Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

On the ASBH_Lit&Med listserv, Rebecca Garden solicited views on the flap overJudge Sonia Sotomayor's apparently shocking admission that she views her capacity for empathy as a strong suit of her judicial temperament. This has provoked controversy. My comments:

As a lawyer and a medical humanist, it has been difficult for me to make any sense of the certitude with which so many commentators and legal scholars seem to profess that empathy has no basis in judicial decisionmaking. Such an idea seems so absurd to me I would barely know where to begin critiquing it, although that has never stopped me before.

(more...)

In my recent blog about the Red Flags rule, GreenLeaves commented that biometric checking would help reduce errors by establishing identity and uncovering fraud.

Using biometrics to verify identity seems like a good idea, so I met with Jim Sullivan from BIO-key, a leading provider of biometric solutions.

In the past, I've been reluctant to adopt biometrics because of the expense of buying fingerprint or Iris scanners for each of my 8000 client devices.

(more...)

By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and science writer for Lumos Labs .

It seems that working memory training may work by physically altering the brain. Stockholm Brain Institute researchers put healthy people through working memory exercises for 35 minutes per day over a period of 5 weeks. Changes in dopamine receptor density were measured with positron emission tomography (PET) before and after the training.

(more...)

Two of my "must-read" journals have released new Tables of Contents.

Topics covered in the new Journal for the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciencesinclude London barber-surgeons 1570-1640, and vivisection, suffragete force-feeding, and responses to scientific medicine in the UK 1870-1920.

Topics covered in the new Medical Humanitiesinclude Wittgensteinian approaches to psychiatric diagnoses, phenomenologic and disability studies interpretations of heart transplantation, and a central text in literature & medicine, Middlemarch.

(more...)

One of the most effective and thoughtful critics of traditionally dominant traditions of bioethics practice in the West is Leigh Turner.Turner recently remarkedinan articlethat an increasing range ofvoices and approachesis present in bioethics scholarship. While I spend a fair amount of time on MH Blog spelling out some of my concerns with traditional conventions of suchscholarship, it isimportant toevaluate the broad scope of the work with an eye to Turner's point. To that end, I am especially pleased to note an article published inthe current Hastings Center Report, which epitomizeswhat Cat Myser has taken to calling an anthropologically or social-science informed bioethics. The title of thearticle is Conversations with Kidney Vendors in Pakistan: An Ethnographic Study.

(more...)

So Blue Shield of Californiawins the first case it’s fighting over the recission issue. But it’s in very strange circumstances. The plaintiffs (a couple trying to get coverage for a doctor they like that wasn't in their employer’s plan) changed their story and said that they had lied on their application.

Blue Shield’s lawyer even went after St. Lisa herself!

Blue Shield's lawyer, Jacobs, also complained about "unrelenting negative coverage in the Los Angeles Times." Despite that, he said, "we fought this lawsuit because we knew we had behaved properly and we were confident that the evidence would speak for itself. It has."

(more...)

Quarrel is easier to be prevented, than settled.

In family life you can do without quarrels!

1. Take interest in partner

Try to get to know him better: his interests, opinion, hobbies. Try to find out not only his positive qualities, but also understand his weaknesses. Those who are interested in only their own problems, would have difficulties to communicate with people and, of course, with their partners. Understanding of another greatly reduces the number of occasions to show aggression.

(more...)

We've known since for at least forty years that supply rather than demand is the primary determinant of healthcare utilization (and here again we are discussing healthcare rather than health, which I bring up here only to emphasize the distinction). Studies surrounding the spate of hospital construction followingHill-Burtondemonstrated this perfectly well, as has decades of excellent research from the Dartmouth Atlas.

But, as any medical humanitiesinterlocutor understands, stories can be persuasive in ways that an army of facts and data cannot. Thus, I want to particularly recommend Atul Gawande's current article in the New Yorker entitled The Cost Conundrum. No summary would do it justice, as it is a tour de force, even while it simply highlights phenomena that we have known about for decades. Gawande has been on a particular roll of late, in my view, and this latest article continues his outstanding work. Here I excerpt a paragraph that Brad F. foundrevealing:

(more...)

In a recent blog post on THCB, Mark Leavitt wrote this about me: "[Dr. Kibbe's] repeated use of falsehoods and innuendo to attack CCHIT have found an audience in the national media, reaching a level that can no longer be ignored. By implication, he demeans the integrity of everyone who has contributed to that work – and I must rise to their defense."

The truth is that I respect both Dr. Leavitt and, equally important, the many fine people who have contributed to CCHIT work. I regret that he has made me the target of his anger about investigative reporting in the Washington Post, which I certainly did not initiate.

(more...)

In 1953, Charles Erwin Wilson, then GM president, was named by Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. When he was asked during the hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee if as secretary of defense he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered affirmatively but added that he could not conceive of such a situation "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa". Later this statement was often misquoted, suggesting that Wilson had said simply, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." (From Wikipedia’s History of General Motors)

(more...)