the Sacklers, one of America’s wealthiest families. Their company produced OxyContin and subsequently covered up the drug’s addictive qualities, according to the suit. Until recently, the Sacklers have been known for their philanthropy more than their business. But that is changing, as Samantha Bee pointed out in a withering segment of “Full Frontal” on Wednesday...
& SB on the Fox News White House
==
Directions to the Undiscovered Country
Advice for the Dying (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death, by Sallie Tisdale, Allen & Unwin, 256 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-1760632700
“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life,” cautioned a certain nineteenth century German philologist with a nose for mischief. “The living is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.” As if to echo Nietzsche’s oft-quoted formula, the lead title of Tisdale’s book in its original US impression was Advice for Future Corpses. The apparent sanitisation of the title for the British market is rather an irony, given that it is part of the author’s purpose to confront a topic she insists is too often hidden, evaded or euphemised. The opening page states:
In Victorian times, children were kept away from anything regarding sex or birth, but they sat at deathbeds, witnessed deaths, and helped with the care of the body. Now children may watch the birth of a sibling and never see a dead body … many people reach the end of their own lives having never seen a dying person.
The problem of offering a practical perspective on death is summarised at the outset. “Birth and death are the only human acts we cannot practise,” writes Tisdale, and so “death looms ahead as a kind of theory.” There are no dress rehearsals for death. Dreamless sleeps will be woken from; the deaths of others do not necessarily carry instruction as to how one ought to go into that good night, gentle or raging. Practical advice then must deal with the concrete details of death; Tisdale’s book addresses both future corpses and their carers and families, and indirectly, health professionals and advocates of varying stripe. The advice is direct. The grammatical mood is usually imperative, the mood and tone of the author running the spectrum from compassionate to faintly peremptory. The book is “about preparing for your own death and for the deaths of people close to you”. A bank of experience built up as a palliative nurse makes Tisdale a singularly qualified counsellor of corpses-to-be, and allows her to lay out the various dull, uninspiring, sometimes absurd practicalities attending the business of dying while avowing simultaneously “the strange, undeniable fact that the presence of death can be joyful”...
the book proper closes with a three-page paean to life, a fragile and ever-endangered thing, which only because it is hedged about by death offers delight and beauty. The chapter celebrates joy; and as Tisdale insists, joy could attend the immediate presence of death, so death’s general, pervasive presence in our lives confers meaning on them. Mortality and vulnerability are the larger context required to make one’s experiences special. These are not original sentiments, but Tisdale has in a sense earned this closing through the hard, clear-eyed look at death and dying that precedes it. Were one averse to this late turn to the lyrical, there remains that hardness and clarity to remind one that the living is after all but the rarer type of the dead, and that to be grateful for life must entail some gratitude to the dead – not only one’s direct ancestors, but to the countless, mostly nameless host gone before one to fatten the maggots.
The Lancet recently established a Commission on the Value of Death (which includes Irish authors Mark O’Connell and Seamus O’Mahony), a marvellous way of framing the issue that reminds us that people must die so that others may live, and that to strive after, never mind achieve, immortality (the dream of certain Silicon Valley denizens, as O’Connell records in To Be a Machine) would be a scandalous violation of the intergenerational contract with future humans. One might recall Elias Canetti’s analysis of the figure of the survivor in his eccentric opus Crowds and Power, his assertion that we draw sustenance from the deaths of others and his proposition that survival where others have succumbed is productive of the feeling of power. One might find the ground for a sober reckoning with death in the thought that one’s own flourishing is purchased at the cost of others’ perishing, and thereby discover some renewed solidarity with both the living and the dead; and finally meditate upon a cast-off thought from Canetti’s journals which stands, solitary and gemlike, among the jottings: “Perhaps every breath you take is someone else’s last.” Paul O'Mahoney
==
Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH and former head of the Human Genome Project, tells Dr. Jon LaPook that Sickle Cell Anemia arises “because of one single letter in the DNA that is misplaced, a ‘T’ that should have been an ‘A.’” https://t.co/LMAEF7hd3p— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 10, 2019
March 12
ReplyDelete18-20
Quiz Questions:
Who remarked that the pharmaceutical industry’s “advertising dollar could be a two-edged sword”? (231)
What technique, which consists of excessively scrutinizing data, is used to make a trial appealing? (234)
What did John Abramson dismiss much of the content of contemporary US medical journals as? (236)
What UK agency oversees their reproductive trade? (246)
What was the decision of Moore v. Regents of the University of California? (243)
DQ: Would a decision like the one from Moore v. Regents of the University of California hold up in a court today?
Would a regulated market for baby trade benefit from regulations on the strict side, or would it thrive in moderate complacency?
My pagination is different. 231=202, 234=205... 243=214 etc.
DeleteAlt quiz questions
ReplyDelete1. Richard Smith said what concerning journals and the pharmaceutical industry? 202
2. According to a review performed by the Annals of Internal Medicine, what percentage of their advertising contained no educational value? 202
3. What percentage of medical journal advertising revenue is provided by pharmaceuticals? 203
4. Instead of handing out branded trinkets, now pharma subsidizes what kind of opertunities? 203
5. What is an increasingly popular HARLOT variant? 205
6. What drugs were triggering heart attacks and strokes? How was this data handled? 210
7. What website offers tools for detecting undue influence in medical research and publishing? 211
8. What was the decision in Myriad? 212
9. What conservative judge delivered the unanimous opinion of the court? 213
10. If the baby trade were to develop, what concept need it acquire? 219
Dq: Would a decision like the one from Moore v. Regents of the University of California hold up in a court today?
ReplyDeleteThis case was a California Supreme Court case and considering how liberal the state is now, and I assume it was maybe a little less so then, the ruling is surprising, although this issue doesn't necessarily seem conservative or liberal. I believe if it were to somehow travel up the court pipeline again and were chosen to be heard by the Supreme Court they would most likely follow the precedent set by Myriad. Justice Thomas I believe is currently the most conservative member of the court and if he voted with the court on Myriad, and felt so strongly to deliver the opinion, I think it would be resolved pretty quickly.
Dq: should society regulate gender demographics?
ReplyDeleteNo. I find I am in line with our writers who have argued against gender selection. Most of the arguments we've read are concerning the preference of one gender over another, but I think similar arguments might be made about trying to achieve a gender balance. I could foresee circumstances where families are limited to one child of each sex. I don't see any way this could be truly beneficial to society, but instead places unnecessary limitations on a family.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAlternative Questions:
ReplyDelete1. What is ghost writing? (209)
2. Who created the Polio vaccine? (212)
3. What is significant about the case of John Moore? (213)
4. The market for ______ stretches across the globe and encompasses hundreds of thousands of people. (216)
1) When a medical expert who scripts a medical article to sell a product or for other marketing needs.
Delete2) Jonas Salk
3)It established a principle that patients have no "property interest in most of the nonreproductive calls or tissue taken from them"
4)babies
Alt Quiz Questions:
ReplyDelete1. By 200, how much were drugmakers paying physicians for trinkets, financial grants, etc.? (204)
2. What is HARLOT's advice to those who would serve Pharma? (205)
3. What did advertisements not mention and journal articles try to hide anout Celebrex, Vioxx, and other Cox-2 drugs? (210)
4. What did Salk refuse to do? (212)
5. What is the litigation surrounding John Moore's spleen an important example of? (213)
6. What principle in property law did Moore v. Regents of the University of California enshrine that haunts us to this day? (214)
7. How many children were born via IVF in the US in 2001? (216)
8. What act required fertility clinics to submit basic statistical information to the CDC? (221)
9. What are societies four options to keep the baby market from ballooning out of control? (225)
1) 6 billion
ReplyDelete2) test against placebos, minimal dose,maximal dose, and in very small groups.
3)That they were triggering heart attacks and stokes
4)refused to patent the vaccine
5) Property law
7)41,000 children
8)Fertility Clinic and Certification Act
9)allowing supply and demand to determine the baby business, ban it all together, treat high-technology reproduction as it treats organ transplants, or US society decide how to regulate the baby trade, and how to make a more equitable market.
1. The workforces of Apple and Facebook are ____ percent and _____ percent male. (226)
ReplyDelete2. What did Robin Marantz Henig say about the egg-freezing cocktail party and the “Three F’s”? (227)
3. Henriette lacks died ____ months after the initial tissue samples were taken. (228)
4. How much did “one scientist” speculate that weight of all the HeLa cells would be if you piled them all up? (229)
5. The children of Henrietta are “still wrestling with feelings of betrayal and fear”, but also what? (237)
6. A result of the formulate of the HeLa cell line was the birth of the multibillion dollar industry of selling what? (237)
7. George Gey and Margaret Gey spent how long working to grow malignant cells outside of the body and for what purpose? (234)
Replying to Elizabeth's quiz q's:
Delete1. 69-70% male
2. No F's left over for failure rates!
3. She died 8 months later.
4. 50 million tons!
5. Pride
6. Selling human biological materials.
7. 3 decades, they were searching for a cure for cancer
Dq: what family friendly work policies would you advocate?
ReplyDeleteThe obvious first is paid maternal leave. A less than obvious second would be paternal leave. The weight of responsibility shouldn't be placed solely on the mother for infant care. Secondly, the value of pair bonding in those initial stages between father and child is undervalued.
Provisions for child care in some form could be considered. Some companies supply gym memberships to their workers (y'all gotta look gerd), child care should be a higher priority. Also, some companies do provide this, but all companies providing it is ideal.
I agree with you, I have heard of instances where the fathers asks for parental leave and has been met with some push back from their employer, as gender norms are reshaped, we have to take them into consideration when making these policies.
DeleteI agree with that, Lily. More and more fathers are raising their children. Becoming "stay at home" dads. This change in the normal gender roles needs to be considered more by companies and societies.
DeleteI certainly have no problem with paid maternal or paternal leave, but I do think it's important to note that not all companies can actually afford to provide this. I'm excluding the huge Fortune 500 companies for obvious reasons, but smaller businesses may not be able to pay for such things. That's not to say that small business owners wouldn't let mothers or fathers have the time off, they just might not be able to afford to pay them. Usually, it's not a case of the owner being greedy. It's a matter of the money just not being there.
DeleteDQ: Is the egg freezing benefit at Apple and Facebook a progressive or retrograde policy, with respect to gender equality? A policy like this, which I would argue aligns with the normal behavior among young couples and young women, is in fact a progressive policy. I think regardless of the way employers intentions with the inclusion of this benefit in their health plans, it still offers a solution to women who feel that they are not financially stable to have a family or are simply waiting for the right person to come along and create a family with. I see the danger in the unknown effects this can have on children and mothers who participate in this procedure, however I see this as a minimal risk when it comes to allowing yourself to prepare as much as you can for a motherhood.
ReplyDeleteDQ: Is Henrietta Lacks still "all but forgotten"? I do see her as forgotten because this is again one of those instances where the system has allowed a marginalized person to be used as a means to an end. Her story should be highlighted more than it is for the progress that it has allowed in cancer research. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
I agree with you in that Henrietta Lacks deserves more credit and to be highlighted for her involvement in this incredible and life-saving research that her cells have been a part of.
DeleteExtra QQ:
ReplyDelete1)What do companies like EggBanxx want us to believe and do? pg 226
2)What are the risks of IVF? pg 227
3)What does Jessica Cussins say we need instead of encouraging invasive procedures? pg 227
4)Who tells the story of Henrietta Lacks? pg 228
5)What did doctors think Henrietta knot was at first? pg 230
6)What procedure that TeLinde do that critics thought was extreme and unnecessary? pg 233
1) That freezing eggs is a way for families to raise a family at their own pace, away from pressures of the workplace and biological clock.
Delete2) Multiple gestation, preterm birth, and fetal anomalies.
3) Family-friendly workplace policies.
4) Rebecca Skloot.
5) A sore from syphilis.
6) Treated carcinoma in situ aggressively, often removing the cervix, uterus, and most of the vagina.
Dq: is Henrietta lacks still "all but forgotten"
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't call her a household name, but where I work I've actually run into a good number of people (who are mostly educated anyway) who are aware of her story.
Given her contribution though, I do believe some form of reimbursement to her relatives is in order. Actors and musicians receive royalties, a similar system may be in order here.
DQ:
ReplyDeleteI am curious ass to what some of you think about egg freezing and in virto fertilization. Given the cost vs. benefits, would any of you be willing to take part in these procedures? Why or Why not?
Is consent to "any operative procedures... deem[ed] necessary" too broad?
ReplyDeleteI’m going to assume here that this would most likely refer to patients who have to be put into an altered state, such as under anesthesia of some sort or another kind of cognition-impairing drug, since every mentally competent adult has the right to refuse care at any time. In most cases, I would say that consent to any procedures deemed necessary is not too broad a statement. Medicine is a complex and often surprising profession (there’s a reason it’s called “practicing medicine” after all), and every eventuality simply can’t be accounted for in a patient briefing session. A surgeon may put his patient under to perform a routine operation only to have a condition unknown to either party drastically alter the proceedings. The doctor can’t simply wake his patient back up to ask for more consent while in the operating room. Now, that being said, I don’t believe that doctors and medical professionals should be able to use blanket statements to just do whatever they want either. They should make earnest efforts to inform patients about possible and probable outcomes as well as potential complications, and the patient should also understand that, while the professionals are doing their best to inform them, they are only human and can’t foresee every possible outcome. For simple cases, perhaps defining the terms of “necessary” is…well necessary. After all, for a simple appendectomy, it’s unlikely a surgeon needs to go opening up the skull. That’s an extreme example, but the idea is pretty clear. However, the gray area, and where I think the blanket statements apply more frequently, comes during longer procedures and more medically complex patients, where things can go wrong and may need to be taken care of quickly and timely. In essence, I would like to see “necessary” with a few guidelines. I don’t want to hamstring physicians from doing what’s best for their patient and the best time, but I also don’t want procedures performed that aren’t beneficial to said patient.