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The psychology of healthcare reform

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

CNET News - By Adam Richardson - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - The House has passed the first comprehensive reform package of the health insurance industry in decades, which is now up for debate in the Senate. This is a highly complex issue, but there are some quite basic reasons why it's so difficult to accomplish significant reform, and in part these have to do with psychological responses to change and uncertainty.

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Michael Specter Fires Bullets of Data at Cozy Antiscience in ‘Denialism'

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Janet Maslin - Nov. 09 (Review) - The term “denialism,” used by Mr. Specter as an all-purpose, pop-sci buzzword, is defined by him as what happens “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.” In this hotly argued yet data-filled diatribe, Mr. Specter skips past some of the easiest realms of science baiting (i.e., evolution) to address more current issues, from the ethical questions raised by genome research to the furiously fought debate over the safety of childhood vaccinations.

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Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Steven Pinker - Nov. 07 (Opinion) - Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cézanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg-O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in “Whole Lotta Love”? Neither had I, until I began this collection by the indefatigably curious journalist Malcolm Gladwell. The familiar jacket design, with its tiny graphic on a spare background, reminds us that Gladwell has become a brand. He is the author of the mega-best sellers “The Tipping Point,” “Blink” and “Outliers”; a popular speaker on the Dilbert circuit; and a prolific contributor to The New Yorker, where the 19 articles in “What the Dog Saw” were originally published. This volume includes prequels to those books and other examples of Gladwell’s stock in trade: counterintuitive findings from little-known experts.

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Happy Days

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Hanna Rosin - Nov. 05 (Review) - I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” When I was a young child, my family moved to the United States from Israel, where churlishness is a point of pride. As I walked around wearing what I considered a neutral expression, strangers would often shout, “What’s the matter, honey? Smile!” as if visible cheerfulness were some kind of requirement for citizenship. Now, in Barbara Ehrenreich’s deeply satisfying book, I finally have a moral defense for my apparent scowl. All the background noise of America — motivational speakers, positive prayer, the new Journal of Happiness Studies — these are not the markers of happy, well-adjusted psyches uncorrupted by irony, as I have always been led to believe. Instead, Ehrenreich argues convincingly that they are the symptoms of a noxious virus infecting all corners of American life that goes by the name “positive thinking.” What started as a 19th-century response to dour Calvinism has, over the years, turned equally oppressive, Ehrenreich writes. Stacks of best sellers equate corporate success with a positive attitude. Flimsy medical research claims that cheerfulness can improve the immune system. In a growing number of American churches, confessions of poverty or distress amount to heresy. America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness.

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The iconoclastic wisdom of David Nutt

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Dorothy Rowe - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - In the late 19th century the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described depression as a long-term illness that returned frequently and would become chronic – a definition that was accepted by British psychiatrists. And when the first antidepressants were created in the 60s, psychiatrists were delighted that they now had what seemed to be a cure for depression. However, it soon became clear to depressed people – and to many of us working in the psychiatric system – that antidepressants did not prevent recurrence and chronicity. Psychiatrists did not wish to admit this, because the only other treatment that we had for depression was ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). The pharmaceutical companies then advised psychiatrists to prescribe antidepressants as prophylactics that would stop the person getting depressed again. The DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Revision Fourth Edition) contains the diagnosis "Major Depressive Disorder in Full Remission". Once depressed, always depressed, no matter how well you feel.

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Climate Change Deniers Are Not Skeptics - They're Suckers

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By George Monbiot - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - My fiercest opponents on global warming tend to be in their 60s and 70s. This offers a fascinating, if chilling, insight into human psychology There is no point in denying it: we're losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed. A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world has been warming over the last few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months.

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Michael Specter’s new book ‘Denialism’ misses its targets

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Tom Philpott - Oct. 31 (Review) - Like the great institutions of European Christianity, modern science has amassed tremendous power—and not always lived up to its founding creeds. Science needs a Gibbon—someone who appreciates its intellectual grandeur and potential, but who also can train a cold eye on the “inevitable mixture of error and corruption” that has accompanied its tenure since the Enlightenment. That Gibbon is not Michael Specter, a New Yorker staff writer and author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. His book purports to defend science from its philistine critics—people who, in Specter’s view, reflexively deny the validity of the scientific process. In his intro, Specter sets up the defining focus of the book. He contrasts the “rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science” with “the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment” (i.e., “denialism”). Already, we’re on thin intellectual ice; Specter evidently believes in a pure science, one that exists completely apart from ideology. In Gibbon’s phrasing, he’s defending a science as “she descended from Heaven [read: the Enlightenment], arrayed in her native purity.”

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Author’s Personal Forecast: Not Always Sunny, but Pleasantly Skeptical

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Patricia Cohen - Oct. 10 (Review) - Barbara Ehrenreich wants to make clear that she is not a spoilsport. “No one can call me a sourpuss,” she declared. “I have a big foot in the joy camp.” She is the author of “Dancing in the Streets,” a history of “collective joy,” she notes, and a lot of fun at parties. So her new book, “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” should not be mistaken for a curmudgeonly rant. It is serious social history. Many of the 17 books that Ms. Ehrenreich has written during the past three and half decades have taken her into alien worlds. In her fantastically successful 2001 book, “Nickel and Dimed,” for example, she details her experience of trying to get by on the salary of an unskilled, minimum-wage worker. By contrast, this newest volume is based on her stay in a world that she became intimately familiar with: the smiley-faced, pink-ribboned, positive-thinking culture that surrounds breast cancer patients. Ms. Ehrenreich found out she had the disease in 2000, and the news left her dazed, fearful and, most of all, angry. What she found when she sought information and support, however, was cheerfulness, and that shocked her. “There were exhortations to be positive,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. She had stopped for lunch recently in Manhattan’s theater district after meeting with her publisher at Metropolitan Books, and before returning to Alexandria, Va., where she moved two years ago to be close to her daughter and grandchildren. Smartly dressed in pants and a sweater with black rectangular glasses that frame her blue eyes, Ms. Ehrenreich, 68, looks like someone who is content to be fashionable rather than fashion forward. The unrelenting message was “that you had to be cheerful and accepting and that you would not recover unless you were,” said Ms. Ehrenreich, who also writes frequently for The New York Times. Most infuriating, she added, was the advice to “consider your cancer a gift.”

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Bob McChesney interviews Chris Mooney, blogger for Discover Magazine and author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

will.illinois.edu - By Bob McChesney, Chris Mooney - Sep. 13 (Interview) - Chris Mooney is a visiting associate in the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University and the author of The Republican War on Science, Storm World and, with Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Chris's blog can be found at blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection

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The Benefits of Vacation

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Jonah Lehrer - Sep. 05 (Opinion) - When we escape from the place we spend most of our time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas we’d previously suppressed. Furthermore, this more relaxed sort of cognition comes with practical advantages, especially when we’re trying to solve difficult problems.

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Where might Gordon Brown bump into scientists, poets, internet gurus, and even Cameron (Diaz, that is)? At TED, the festival of new ideas

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Carole Cadwalladr - Jul. 26 (Opinion) - It's a confusing place, the world of TED. Not just because that for an event which prides itself on its cleverness, it has a name that makes it sound like some sort of football jock, but because, one minute you're listening to a talk about how an artificial brain is just 10 years off completion and the next you're thinking, oh look there's Cameron Diaz. And then, in an unscheduled departure from the timetable, Gordon Brown walks on to the stage. Even more confusingly, he receives not one standing ovation, but two! They cheer. They applaud. They, actually, whoop. But at TED, I discover, all things are possible - including a belief in an infinite number of parallel universes, in one of which Brown is the most popular man in Britain.

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The folly of pretence

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Daniel Dennett - Jul. 16 (Opinion) - I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound.

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How Scientific Illiteracy Cost Us 20 Years on Global Warming

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BuzzFlash - By Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum - Jul. 13 (Editorial) - This summer, as the U.S. Senate debates whether to join the House of Representatives in passing the first law in U.S. history to control global warming, expect to hear a lot of misinformation, a lot of absurdity, and a lot of gobbledygook. You'll hear assertions that the globe isn't warming any longer -- cooling has set in. You'll see any local temperature variation (in the cooler direction, anyway) seized upon to the same end. You'll hear the sun invoked -- rather than human industrial emissions -- as the cause of climate change.

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Conflicts galore: Statin study authors on the take from statin makers

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

alison-bass.blogspot.com - By Alison Bass - Jul. 08 (Opinion) - Just yesterday, Senators Charles Grassley and Herbert Kohl announced that language requiring the public disclosure of payments to doctors from drug and medical device companies has been included in the draft bills for health care reform now being debated in the House and Senate. In case you haven't been convinced by the parade of doctors on the take (who in some cases were found to have skewed scientific data as a result of their conflicts of interest), here's one more reason why public disclosure of such conflicts is so important.

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The Patriot's Guide to Legalization

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Kevin Drum - Jul. 06 (Opinion) - Maybe the war against pot is about to get a lot uglier. After all, in the 1920s, Prohibition gave us Al Capone and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and that was over plain old whiskey and rum. Are we about to start paying the same price for marijuana?

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Obama turns back on bears

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

thesunchronicle.com - By Ian McCarthy - May. 25 (Opinion) - For Obama, a president elected on a platform of "change," reversing this policy would seem like a slam-dunk. However, in what is turning out to be a bit of a nasty habit, the president has reversed another ambiguous campaign pledge (to "review" Bush's ESA modifications), and is continuing to uphold some of the most controversial policies of his predecessor. For environmentalists, this ruling is devastating.

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Why 'Ida' Inspires Navel-Gazing at Our Ancestry

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

LiveScience - May. 20 (Opinion) - One long line of evidence that supports evolution is the ongoing discovery of "transitional" fossils that bridge the gap between one obvious kind of species and another. Nowhere are these transitional animals more interesting than when looking backwards through time at the human lineage. This week, scientists from the University of Oslo announced the discovery (or re-discovery since the fossil was dug up in 1983) of a 47-million-year-old female primate known as Ida. This almost complete female animal appears to represent the transition between what are often called "primitive" primates, such as lemurs and lorises (known as prosimians), and the more "lofty" monkey, apes and humans. And even more interesting, this transition was in place long before anyone realized.

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Fossil Ida's great big?family | Colin Tudge | Comment is free

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Colin Tudge - May. 19 (Comment) - – what she tells us about Charles Darwin; and what she can tell us about our attitudes to nature and our own survival on this Earth. So many years after her death, this humble creature could help to restore a little sanity in a world that seems to have run short of it.

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Women Sue Over ObTape, a Device to Stop Urine Leaks

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Roni Caryn Rabin - May. 05 (Opinion) - “It was supposed to be a simple ‘in one day and out the next’ kind of thing,” said Ms. Suriani, now 43, who lives in a suburb of Syracuse.

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Why our obsession with climate change may end up destroying biodiversity

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Brendan Borrell - Apr. 23 (Opinion) - Now, being green is all about greenhouse gases: Neighborhood moms are more apt to fret over food miles than felled forests; organic cattle farmers are more interested in offsetting the methane coming from cow burps than pondering squished tadpoles in hoof prints. Even scientists have grown bored with question of habitat loss, tweaking their grant proposals to emphasize the climate angle no matter how tenuous the connection. Saving the Amazon is so 1980s.

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The Last Experiment

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seed - By David Zax - Apr. 22 (Opinion) - Line up a dozen environmentalists, ask them to conjure up an image of the sort of scientist who might save the planet from global warming, and it’s a safe bet none of them will imagine somebody like Benjamin Ho. For one thing, Ho worked for a time in the Bush White House. For another, he’s not even a climate scientist. He doesn’t study global sea rise or Arctic ice melt, and he doesn’t project temperature increases. Nor does he have suggestions for technological solutions to the problem. And why would he? Ben Ho is an economist. His doctoral work at Stanford consisted of a “statistical examination of the role apologies play in medical malpractice lawsuits.” He also did some work on how fads and fashion are used to signal identity — there was nary a kilowatt-hour nor a molecule of carbon dioxide in sight. Nevertheless, Ho claimed at a conference last November that it was social scientists like himself who held the key to saving the world from climate change.

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A Question for the Economists

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Harvey Mansfield - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - One group of those involved in the present financial crisis has so far escaped notice--the economists. They are masters in the science of prediction, but as a group, if not to a man, they failed to predict a crisis that has wiped out nearly half the wealth invested in the stock market and elsewhere (measured of course from the peak). The economists did no better than their unscientific rivals, the stock pickers, who are in the business of prediction.

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The Scientific Activist: THC Gives Cancer Cells the Munchies Too

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Nick Anthis - Apr. 02 (Opinion) - THC and other cannabinoids are actively being investigated for various useful clinical purposes, including the treatment of cancer through the inhibition of tumor growth.

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Pathogens in Our Pork

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

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Scientist: Warming Could Cut Population to 1 Billion

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By James Kanter - Mar. 13 (Opinion) - Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said that if the buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences pushed global temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today — well below the upper temperature range that scientists project could occur from global warming — Earth’s population would be devastated.

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