Health and Medicine

The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

It has been with us for centuries, as long as man has been fermenting vegetable matter to produce alcohol, and it is a plague on the human race. Virtually every one of us has friends, relatives or close associates with the disease, or battle the addiction ourselves; although accurate figures don’t exist, estimates of the prevalence of alcohol addiction in the U.S. range between 5 and 12%. Whatever the real figure is, it is a lot, and the disease causes a wide range of problems. For example, close to 50% of all automobile fatalities involve alcohol. Yet the public remains shockingly ignorant about alcoholism, to the detriment and convenience of alcoholics, and the devastation of their families

The ignorance is also profitable to some corporations that are not even officially in the beverage business. The ethics question is, do those corporations knowingly and intentionally encourage and facilitate that ignorance? If so, they have a lot to answer for, and so do government consumer agencies and the media. This ignorance kills.

Continue reading →

Mad Scientist Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It is comforting to know that all mad scientists aren’t hell-bent on world domination. Apparently some Japanese mad scientists are dedicated instead to world vaccination, because, as reported in the April issue of “Insect Molecular Biology”, they have figured out how to make mosquitoes into itty-bitty flying syringes full of vaccine. Continue reading →

NPR Abandons Abortion Issue Spin

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

It shouldn’t have taken so long for National Public Radio to join many other news organizations in concluding that the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” were deceitful misrepresentations expressly designed to allow advocates to de-emphasize the problems with their positions. Nevertheless, the decision of the organization to stop using the euphemisms was both welcome and correct. After a column on the subject by NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard called for the change, Managing Editor David Sweeney sent out a network-wide memo aimed at ”  He continued:

On the air, we should use “abortion rights supporter(s)/advocate(s)” and “abortion rights opponent(s)” or derivations thereof (for example: “advocates of abortion rights”). It is acceptable to use the phrase “anti-abortion”, but do not use the term “pro-abortion rights”.

Next, the public should insist that advocacy groups and their obsequious political allies follow the same policy. The position of Ethics Alarms, for example, will be that any elected official who uses the deceptive terms “pro-life,” “pro-choice,”  “anti-choice,”  or “anti-life” is either intellectually dim or intentionally attempting to misrepresent the position he or she claims to be supporting.

Making Sure Your Shrink Has Only Your Needs in Mind

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Psychiatry and psychoanalysis were supposed to transform humanity for the better by allow us to understand what makes us happy, sad and crazy and to control it, rather than to let it control us. But after a century that witnessed  Woody Allen undergoing intense treatment for decades that resulted in his marrying his step-daughter (and feeling darn good about it!), the profession is increasingly resorts to a shrug and a prescription. The good news is that many of the new drugs seem to do the job a lot better than Dr. Freud’s couch; the bad is that psychiatrists are often conflicted by their financial ties to drug companies.

Writing in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institutes of Health, states that American psychiatrists need to reform a “culture of influence” that has been nurtured by too many goodies offered to doctors by pharmaceutical companies and happily accepted, including big ticket items like research grants, trips, fees for writing friendly journal articles and entertainment, and smaller trinkets like coffee mugs. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“I know how the “tea party” people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their “Obama Plan White Slavery” signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.”

——Washington Post columnist Courtland Malloy

That’s it, Courtland, just the ticket for helping to cool the inflammatory rhetoric, encourage mutual respect and restore civil discourse. As long as it makes you feel better, go ahead and use your space in the Washington Post to be just as hateful as those whose conduct you deplore. Next step: call anyone a Cro-Magnon racist who takes you to task for it.

Any journalist or columnist who stoops to this kind of irresponsible and emotional name-calling needs to be taken off the job and given a nice, long paid vacation in the Bahamas to get his perspective back. There is too much primal screaming in print already, and it only raises tensions and entrenches both bad feelings and bad conduct. Malloy has been simmering for a long time, so his outburst comes as little surprise. A responsible newspaper, however is foolish to print such a column.

Rep. Bart Stupak: Double-Reverse Ethics Dunce

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak has been wrong in so many ways lately it is hard to keep count. If you are going to be wrong, however, the ethical way is to have integrity and at least be consistent in your wrongness. He couldn’t even do that right. He did manage to become Ethics Alarms’ first Double-Reverse Ethics Dunce. That’s something.

First, Stupak staged a revolt in the House to insist that the original House health care reform bill didn’t wouldn’t mandate the use of taxpayer funds for abortions.

What was wrong with this?  Oh, only everything…. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Mark Levin

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Despite his on-air persona as a real-life version of the old SNL John Belushi bit on “Weekend Update” in which his rant on some issue always ended with him convulsing and hurling himself to the floor, Mark Levin is an attorney of some note, a scholar, and theoretically a couple of evolutionary steps above the typical right-wing radio screamer. Yet tonight he began yelling about how hypocritical it was for the Obamas to be preaching healthy life-styles “when his own doctor told him to stop drinking so much!” Now, that is simply untrue, as Ethics Alarms and others have thoroughly documented. Obama’s medical report did not recommend that he “moderate his drinking” as the Drudge Report erroneously reported, but rather recommended “moderation in alcohol intake,” which is boilerplate language for “a drink now and then is OK.” Even though the Drudge smear, accidental of not, made the rounds of the virulent Right media, there had been plenty of time to get the facts right, especially for someone like Levin, who is always mercilessly slamming Democrats for sloppy research and dishonest facts. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

—-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her speech before the 2010 Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties, dicussing the need to pass health care reform.

Many, including me, assumed that reports and YouTube clips of this comment were just typical examples of the increasingly common deceitful tactic of taking one sound bite out of context to make the speaker sound irresponsible or, in some cases, unhinged. But read the speech: Pelosi really is asking her audience to trust her, the House, Senate Democrats and President Obama to pass a sweeping, life-altering, expensive and vaguely defined law, that the legislators haven’t read and the public cannot begin to comprehend. Continue reading →

Essay: Ending the Bi-Partisan Effort to Destroy Trust in America

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Both the Pentagon shooter and the Texas I.R.S. attacker were motivated by a virulent distrust of the U.S. government, the distrust mutating into desperation and violence with the assistance of personal problems and emotional instability. We would be foolish, however, to dismiss the two as mere “wingnuts,” the current term of choice to describe political extremists who have gone around the bend. They are a vivid warning of America’s future, for the media, partisan commentators, the two political parties and our elected officials are doing their worst to convert all of us into wingnuts, and the results could be even more disastrous than the fanciful horrors the Left and the Right tell us that the other has planned for us. Continue reading →

Provocative Links for Ethical Weekend Reading

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Here is a diverse selection of five ethics-related posts from cyberspace for your weekend reading pleasure:

  • Christopher Hitchens analyzes, critiques and updates the Ten Commandments—and does an excellent job of all three, here.
  • Finally, a former Bush Justice Department official takes aim at the Republican attacks on the so-called “Al Qaeda Seven,” a despicable moniker apparently invented by Mary Cheney. There really is no debate here: the suggestion that attorneys who previously represented accused terrorists cannot be trusted to work in Justice is legally, ethically and logically ignorant. Still, it is good to have a Republican lawyer say so.