Written by Roman Gaehwiler
Reconstructive plastic surgery to correct ravages of disease and injuries as well as gross physical abnormalities constitutes a core medical practice. Reconstructive procedures, however, lie along a continuum, without any clear boundary between therapeutic reconstructive surgery for diagnosable problem and purely cosmetic surgery.[1]
Read More »Cosmetic Surgery – What is the Matter with Dr Salesman?
Largest oil spill in U.S. history continues to devastate
Gulf wildlife while the press and independent scientists are continually denied access to
spill site and surrounding beaches.
by Stephanie Malik
On April 20 a wellhead on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling
platform blew out in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 40 miles southeast of the
Louisiana coastline. What BP had initially claimed would be a spill with
“minimal impact”, 69 days later now constitutes the largest offshore oil spill
in U.S. history. Today the well is conservatively estimated to be leaking at a
rate of 1,900,000–3,000,000 litres per day—though several expert estimates
based on footage of the spill suggest the actual rate is more likely to be 3 to
5 times higher than this. The unusually wide disparity in expert estimates is
due to the fact that BP has continually denied the requests of a number of independent
scientists to set up instruments on the ocean floor that could measure the rate
of the leak more accurately. “The answer is ‘no’ to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom
Mueller, said earlier this month. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts
now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response
effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”
The question of the social utility of the financial services and of the appropriate modes of remuneration of its actors has occupied a central place at the G20 meeting held in
The recent interview by Prospect magazine of the FSA Chairman Adair offers a case in point, as does his recent speech at Mansion House. Turner suggests that the financial services sector should slim down to a more ‘socially useful’ size and reduce bankers’ pay accordingly. He also estimates that market deregulation has led to an oversized financial sector. Finally, he proposes that regulators should step in to reconnect the size, profit and pay level of the sector to what is ‘socially optimal’.
Though it may sound intuitive, the idea of a ‘social optimum’ that could be used as a guideline for regulating finance is ambiguous and deserves a close look.
Economists have long used Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita as a proxy measure for the average level of wellbeing within a country. GDP is a measure of the goods and services produced in a country and is a fairly good proxy for material wealth. However, it fails to capture many other factors that are clearly important for wellbeing: for example, amount of leisure time, health, quality of one's environment, wealth distribution, employment rates, and changes in wealth over a lifetime. Some negative influences on wellbeing – such as crime – may even contribute positively to GDP since the costly government responses to them are included in a country's GDP. The gap between GDP and wellbeing obviously has important practical implications since policies correlated with higher (lower) GDP are likely to be adopted (rejected) for that reason.
On 14 September an expert group commissioned by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and and including no less than five Nobel prize laureates released a report recommending that official statisticians should move to a wider measure of wellbeing that takes into account some of the factors that GDP leaves out. This move away from 'GDP fetishism' has long been championed by the commission's chair, Joseph Stiglitz.
Everyone seems to acknowledge the problems with GDP, but the commission's report gets a cool response from some of the business press, with the adjective 'Orwellian' cropping up here and there. The Economist admits that 'broadening official statistics is a good idea in its own right', but emphasises that 'these are early days' and remains sceptical about the practicalities of moving away from GDP. The primary concern is about potential abuse of a less well defined measure by governments or interest groups and a resulting lack of public trust. The message seems to be that it's fine to research broader measures and to start collecting figures, but until something robust is found, GDP per capita should remain the gold standard. Policymakers shouldn't put any credence in the broader measures yet.
Last week the US congress agreed to a US$7 billion bail-out for the banking sector. This Tuesday, the UK government followed suit with its own bail-out – though with some fairly serious strings attached. In the US case in particular, there was some strong public opposition to the bail-out, with many people claiming that bankers should be made to feel the consequences of their own bad decisions. In response, those who favoured the bail-out tended to make one or both of two main responses. First, they claimed that the bail-out would make everyone better off, and/or second, they implied that the feelings of resentment which many harbour towards bankers are not really the sort of consideration on which economic policy should be based.
Ben Goldacre (who seems to be one of this blog’s favorite
sources) tears into the Durham fish oil trial.
to test whether giving omega-3 supplements would improve the GCSE scores of
children. Unfortunately there were clear problems with the trial design. In the
face of criticism the organisations involved refused to give out information on
the experimental setup and even claimed not to be running it as a trial (despite numerous statements to the
press). GCSE scores did not generally increase. Despite this, now positive results are claimed – largely because what is measured has been changed to suit
the data. The most vexing thing about the whole affair is that the
trial could have been done in a proper manner for the same amount of money.
Read More »The price of ignorance: the Durham study and research ethics
California has sent cease-and-desist letters to firms offering Web gene tests to consumers. The legal reason is that California law requires a licenced physician to order any lab tests. This follows from a similar crackdown in New York. Wired responds by top 10 reasons that regulators should not hinder genetic testing. Is there any good reason to limit public access to genetic testing besides protecting incumbents and gatekeepers?
Drug company Merck and its product Vioxx are in the news again. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has examined the documents from the legal proceedings against Merck in connection with the withdrawal of Vioxx from the market in 2004. From their analysis, a significant number of journal articles – mostly review articles rather than articles reporting clinical trials – were written in-house and senior academics were brought in late to be lead named author. At least one of these academics has disputed the accusations made in the JAMA article.
Alcohol abuse in the UK has been escalating for decades, contributing to crime, unemployment, illness and death. Last month, the government reported that alcohol-related deaths in the UK have doubled over the last 15 years to almost 9,000. One prominent factor in these increases is the price of alcohol, which has remained relatively stable despite increases in income over the years, and has thus become much cheaper in real terms. The cheaper it is, the more of it people consume, and the more ill effects are felt. The British Medical Association has thus called on the government to prohibit the cheap sale of alcohol, and in a surprising turn of events, the dominant supermarket chain, Tesco, has echoed this call.
