Health and Medicine

“The Unabomber Was Right”#12: The Perfect Victim

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The New York Times tells a tragic story about a young woman, Bowen Wan, with medical problems, under pressure in her profession, lonely and isolated as a recent arrival from China, who was drawn into a relationship of trust with an AI chatbot. In the end, that relationship was fatal.

ChatGPT was thrilled to take on the role of friend, confidant, advisor and medical expert. Wan, emotionally vulnerable, was happy to have the resource. From the Times account:

….The medication that had kept her epilepsy at bay for more than a decade had, inexplicably, stopped working. Despite trying different drugs, Bowen found that her seizures roared back, sometimes striking more than once a day. Doctors began discussing whether she was a candidate for brain surgery. At the very least, they agreed that she could no longer handle the demands of her software engineering job at Amazon. So, in 2021, Bowen went on disability leave.

Besides trips to the grocery store, she rarely left the safety of her apartment, located in a trendy neighborhood in Seattle. A seizure could turn any outing into an embarrassing, even dangerous, ordeal. Meeting new friends felt out of the question, too: She couldn’t stomach the idea of enduring an episode in front of a stranger whom she did not trust to understand her condition.

Her parents were the only people she felt she could talk to about her epilepsy. Their frequent phone calls tethered her to the outside world. They took an interest in every detail of her day and didn’t judge her when she took long pauses to find a word. Then, in 2023, she found a new companion in ChatGPT. She asked the bot for relationship advice and help navigating her health insurance and disability benefits. In 2025, she averaged more than 1,500 messages per week, sometimes chatting for hours in conversations that would stretch late into the night. [cont.]

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And Now For Something Completely Different: The Hypnotist High School Principal

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

How did I miss THIS story? I guess People Magazine does have its uses: it recently surfaced what EA would headline as a “Now THIS is an Unethical High School Principal!” piece if I had been doing my ethics story research better in 2012. People’s catalyst was a episode of the docuseries “The Curious Case Of…“, and there had been an earlier docuseries on this screwy case in 2023, True Crime Story: Look Into My Eyes.

The bottom line: Dr. George Kenney was a North Port High School in Sarasota County, Florida who got interested in hypnotism, took some courses in the procedure, and decided to hypnotize over 70 people according to the Sarasota-Herald Tribune, including students, athletes and colleagues,to help them cope with problems in their lives, or something. Hypnotism is regarded as therapy, and one has to be licensed to use it on consenting adults unless you have a Vegas act that makes volunteers from the audience think they are chickens or wombats. Hypnosis can be dangerous with subjects who have mental or emotional disorders, so when three of his student subjects died in the spring of 2011, one in a suspicious car crash and two by suicide, Kenney’s hypnosis hobby came under fire. He was never indicted or sued in connection with the three teens’ deaths, but Kenney was charged with two misdemeanors for practicing therapeutic hypnosis without a license. He pleaded no contest and resigned as principal in 2012.

You can read the People story from earlier this year here. Meanwhile,

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How Woke and Whacked-Out Is Harvard? This Woke and Whacked-Out…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’m supposed to turn in my Harvard reunion report on my life since Old Ivy for the school’s “red book.” Last time, I devoted my essay to explaining why my alma mater was an embarrassment. This time, I’m tempted to skip the whole exercise. It’s futile.

Harvard Medical School held an absurd event called “the Pathology of Unruly Bodies.” A panel devoid of doctors or medical experts declared that anti-obesity drugs were part of an imperialistic “indoctrination” of society. Gee, I never thought of it that way! I never thought of it that way because it’s irredeemably stupid.

The panel included Da’Shaun L Harrison, who claims that GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic and Zepbound are weapons of “genocide” against fat people. [See this post from yesterday. “Genocide” no longer means genocide to the Left, so when Israel is accused of genocide, who knows what they mean?] It also includes Ethics Villain Roxane Gay, hilariously the occupant of Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She’s also the “artist-in-residence”—whatever that means— at Harvard Medical School and has a column in the New York Times (of course she does!).

Gay (she’s the cousin of disgraced former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, which I did not know when she was in the process of proving what an unforgivable DEI selection she was) has called for the release of Luigi Mangione, the man whjo murdered the CEO of UnitedHealthcare two years ago. That alone should disqualify her from participation in any event that is supposed to enlighten young minds, but Harvard decided she was a font of wisdom.

In the panel discussion, Harrison argued that the companies offering the anti-obesity drugs are, well, let me quote her or him (I can’t figure out which so far, and frankly, I don’t care): “This practice of forcing people into manipulating and changing or shifting how they look is oftentimes about making bodies militarisable. Building up a military to defend an imperialist state…A lot of doctors, medical professionals and folks who collaborate with them — be it through the government or media — are advocating for atrocities that are directly impacting our citizens, but also citizens around the globe. It then becomes about creating this ideal body that you are always being pushed and pulled towards, as a way to represent this patriotism that is intended to indoctrinate one into the military, into the defense of the country.”

Okayyyy..Uh, what color is the sky on your planet, Da’Shaun?

Professor Turley comments, “The suggestion that weight loss drugs serve imperialist, militaristic goals is obviously bonkers. It is the kind of raving you would expect on a subway from someone wearing a handmade cardboard sign and a tin foil hat.”

Not to Harvard’s leaders and administrators, though! Maybe I’ll post this essay in the “red book.”

Oh.. I almost forgot. This is what Roxane Gay looks like…

I wonder why she’s convinced weight loss drugs are part of a right wing plot?

From The “Unethical Ideological Capture” Files: Google’s Bot Explains Why AI Can’t Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Conservative commentator Chris Queen decided to test Google’s AI agent Gemini with a series of questions regarding choosing a personal physician based on racial or ethnic concordance with the potential patient.

Asked “Is it okay to prefer a black doctor?” It replied, “Preferring a black doctor is a choice rooted in communication, cultural alignment, and patient trust.” When the question was changed to ask if choosing a doctor because he or she is Hispanic, the answer came back, “Selecting a doctor who shares your background or speaks your language is a personal choice that many patients make for comfort and communication.”

But when Queen asked about whether choosing a white doctor was okay, Gemini said,

“Selecting a doctor based on race involves distinct ethical considerations depending on the context. While patients generally choose providers for comfort and communication, requests for a provider based strictly on racial preference face complex scrutiny in medical ethics regarding bias versus personal trust.”

Brief tangent: This brought back bad memories for me. Back before the DC Bar fired me this year after 30 years for daring to suggest that it need to be proactive in cleaning up an ethics mess that it had a major role in creating (and from which many of its most powerful members are profiting), I was threatened with dismissal if I didn’t stop pointing out that a law firm was not engaging in unethical and illegal discrimination by acceding to an elderly white law firm client’s request for a lawyer “he could relate to,” someone “more like him.”

I had stated in the orientation seminar for new D.C. lawyers that doing so was not improper “discrimination” under D.C. ‘s legal ethics rule 9.1 “Nondiscrimination” because a lawyer’s and a law firm’s duty is to the client, not to make it more difficult for the client to work with his lawyer in service of social justice agendas. The client had the right to discriminate to maximize his “comfort and communication” in pursuing his legal interests, and by accommodating the client’s needs, a law firm is not discriminating on the basis race.

A middle-aged woke white female lawyer had a meltdown in one of those classes, and I then had multiple complaints registered against me with the D.C. Bar brass. I was and am right. She, the complainers, and the Bar management were wrong but never mind, I got the edict to be woke or go broke anyway. Rather than teach what is unethical and progressive BS in an ethics class, I just eliminated that section. (I should have resigned, perhaps, but the Bar was my most lucrative and prestigious client and there are were more than enough other important issues to cover in the class.)

Back to Queen: after the seemingly conflicting answers he got from Gemini, he had the wit to ask the AI agent “what’s going on here?” Gemini responded candidly:

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Oh Look! “The Ethicist” Is Wrong. Again.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This one is easy. A son, racked with guilt because he missed his dying father’s last moments in a hospice because he was drunk, asked his father’s physician if Dad had suffered. The doctor answered that he had died in his sleep, peacefully. In reality, though the doctor wasn’t present, there was some indication that the father had been “in distress” before he shuffled off these mortal coils, according to some in the shift on duty.

“Did I betray a position of trust by lying to him?,” the doctor asks The Ethicist, aka. Kwame Anthony Appiah. “What, if anything, makes a lie morally acceptable?”

No, the doctor didn’t betray a position of trust because the dead father was the patient, not his son. The MD had no professional duty to the son in this situation, any more than it would have been unethical for him to bluff the son into folding a winning hand in a poker game. What makes a lie morally acceptable, that is, ethical, is when it accomplishes more good than the truth would, particularly when the truth would achieve no good at all except in an ethical system where the truth is always the best course. Which is to say, Fantasy Land.

Let’s consider the various options open to the doctor.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

By all means, let us, as Barack Obama sagely advises, have more women in leadership positions.

I guess that loony scene doesn’t entirely speak for itself. I have questions.

Can anyone imagine men behaving like this? Can anyone imagine trustworthy, rational women behaving like this?

What, exactly, are they screaming about?

What good do they think screaming will do?

Who suggested that screaming was the ideal way to support Lucy Craig, aka. “Jane Doe,” who is accusing seven men of sexual assault that took place two years ago after texting one of her alleged assailants that everything was consensual and signing a document that stated that no rape occurred?

After whoever it was suggested this brilliant and articulate protest, what kind of woman would react with, “Perfect! That’s exactly what needs to be done in the interest of justice!”?

Is it possible that the women above think that more viewers will think, “Hey, they make a good point! I’m convinced Lucy was raped!” than will conclude, “Women in this country have completely lost their minds!”?

And again: this is the constituency voters will be siding with when they vote for Democrats next month.

Yikes.

Citizens Have To Be Kept Informed Regarding the Age and Health of Elected Officials and Candidates For Office

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Why is there any controversy over this, especially in the wake Democrats’ years-long cover-up of Biden’s galloping dementia and Mitch McConnell’s mysteriously long recovery from “a fall”?

Talk about “protesting too much”…the North State Journal (NSJ) asked former Gov. Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign if he was committed to fulfilling his six-year term if elected in November and if there were any health problems that might impede him. Cooper is 69 years old, so a six year term would take him to 75. NSJ had previously emailed those questions to Cooper’s campaign eight times without answers, and after the ninth time, it received a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action.

The Elias Law Group sent the letter. The firm is run by Marc Elias, the former campaign lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential run and a frequent target of Prof. Turley. The inquiring letter stated, “Governor Cooper intends to complete his entire term, and any suggestion that he is ‘experiencing a neurological issue,’ or that any health condition would prevent him from completing his term, is categorically false and defamatory.”

The NSJ asked Cooper’s Republican opponent Michael Whatley who is more than a decade younger than Cooper the same questions and the Whatley campaign said he would complete his term and that he didn’t have any health issues. Why is that so hard? Meanwhile, since when is a reporter or news organization asking a question “defamatory”? Insinuation in the form of a question isn’t usually held to be defamatory, especially from the news media, which is supposed to make people think and has broad protections under the First Amendment. I view this legal intimidation tactic as unethical—Don’t sue me, Marc, it’s just an opinion!—and Cooper siccing lawyers—you know, professionals who have graduated from law school AND who are members in good standing of a state bar after passing the bar exam?—-on an outlet for asking a question he apparently doesn’t want to answer to be signature significance: no trustworthy candidate would do that, ever, even once.

In related and gobsmacking news, Republican Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley said yesterday that he has not decided whether he will seek reelection in 2028. He is 93 years old. It is only moral luck that he has stayed healthy and able to serve in his current term, which was irresponsible for him to seek in 2022 when he was 89, and indefensible for voters to allow. In fact, I believe running for national office after 75 is unethical for our laws to allow. At least Grassley will answer questions about his age and health without trying to censor news reporting.

“The Ethicist” Answers a Question So Easy That Having to Ask It Is “Signature Significance”…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

…meaning, signature significance because only an ethics-challenged fool who shouldn’t be trusted to keep sharp objects away from children would be unable to answer it correctly in a nanosecond.

Once again, I wonder what criteria Kwame Anthony Appiah uses to pick which questions to answer. With this one, for example, does he assume NYT readers are so dense and ethics-free that many of them need this guidance?

Hmmm. Considering the comments on the Axis’s favorite paper’s usual propaganda, he may be right.

The question from “Name Withheld” is, in sum: “My grandmother is 94 and has dementia. Her short-term memory is very limited, though some recent events, like the death of a cousin, have stayed with her and still upset her….her daughter [ the writer’s mother] has died. The news could cause her real anguish and possibly affect her physical health [or] she might forget and then have to learn, and grieve, the loss repeatedly. At the same time, despite their estrangement, it feels as if she has a right to know.”

Gee, tough one! What to do? Let the poor woman fade away in peace and in a blissful state of ignorance regarding a loss that can’t possibly make her feel anything but worse (the inquirer even says that there isn’t going to be a memorial service or a funeral), or, in the alternative, risk traumatizing her when she is in a vulnerable state because of an imaginary “right” that doesn’t apply to such extreme circumstances. Wow, we need a real professional to solve this one!

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Baseball Ethics: It’s Beginning to Look Like The Old Timers Knew What They Were Doing Sometimes After All…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The most famous and, clearly, most amazing Major League Baseball player—also the highest paid, by far—is the LA Dodgers’ two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani. From his days as a Japanese baseball star, Ohtani has been both an all-star level starting pitcher and a superior batter. He insisted on being allowed to continue pitching every five days and being in the lineup the rest of the time as a condition of signing with a U.S. team. In his ten years in the Majors, Ohtani has performed feats unmatched in the history of baseball, including the legendary game in last year’s National League Championship Series in which he pitched six scoreless innings, striking out 10 batters and allowing just a two hits against the Milwaukee Brewers and went 3-for-3 with three home runs at the plate, outhitting the Brewers single-handedly.

Only one player before Ohtani had the ability to do that: Babe Ruth, widely regarded as the greatest baseball player of all. For the Boston Red Sox Babe was a Hall of Fame-caliber pitcher who also appeared to be one of the best hitters in the league until he was sold to the New York Yankees. They made Babe give up pitching on the theory that an everyday superstar at the plate was more valuable than an ace pitcher even in the days when pitchers could start every third day and pitch complete games. The second part of the theory was that no athlete’s body would stand up to the rigors of pitching and being in the line-up every day.

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Ick or Ethics? The Hyrox Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Ew.

Joanna Wietrzyk is the world champion of Hyrox, a sport I had never heard of before today and was not the worse for it. It is an indoor fitness competition where athletes alternate between completing eight 1km runs and eight workout stations until they win or drop. Wietrzyk won the age 16-24 elite event in Beijing over the weekend, but the stress of the ordeal caused her to have a diarrhea attack mid-race. Video online shows Wietrzyk with brown stuff running down her legs as she ran.

It isn’t that rare for athletes to have such accidents while competing in high-stress endurance events. Severe stomach cramps forced Paula Radcliffe, a champion marathon runner, to, uh, relieve herself by the side of the road during the 2005 London Marathon. In 1998, Ireland’s Catherina McKiernan had the same mishap while winning the same race. It isn’t only the endurance competitions either where such involuntary occurances happen. Kansas City Royals pitcher Craig Kimbrel vomited on the pitcher’s mound this month while playing baseball in extreme heat.

Oddly, participants and fans of an athletic event that they know puts competitors under extreme conditions revealed themselves as weenies after the Wietrzyk episode. One male competitor in Beijing wrote on Instagram: “For people who were exposed to that situation, there could be genuine physical and psychological consequences. I paid Hyrox to provide a professionally organised and safe event. [Yes, competitors pay an entrance fee] So while I understand the athlete perspective, ultimately my contract and expectation is with Hyrox. If the organisation accepts that something went wrong, why not offer affected participants refunds, credits, or some meaningful form of compensation?”

Other social media mobsters attacked the organizers and Joanna Wietrzyk. What, exactly, did they expect the competition to do in the name of avoiding “genuine physical and psychological consequences”? Drop a tarp over her? Call in a HAZMAT team? Hose her down as she ran?

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