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Government encourages traumatic brain injury on city streets?

Government encourages traumatic brain injury on city streets?

What happened to governments sending this type of message?
Traumatic Brain Injury

I was just in LA. I was surprised and pleased when a good friend of mine mentioned this brilliant new transportation scheme the city had developed. Basically, with sponsorship from a few businesses the city had placed hundreds of electric cars at street-side parking-spots (where the car batteries recharged) throughout the most frequented neighborhoods. The idea was that anyone (tourist or city-dweller) could rent the electric car by the half-hour, paying by card at a nearby pay station. Then the renter could bring the electric car back to any of the city parking spots by the set time. What was even more convenient was that city-dwellers could get an “LA-Car Card” by paying a nominal fee that would allow them to take out electric cars for up to a half hour at a time for free! Environmental AND convenient! So of course I went straight to the nearest electric car parking-spot, paid the fee, and was soon zooming about the streets of LA. I had never driven an electric car before, so it felt a bit odd, but I was so excited by the new car scheme that I didn’t let it bother me. Everything was grand until a reckless driver ran a red light in front of me and nearly took me off the road. Thankfully it was only nearly. But with that close-call, I realized that the reason the car had felt a bit odd is that the car had NO SEATBELTS! That’s right: no seatbelts. What would have happened if I had been in a car accident?

These electric cars were environmentally friendly, yes. Super-convenient, yes. But wasn’t it irresponsible for the city to encourage needless risk-taking (and traumatic brain injury) by providing this transport without the most basic safety feature?? For worried as I was about my safety in not having a seat-belt (and I would never drive my own car without my seat-belt), I found myself renting and driving the cars for the rest of my stay just because they were so darn convenient. I oscillated between decrying the city’s irresponsible behavior and applauding their creation of such a convenient scheme. Which was the proper stance? And was there a rational reason why these cars did not have seat-belts??

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The Need for a Progressive Neuroethics

Neuroscience is challenging previously maintained notions about the structure and function of nervous systems, the basis of consciousness, and the nature of the brain-mind-self relationship. Such developments prompt re-examination of concepts of ‘personhood,’ which forms the basis of the modern social sphere and its interpretation. Contemporary neuroscience also questions traditional socially defined ontologies, fundamental social values, conventions, norms, and the ethical responsibilities relevant to constructs of individual and/or social “good.” Moreover, neuroscientific developments are rapidly being translated into medical and social contexts in the present, not at some unforeseen point in the future.

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“The Madness of Normality” – On why the DMS-5 is fundamentally wrong

The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is the world widely recognized classificatory system of psychiatric disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). It is currently under major revision; the release version DSM-5 is expected in May 2013. The “psychiatrist´s bible“ has overwhelming impact: Inclusion in the DSM carries weight far beyond the psychiatrist’s office. It has major influence on whether insurers will cover therapy for a condition, whether research will be pursued for a specific disease or whether the health technology assessment agencies will approve medications that can be marketed for it.

Many interesting issues in DSM-5 could be discussed: the prevailing categories “substance abuse” and “dependence” will be substituted by “addiction and related disorders”, gender and ethnicity specific distinctions will we introduced and instead of distinguishing different entities like “Autistic disorder” or “Asperger´s disorder”, the manual introduces the term “Autism spectrum disorder”.

In this blog post, I want to focus on one particular innovation: The introduction of so-called risk syndromes. This is a collective term for all those conditions, which do not “yet” meet the “full” clinical diagnostic criteria, e.g. for schizophrenia: In this case, you would suffer from the “attenuated psychotic syndrome”. The aim is obvious: “Young people at risk for later manifestation of a psychotic disorder can be identified“. (http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevision/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=412#). This is a clear paradigm shift towards early diagnosis and prediction in psychiatry. Is this shift ethically justified?

Read More »“The Madness of Normality” – On why the DMS-5 is fundamentally wrong

When it’s unethical to be a well-published academic

by Charles Foster

There’s a huge number of journals publishing papers about ethics. Would the world be poorer, less ethically well adjusted, or less wise, if half of them went out of business? I doubt it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Less, famously, is more. Let’s face it: there’s little or nothing that’s new in most of the papers we write. We write them because we feel that we should; because our ‘career’ or our self-esteem demands it, or, more likely, because the department needs to put in a long list of publications in order to justify its existence.  The fact of a publication is more important than its quality.

In order to justify the recycling of old thoughts, and to convince ourselves and our readers that we’re really smart, we write our papers in impenetrable jargon. Whole papers are devoted to saying in new technical language what was simply and accessibly said in words of one syllable in the 1930s. Academic enterprise has become a process of obfuscation.Read More »When it’s unethical to be a well-published academic

The Ethics of Etiquette

It is of course nearly the ‘silly season’, but the amount of attention paid in recent days to Carolyn Bourne’s critical email to her future daughter-in-law Heidi Withers about her manners is remarkable. Most of the rules Bourne mentions concern the table manners of guests: 1) Don’t declare what you will and will not eat.… Read More »The Ethics of Etiquette

Ban the beets?

The hot new performance-enhancing drug is…beetroot juice!? (original paper)

Nitrates in food reduces the oxygen cost of some forms of exercise and improves high-intensity exercise tolerance. So the researchers gave half a litre of beetroot juice (which is rich in nitrate) or a nitrate depleted placebo to club-level competitive cyclists. The nitrate juice produced better cycling performance when compared to the placebo. On a 16.1 km race beet juice reduced the total time by 2.7% – not much, but presumably enough to matter in a competition.

In any case, this is fun for doping discussions. Should we ban athletes from quaffing beet juice?

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Artificial meat – the best idea you’ve heard all year!

Last week scientists from Oxford and Amsterdam announced the results of an investigation into the environmental impact of growing meat artificially in labs rather than keeping livestock. They found that greenhouse gases would be reduced by up to 96%. In addition, cultured meat production would only require 1% of the land and 4% of the water that conventional meat does. They estimated that if more resources were put into the research, it would take about five years to produce artificial meat with the consistency of mincemeat, and another five years to produce steaks. Their conclusion is modest: “We are not saying that we could, or would necessarily want to, replace conventional meat with its cultured counterpart right now.”  This modesty is misplaced – it should be considered not just desirable, but hugely important to replace conventional with artificial meat.Read More »Artificial meat – the best idea you’ve heard all year!

“Tourists are ambassadors in bathing suits” – On the ethics of choosing a holiday destination

Michael Allmaier, an Austrian journalist, wrote a controversial article in the German newspaper “Die Zeit” (http://www.zeit.de/2011/26/Reiseziele). It is devoted to the question, on why to pick an “ethical” holiday destination. He claims, that tourists should have a political attitude towards choosing a country to travel to. This inspired me to write this post on the ethics of selecting a holiday destination:

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Shocking behavior: Government scare tactics, smoking, and public health

Coming to a mini-mart near you. The FDA has just approved nine very grisly looking warning labels—to be slapped on cigarette packs throughout the USA. But will they work to cut smoking … or will they backfire?

Here are some of the top reasons why these labels may not only fail to achieve the FDA’s desired outcome, but could actually do the opposite – leading to more smoking, not less.Read More »Shocking behavior: Government scare tactics, smoking, and public health

A Reflection on Confronting Evil

The New York state legislature has nearly approved a bill endorsing same-sex marriage, finally bringing the state in line with such bastions of extravagant liberalism as Argentina, Nepal, and Iowa. Taking to the airwaves in the tradition of Father Charles Coughlin, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan declared the legislation an “ominous threat”. Same-sex marriage is “detrimental for the common good,” said the Archbishop; it violates “the natural law that’s embedded in every man and woman”.

This post is not about gay marriage; I will not present a positive argument for the moral necessity of marriage equality. Similarly, I will not write a post about the moral necessity of racial integration in public education, or about the moral necessity of women’s suffrage. The mere raising of such issues, in a context of argument, implies an open question about the simple human dignity of the people affected. My starting point is that marriage equality is such an issue. My question, instead, is this: how we are we to deal with those among us most responsible for our collective failure to decisively conclude this argument, the very existence of which is morally repugnant?

Read More »A Reflection on Confronting Evil