Use of brain scans in courts

Wow.. this is incredible.... actually it's NOT credible which is the point.
Reminds me of the Star Trek episode where Kirk is convicted based on "infallible" computer evidence. Or a few others where they had a high tech lie detector in trials. But this seems to go further than just detecting a lie. This seems to suggest that a brain scan can read what a person remembers.. chilling....

India's use of brain scans in courts dismays critics - International Herald Tribune [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Baby Dies, Comes Back to Life

Miracle or explained medical phenomenon?

I think this is why "belief" is so hard in the modern world. Even when we can't fully explain something, we pretend we can.

FOXNews.com - Baby Who Fell Into River Dies, Comes Back to Life - Health News [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Teen Died After Taking Abortion Pill RU-486

Tragic...

FOXNews.com - Inquest Told Teen Died After Taking Abortion Pills - Health News | Current Health News | Medical News [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Parents Who Prayed as Daughter Died to Face Murder Charges

This is disturbing. The girl died from an UNdiagnosed condition. She was healthy except for the last two weeks of her life. Some could call this poor judgment by the parents, but I won't even go that far. It was a mistake, yes.... but not 2nd degree murder.

I suspect it will not go far...

FOXNews.com - DA: Wisconsin Parents Who Prayed as Daughter Died to Face Murder Charges - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Researchers create beating heart in lab | Science Blog

WOW... all I can say is WOW...

Cells from a Rat embryo or newborn were used here, but the idea is that cells from an adult rat could be used without killing the adult rat. The same adult rat would then get the new heart.
(well, the REAL idea is to do this on humans, but you know what I mean....)

Researchers create beating heart in lab | Science Blog [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Stem cell politics shifting

Stem cell politics shifting - Cosmic Log - msnbc.com

I fail to understand why people still cling to the position of using human embryos for research even as that research suggests alternatives. I mean it's like the actually HOPE human embryos will always be required to accomplish anything.

I for one, certainly hope we can do all the promised miracle cures WITHOUT the need of killing another person to accomplish the cure, or even to learn about the cure. The difference is what this new development is all about. They say we STILL need to research on embryonic stem cells to learn about them, but then we may be able to use non-embryonic stem cells to actually do the cure for any particular patient. This is great, but still doesn't cut it for me. Killing human embryo is unacceptable to me no matter what benefit it will or possibly will give us. My ethics are based on my ethical and moral beliefs, not some "cost/benefit" analysis. The line that cannot be crossed, still cannot be crossed no matter what I see on the other side. This is certainly all the more true if there is even a hint of a way to get some of the prize without crossing the line.

My line of not killing human embryos is NOT some infinite horizontal line above with we can never go. We can still move upward and improved and progress, we just have to avoid certain obstacles along the way. They may seem unavoidable, and they may seem to stop progress, but my experience is that it just slows us down some but that we can still progress even without selling our souls. [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Emilio Gonzales - Fight over baby's life support divides ethicists

Fight over baby's life support divides ethicists - CNN.com

Emilio is 17 months old and has a rare genetic disorder that's ravaging his central nervous system. He cannot see, speak, or eat. A ventilator breathes for him in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Austin Children's Hospital, where he's been since December. Without the ventilator, Emilio would die within hours.

The hospital contends that keeping Emilio alive on a ventilator is painful for the toddler and useless against his illness -- Leigh's disease, a rare degenerative disorder that has no cure.

Emilio's mother, Catarina Gonzales, on the other hand, is fighting to keep her son on the ventilator, allowing him to die "naturally, the way God intended."

Update: More at the Washington Post

I'm going to have to think about this one some more, and maybe read some more, from both sides.

The medical decision lies with the boys parents....

But the doctors and hospitals have the right to refuse to follow the parents (or anyone's) wishes if they think it harms the child and/or is futile.

Then there's the cost issue. Doctors and hospital have gone to heroic and expensive efforts to save people even when there is only a slim chance of it working, and even when no one can pay for it. But in this case it sounds like they are not doing any actual "TREATMENT" for this child, they are just keeping him alive.

In my opinion, the purpose of artificial life support is to keep a patient alive long enough to repair, or cure them or for them to heal after a treatment. If there is no chance for cure or healing, and the person is in pain (or unable to communicate), then the question of how long to keep them on life support becomes very important. [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Furor over Baptist's gay-baby article - Yahoo! News

Furor over Baptist's gay-baby article - Yahoo! News

The president of the leading Southern Baptist seminary (Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr.) has incurred sharp attacks from both the left and right by suggesting that a biological basis for homosexuality may be proven, and that prenatal treatment to reverse gay orientation would be biblically justified.

Original Post on this Blog...
Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?
(http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=891) [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Woman in Vegetative State for 6 Years Awakens for 3 Days

Apparently, she slipped back into the semi-conscious state. It's confusing because they throw around very different terms.

Semi-conscious state
Vegetative State
Persistent Vegetative State


FOXNews.com - Colorado Woman in Vegetative State for 6 Years Awakens for 3 Days - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Miracle baby comes back from the dead

Miracle baby comes back from the dead | the Daily Mail

This seems to me to be a true "miracle" yet scientifically its just "statistically unlikely" or something like that. People throw around the word "miracle" but fail to acknowledge who or what did the miracle, was is a "miracle of modern medicine"? or a "miracle of God"?

Was it truly a "supernatural" or "unnatural" event, of just one we don't understand?

Personally I think truly supernatural, God-caused events happen all the time and we credit it to luck or randomness. In a way we are blind to the miracles that happen every day.

It good that some of them do actually get reported in the news. [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Growth Stopping Treatment for Disabled 9 year old

I'm going to have to think about this one for a while before saying much.

At first I would not do everything the parents did, but that is from fear of side effects and future problems that are not known. If I knew there would be no issues down the road, then this treatment would at least be an option to me.


I'll see if I can find the website this article mentions...here it is...
http://ashleytreatment.spaces.live.com/


Update
Now disabled groups have forced a meeting with the AMA. [This Post Continues after the jump...]

A Real Miracle

This sounds interesting... Even the doctors are using the "M" word but scientifically this was just a random occurrence and shouldn't be contributed to "divine intervention", which shows the limits of a pure "scientific" mind set.

FOXNews.com - NYC Student's Heart Starts Beating Days After Stopping - Health News | Current Health News | Medical News [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Scientists bridging the spirituality gap

Interesting...

Scientists bridging the spirituality gap - Science - MSNBC.com


also, it mentions "What the Bleep Do We Know," a strange movie that lumped so many things together that it was actually interesting... [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Stem Cell Tactics

I'm posting a link to this because it made me so angry when I read it. This guy, Steven Edwards, admits up front that he has "this nagging case of paralysis that makes me passionate about stem-cell policy"

But then he immediately says that embryonic stem-cell policy must change for FINANCIAL reason, stating that it is the #1 threat to Medicare.

So, in his first two breaths, he comes up with a "emotional" and a "financial" reason to destroy more embryos in the search for cures that won't come in time to help him or our Medicare system.

He then goes on to mock Bush's decision to limit federal funding to embryos already destroyed but never seriously mentions Bush's and millions of other people's real concern with Embryonic research.

His ultimate compromise to the allow the 300 embryo's killed since Bush's first executive order to be studied with federal money, as long as the law "encourages research into techniques that don't destroy embryos".

I'm sorry, but if you allow researchers to use the stem-cells from destroyed embryos, there would be no benefit for them to look into ways that don't kill embryos. Currently there IS a lot of effort being made to come up with ways to get stem-cells without killing embryos, and this is precisely because Bush made a firm stand on this issue. For the President to change that now would be silly...almost as silly as this article.

Wired News: Stem Cell Tactics for a New Age [This Post Continues after the jump...]

New Stem Cell Research

A New Era Begins This research proves that there is an alternative to destroying humans embryos to study and use Stem Cells. The Democrats were saying they were going to fund stem cell research, If they are the centrists they claim to be, they will fund research using Adult or these "amniotic-fluid stem cells" and forgo funding for "embryonic" research which is immoral and now proven to be unnecessary.

These AFS cells look to be actually BETTER than embryonic cells for several reasons and have NO ethical baggage that I can see. Conservatives have been saying for a long time that we should not do medical experimentation on people (embryos) just because the hype says embryonic stem cells can cure just about anything. The hype machine was running full force and made conservatives out to be "anti-science" and "anti-progress" etc. Well, now the truth is coming out and we see that is a different and better way to get to the magical land of "Stem cell treatments" for many diseases. Most conservatives were never against using "stem cells" just against killing people to get those stem cells.

If any of this pans out to yield an actual treatment for a medical condition, I think this will be a good case study for medical ethics, we shouldn't allow the hype to carry us away and forget the significance of even the smallest and most helpless person, a human embryo. [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Scrooge and intellectual property rights

Interesting...

Scrooge and intellectual property rights
A medical prize fund could improve the financing of drug innovations

At Christmas, we traditionally retell Dickens's story of Scrooge, who cared more for money than for his fellow human beings. What would we think of a Scrooge who could cure diseases that blighted thousands of people's lives but did not do so? Clearly, we would be horrified. But this has increasingly been happening in the name of economics, under the innocent sounding guise of "intellectual property rights."

Intellectual property differs from other property—restricting its use is inefficient as it costs nothing for another person to use it. Thomas Jefferson, America's third president, put it more poetically than modern economists (who refer to "zero marginal costs" and "non-rivalrous consumption") when he said that knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish from the light of the first. Using knowledge to help someone does not prevent that knowledge from helping others. Intellectual property rights, however, enable one person or company to have exclusive control of the use of a particular piece of knowledge, thereby creating monopoly power. Monopolies distort the economy. Restricting the use of medical knowledge not only affects economic efficiency, but also life itself.

We tolerate such restrictions in the belief that they might spur innovation, balancing costs against benefits. But the costs of restrictions can outweigh the benefits. It is hard to see how the patent issued by the US government for the healing properties of turmeric, which had been known for hundreds of years, stimulated research. Had the patent been enforced in India, poor people who wanted to use this compound would have had to pay royalties to the United States.

In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed. For example, a year's treatment with a generic cocktail of AIDS drugs might cost $130 (£65; {euro}170) compared with $10 000 for the brand name version.1 Billions of people living on $2-3 a day cannot afford $10 000, though they might be able to scrape together enough for the generic drugs. And matters are getting worse. New drug regimens recommended by the World Health Organization and second line defences that need to be used as resistance to standard treatments develops can cost much more.

Developing countries paid a high price for this agreement. But what have they received in return? Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns. The chief executive of Novartis, a drug company with a history of social responsibility, said "We have no model which would [meet] the need for new drugs in a sustainable way ... You can't expect for-profit organizations to do this on a large scale."2

Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way. For instance, the human genome project decoded the human genome within the target timeframe, but a few scientists managed to beat the project so they could patent genes related to breast cancer. The social value of gaining this knowledge slightly earlier was small, but the cost was enormous. Consequently the cost of testing for breast cancer vulnerability genes is high. In countries with no national health service many women with these genes will fail to be tested. In counties where governments will pay for these tests less money will be available for other public health needs.

A medical prize fund provides an alternative. Such a fund would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions, and smaller rewards for drugs that are similar to existing ones, with perhaps slightly different side effects. The intellectual property would be available to generic drug companies. The power of competitive markets would ensure a wide distribution at the lowest possible price, unlike the current system, which uses monopoly power, with its high prices and limited usage.

The prizes could be funded by governments in advanced industrial countries. For diseases that affect the developed world, governments are already paying as part of the health care they provide for their citizens. For diseases that affect developing countries, the funding could be part of development assistance. Money spent in this way might do as much to improve the wellbeing of people in the developing world—and even their productivity—as any other that they are given.

The medical prize fund could be one of several ways to promote innovation in crucial diseases. The most important ideas that emerge from basic science have never been protected by patents and never should be. Most researchers are motivated by the desire to enhance understanding and help humankind. Of course money is needed, and governments must continue to provide money through research grants along with support for government research laboratories and research universities. The patent system would continue to play a part for applications for which no one offers a prize . The prize fund should complement these other methods of funding; it at least holds the promise that in the future more money will be spent on research than on advertising and marketing of drugs, and that research concentrates on diseases that matter. Importantly, the medical prize fund would ensure that we make the best possible use of whatever knowledge we acquire, rather than hoarding it and limiting usage to those who can afford it, as Scrooge might have done. It is a thought we should keep in mind this Christmas.3 4 5 6

Joseph E Stiglitz, professor

1 Columbia University, New York, NY 10025, USA

jb2632@columbia.edu

Competing interests: JES was chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000 and a member and then chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001.

References

1. Médecins Sans Frontières. People not getting the treatment they need to stay alive. Newer AIDS drugs unaffordable and unavailable. Geneva: MSF, 29 November 2006.
2. Andrew J. Novartis chief in warning on cheap drugs. Financial Times 29 September 2006.
3. Stiglitz JE. Making globalization work. New York: WW Norton, 2006.
4. Hollis A. Optional rewards for new drugs for developing countries. Geneva: World Health Organization, 5 April 2005. www.who.int/entity/intellectualproperty/submissions/Submissions.AidanHollis.pdf.
5. Pogge T. Human rights and global health: a research program. Metaphilosophy 2005;1/2(36).
6. Love J. Submission of CPTech to IGWG. 15 November 2006. www.who.int/entity/public_hearing_phi/summary/15Nov06JamesLoveCPTech.pdf

[This Post Continues after the jump...]

Judge Orders Teen to Cancer Treatment

This is scary to me.

At 16 I don't even see this as a parental rights issue (but it is partly that), but mainly a 16 year old should be able to make their OWN healthcare decisions to a large extent.

I don't know the success rate for Hodgkin's disease, but no one should be forced to take Chemo for anything.

BREITBART.COM - Judge Orders Teen to Cancer Treatment [This Post Continues after the jump...]

New Scientist Breaking News - 'Rewired brain' revives patient after 19 years

New Scientist Breaking News - 'Rewired brain' revives patient after 19 years [This Post Continues after the jump...]