Health and Medicine

In Memory of Grace: “The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

When I last re-posted this early Ethics Alarms entry from 2010, I called it, “Since Ethics Alarms Appears To Be The Only Source Trying To Publicize This Problem, Here, For The Third Time.” Not much has changed since then, except that my wife is dead. Listerine played a major role in killing her: Grace’s last major relapse—she battled alcoholism her entire adult life—occurred right before the pandemic when she impulsively drank down an entire jumbo bottle of the vile stuff and shortly thereafter took a nearly fatal fall off a curb outside our home. She never fully recovered from the effects of that fall, though other, less catastrophic relapses involving the mouthwash occurred at regular intervals.

As I explained in an earlier introduction, the original post “raised an important and shamefully under-reported topic, one that despite my exhortations then has yet to be adequately examined in the media.” In 2016, when I googled various combinations of “mouthwash,” “Listerine,”‘alcoholism,” and “alcoholic,” the first result was still my post. [UPDATE: The Ethics Alarms post is now about 100 deep, behind such links as “Should I switch to alcohol-free mouthwash?” Note that since 2016, Google’s algorithm buries EA in its searches because it is insufficiently in tune with the Axis.]

“Most people who are not afflicted with the disease of alcoholism have no idea that mouthwash is a popular stand-in for liquor, or that is used to deceive family members who think an addict is no longer using or intoxicated,” I wrote in the 2016 intro. First I was prompted to re-post the essay after I had been shocked to hear a physician friend who treated alcoholics plead complete ignorance of the links between mouthwash and alcoholism. The last time, it was the surprising reaction of my own physician, who is usually up-to-date on all medical research, and had treated alcoholism sufferers at the VA. He had never heard anything about the problem.

I’m re-posting this time because of Grace. The quote from my 2016 intro is still valid:

“Despite my frustration that what I regard as a true exposé that should have sparked an equivalent article in a more widely read forum has remained relatively unknown, I am encouraged by the effect it has had. Most Ethics Alarms posts have their greatest traffic around the time they are posted, but since 2010, the page views of this article have increased steadily…More importantly, it has drawn comments like this one:

‘Am looking after my twin sister who is a chronic alcoholic. She has been three days sober and then she just walked in and I couldn’t work out what the hell happened. She was in a stupor , but there was no alcohol and I am dispensing the Valium for detox period and she smelt like mint!! Found three bottles of it !!! This is my last big push to help her and she pleaded innocent and no idea it had alcohol in it! Hasn’t had a shower for two days but keeps her mouth fresh and sweet !! Thanks for the information. Much appreciated XXX’

“Most of all, I am revolted that what I increasingly have come to believe is an intentional, profit-motivated deception by manufacturers continues, despite their knowledge that their product is killing alcoholics and destroying families. I know proof would be difficult, but there have been successful class action lawsuits with millions in punitive damage settlements for less despicable conduct. Somewhere, there must be an employee or executive who acknowledges that the makers of mouthwash with alcohol know their product is being swallowed rather than swished, and are happy to profit from it….People are killing themselves right under our noses, and we are being thrown of by the minty smell of their breath.”

Here again is “The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit.” Maybe this time it will help someone to avoid Grace’s pain and her ultimate fate.

I’m so, so sorry, my darling, that I couldn’t give you the peace you needed to fight this curse.

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Ethics Quiz: The Gratuitous Diagnosis

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I am 100% on the other side of an ethics question recently raised for the New York Times’ ethics advice maven, “The Ethicist.” You tell me which of us you think is right.

Details aside, the inquirer asked if he should, as a retired neurologist, tell a woman he admittedly barely knows but whom he has been in frequent contact with recently that he believes she has Parkinson’s Disease…

….There’s been no occasion to mention my professional background, and I’m now uncertain about whether I should tell her about it and my clinical impressions. Her disease, at its current stage, is likely to be successfully managed with oral medication. However, it is neither obvious that she will have access to skilled neurological care nor that she will be willing to seek it. And a new diagnosis of Parkinson’s, without prompt treatment, on top of her recent loss and the challenges that have followed, may further overwhelm her. My wife is in favor of my informing her, because treatment would benefit her quality of life. I’m hesitant, as there has been no invitation to become more involved in her personal life, and I cannot provide her with a supportive doctor-patient relationship. What would you recommend?

I’ll tell you which of us ethicists believe what after you’ve formulated your own answer. For now, Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is,

What would YOU recommend?

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Yes Indeed, Most Presidents Have Had Emotional, Mental or Serious Physical Problems, But That Doesn’t Make Joe Biden Fit to Be One

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I’ve been holding on to this post for a while now, waiting for Presidents Day. An old “Psychology Today” article has been dredged up lately by various pundits desperately seeking a way to deny what is now undeniable. President Biden is in the throes of serious mental decline, and allowing him to run again, at an advanced age and when his memory, stamina, and cognitive health are rapidly receding into the fog, is irresponsible—which doesn’t mean that the Axis won’t do it anyway. The argument being mounted to justify such a desperate and stupid course is a version of the #1 rationalization on the list, “Everybody does it!” Joe’s problems are no big deal, you see, because, as Dr. Guy Winch wrote in 2016: “a study by Jonathan Davidson of the Duke University Medical Center and colleagues, who reviewed biographical sources for the first 37 presidents (1776-1974), half of those men had been afflicted by mental illness—and 27% met those criteria while in office, something that could have clearly affected their ability to perform their jobs.”

Whew! Well, that’s a relief!

I hadn’t seen the study, but it was heartwarming, since its findings echoed those of my American Government honors thesis, now deep in the stacks of Widener Library. I hypothesized that being outside the norm emotionally, mentally and physically was among the factors that selected out the extraordinary individuals who become Presidents of the United States. Leaders, to give an even shorter version, are not normal by definition.

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FIRE’s Annual Censorship Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

FIRE released its annual “Top Ten Worst Censors” list. They are…

As you see by the EA links, I batted just .500 in covering this topic, and some of the incidents described in FIRE’s report are clearly major ethics breaches that should have been discussed here. Personally, I blame Donald Trump for being a catalyst for so much unethical conduct by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (AUC)—the “resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media—as well as his own usual forays into the Ethics Twilight Zone that I missed other important matters. Or, as Joni Mitchell might have croaked, “So many things I might have done, but Trump got in my way….”

OK, I’m kidding. Sort of.

The most horrible story that I missed is a tie between the Mayo Clinic outrage and the Marion County Police Dept.’s gestapo act. In that one, FIRE explains,

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Forget “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” The Proper Reaction Should Be “What the Hell Is the Matter With You Hacks?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The furious wagon-circling by left-biased journalists (or “journalists,” for short) in response to the DOJ Special Counsel’s stunning “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!” declaration in his report is another smoking gun in the “controversy” over whether Donald Trump was as right as he has ever been to call the media “enemies of the people.” It might even be the smokiest gun of all—more damning than the news media’s blatant cheer-leading for Barack Obama’s candidacy and destructive Presidency, more damning than its Black Lives Matter pandering during the BLM riots and its fearmongering during the pandemic, even more damning, perhaps, than its successful efforts to hide the evidence of Hunter Biden’s laptop until Donald Trump was safely defeated.

Confirmation bias and willful blindness still have their limits. How can any American with two brain cells to rub together observe the shameless gaslighting compiled in the video above and not be offended, disgusted, and angry?

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My Annual Boycott the Super Bowl Edition…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Feb. 9th was the 60th anniversary of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, leading me to muse on what other momentous cultural (as opposed to political and international) events American society has shared in caring about and observing since. There haven’t been many. I remember that the first Super Bowl, when the AFL and the NFL agreed on a championship game between the upstart rebel league and the establishment attracted such intense interest and coverage (two networks covered the game—when has that happened since?) which was a wipe-out by the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. I didn’t know any families that didn’t watch that first one. Once upon a time, everybody tuned in to the Academy Awards: it was a unifying ritual, but no more. It is disturbing to think that there can’t be a unifying cultural event in the U.S. today, but I’m coming to that depressing conclusion.

Meanwhile, I hope you are boycotting the annual hoop-de-doo by the evil NFL, which happily kills its player for profit. This NFL season I didn’t catch a second of a single game, and wrote less about the cynical, ethics-free league than I have in years. The most recently discussed incident when an NFL head coach was pilloried for trying to inspire his players by extolling the teamwork of the plane hijackers who brought down the Twin Towers and bombed the Pentagon. I didn’t write about, but should have, a study from almost exactly a year ago that found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of 345 former NFL players among 376 former players studied. That’s 91.7% compared to the normal incidence of CTE in the general public, which is in the vicinity of .4% I didn’t write about it because, as far as I can tell, none of the sources, ethics and news, that I usually check for ethics stories bothered to treat the study as newsworthy. I assume that’s because they chose not to issue a buzzkill on Super Bowl week.

Think about that for a while, assuming that you haven’t played professional football and can think.

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Update: We Can’t “Trust the Science” Because We Can’t Trust the Scientists

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

…or the politicians and untrustworthy elected officials who use both for unethical ends.

Further reinforcing his Ethics Alarms status as an Ethics Villain, the now retired Dr. Anthony Fauci blithely told lawmakers on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic this week that “social distancing guidelines”—warning the public to keep six feet apart from anyone else supposedly to limit the spread of the Wuhan virus — “sort of just appeared” without scientific input, and was “likely not based on scientific data.”

Oh! That’s nice! Schools remained closed well into 2021 substantially as a result of the social distancing guidelines that he stood by and allowed to be issued without scientific data. I was screamed at in several public places because I knew the social distancing edicts were garbage from the beginning, just like the “don’t touch your face!” nonsense and 95% of all masks. My sister has been a phobic about physical contact ever since March of 2020: she has yet to allow me into her house, and will only speak to me at my home ten feet away on the front yard. Research studies and other health officials pooh-poohed the social distancing mandates early on while media scaremongers—-after all, it was vital to wreck the Trump economy if he was going to be brought down—were quoting some “experts” saying that we should all wear masks and socially distance forever. Fortunately my pop culture addiction served me well: I recognized all of the CDC recommendations from the 2011 pandemic movie “Contagion.” They were exactly the same, proving to me that “social distancing” and the rest were just boiler plate “Do something!” measures off the CDC shelf. (They didn’t work in the film, either.)

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Incompetent? Irresponsible? Dishonest? Whatever This Was, It’s Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Look! Another example of IIPTDXTTNMIAFB (“Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”)!

From the New York Times:

It took the Pentagon three and a half days to inform the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had been hospitalized on New Year’s Day following complications from an elective procedure, two U.S. officials said Saturday.

The extraordinary breach of protocol — Mr. Austin is in charge of the country’s 1.4 million active-duty military at a time when the wars in Gaza and Ukraine have dominated the American national security landscape — has baffled officials across the government, including at the Pentagon.

Senior defense officials say Mr. Austin did not inform them until Thursday that he had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The Pentagon then informed the White House.

The Pentagon’s belated notification, first reported by Politico, confounded White House officials, one Biden administration official said.

Meanwhile, conservatives “pounced”: “What possible motive could there be for doing this? Who knows? It didn’t make a lot of sense, but the Biden administration has an extensive record of covering up scandals, so it wasn’t exactly out of character for the Biden administration to cover something up,” wrote PJ media’s Matt Margolis. Other wags noted that hiding such health-related information about important government officials is the kind of thing China does.

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 6: Pot Users

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The status of marijuana in the U.S. is a mess, with the drug still being illegal under federal law and the states slowly sliding down the slippery slope to legalization, because they see revenue in it. The confusion is going to get worse before it gets better. Ohio was the only state to legalize marijuana for “recreational use” last year. The Kentucky General Assembly legalized medical marijuana this year, but patients will have to wait until 2025 for the program to kick in. Voters in Oklahoma rejected the legalization of recreational marijuana in last March, and Hoosiers voted against legal marijuana in Indiana in early April.

The Department of Health and Human Services sent its latest findings on marijuana to the Drug Enforcement Administration, recommending that it be reclassified as a Schedule III drug. That classification would mean that the substance has a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” However, I wouldn’t trust the now thoroughly woke HHS to do an unbiased study on the topic, since the most stoned American are progressives and Democrats. Throughout the last few years, there have been various studies suggesting that the drug is not as harmless as its proponents have been claiming it is, and there is enough evidence of heavy use of pot causing long-term cognitive problems to tell me that we still don’t know what lurks in the genie’s bottle.

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Dentist Ethics Drill! [Multiple Updates and Corrections]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This is a bridge from the previous post, since it also involves Minnesota, and gives some teeth to my argument that the Land o’ Lakes is facing a brush with ethics decay. At the root of our tale some yawning cavities in the ethical hygiene of a dental professional. (Note my generous restraint in leaving quite a few potential puns for you to add in the comments. Consider the challenge a moment of tooth, er, truth.)

But I digress. Dr. Kevin Molldrem and Molldrem Family Dentistry face a lawsuit from a disgruntled patient, Kathleen Wilson, who claims the Eden Prairie dentist harmed her in the process of performing over 30 dental procedures in a single five hour appointment. Molldrem, she alleges, put in eight crowns, did four root canals and filled the cavities in 20 teeth during a single visit in July 2020. In the process, according to the lawsuit, Molldrem used anesthesia “well in excess of (the) recommended dosage” and engaged in “falsifying medical records” regarding the amount administered.

Update 1: I finally have the complaint (thanks to JutGory). The news reports did not accurately convey the sense of the lawsuit, concentrating excessively on the sensational feature of all that dental work at a single session. The complaint’s complaints are:

—“Plaintiff has incurred and will continue to incur medical costs for the dental care required to address the harms caused by Dr. Molldrem’s negligence.”

—“Plaintiff has incurred and will continue to incur lost income and loss of earning capacity as a direct result of Dr. Molldrem’s negligence.”

—“Plaintiff has endured and will continue to endure pain and suffering, embarrassment, emotional distress, and disfigurement as a direct result of Dr. Molldrem’s negligence.”

Update 2: The complaint also accuses the dentist of failing “to create a care plan that would effectively address decay and tooth dissolution” and “failing to control gingival inflammation and bleeding” during the lengthy visit. That’s the harm alleged, as well as damage that required repair by other dentists. Based on what was revealed about the suit in the media and the fact that the expert report for the plaintiff mentions “trauma,” discomfort” and “anxiety,” I assumed that pain and suffering were also alleged in the suit, as they virtually always are when medical negligence is involved. And sure enough, they were. However, my statement in the original post that the suit claims the dentist’s marathon session “caused great pain and suffering” was speculation stated as fact, so I’ve removed it.

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