Health and Medicine

My Answer To “Name Withheld’s” Question To “The Ethicist”: “Tell Sis To Shut The Hell Up!” Yours?

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

An inquirer to “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, asked this week:

“A year ago, I was told I had a form of ovarian cancer and was given two to three years to live — five years, if I’m in the top quartile of patients. I nursed my husband through metastatic lung cancer for 15 months. It was horrific; I am hoping that God takes me early. My sister, whom I love very much, is part of a fundamentalist Christian church and is one of their top “prayer warriors.” As such, she calls me nearly every day and launches into long prayers asking God to send my cancer to the “foot of the cross.” She implores me to pray with her and says that if I just believe that God will cure me, he will.I grew up Catholic and have fallen away from the church. I believe God is bigger than what we can understand as human beings. I am a data-driven health care practitioner: I believe that everybody has to die of something, and this happens to be my fate. I’ve told her as tactfully as I can that her praying for me and expecting me to pray with her for my cure is upsetting to me. It makes me feel that if there is a God, he must really hate me; otherwise, he would have cured me. (She says that he wants to use me as a “messenger” to others and that it’s the Devil, not God, who gave this disease to me.)…

“What do I say to my sister without belittling her beliefs? I’ve told her that if she wants to pray for me, I would rather she do it on her own time and not ask me to participate. But she is persistent, thinking that she’s going to “save my soul” and my body at the same time. She disputes every reason that I give her and insists that what she is doing is helpful. But it’s not helpful; it sends me into a terrible depression.”

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From The News Media And Democrats, Another “It Isn’t What It Is” Orgy [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

There is no excuse for this, but apparently it works because the American people are generally as gullible as puppies, as lazy as Homer Simpson, and as irresponsible as eight-year olds with firecrackers. Democrats and their news media henchmen and henchwomen once again decided that it was prudent to gaslight the American people on the topic of abortion, where they have no logical or ethical legs to stand on, but never mind, it’s only about “choice,” after all.

During the first GOP candidates debate in Wisconsin, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott and former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson all agreed that, in DeSantis’s words,”the Democrats are trying to….allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth.” That is unquestionably true, but most Americans don’t like the idea of killing viable babies in the womb—if that’s okay, why not wait until after a birth and decide then if you want to kill the little bugger?—so the troops were called out to deny reality. (This is the current Rationalization of the Century in Woke World: #64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is”)

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Oh-Oh, I May Have To Apologize To Michael Savage…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Michael Savage (real name: Michael Weiner) is in his eighties now, and his exposure is limited to out-of-print books (he wrote 40 of them) and podcast that can be easily avoided. I used to stumble across his syndicated rant show on the car radio in D.C. now and then, and I was repeatedly horrified, not just that enough Americans would listen to his mad white nationalism to provide him with a living wage, but that there were people who thought like him at all. Savage is a misogynist, mocks autism, wants to eliminate all immigration to keep the U.S. as white as possible, and generally represents the worst pathologies of conservatism, allowing the news media to use him a template to smear anyone to the right of Barack Obama. In the early 2000s his theme was that liberalism was a mental illness; he even published a book about that theory. Like so much of Savage’s bile, that position seemed especially ominous to me, an echo of both fascism and the Soviet treatment of dissidents. I alluded to this obsession of Savage’s in a 2009 essay on the old Ethics Scoreboard, writing,

Zealots on both the Left and the Right, rather than make an honest effort to challenge the views and assumptions of those on the other side, increasingly opt to smear their character with broad and crude generalizations. Democrats and liberals hate America, and want to destroy everything that is good and decent. Republicans and conservatives are fascists and hypocrites. Liberals are evil: they encourage the killing of babies and the destruction of the family. Conservatives are evil: they secretly lead lives of sexual excess and mad fetishes. This mode of public debate could be laughed off as self-evidently ridiculous, except that individuals held in high regard by millions engage in it routinely. Listen to conservatives Michael Savage (whose writings claims liberalism is a mental illness) or Marc Levin on your radio. Or read one of newly-seated Democratic Senator Al Franken’s books, before he realized that accusing all Republicans of being fat, venal and stupid was a serviceable road to power.

That was a correct assessment then and is correct now; the problem is (and calling it just a “problem” is, as Jonathan Turley would say, “problematic”) that the two polar extremes have largely now taken over national discourse. Their excesses are just as repulsive (or should be), but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone with influence who can act as a counterweight.

But I digress…the original inspiration for this post is that Michael Savage’s assertion that “liberalism is a mental disease” appears to be coming true. Witness Ryan Polly, whom , a hospital system of over 20,000 employees, MaineHealth, has chosen to place in a position of power in its organization. Polly is a vice president of DEI there” the fact that any organization actually spends money to create a bureaucracy around the latest leftest fad is itself evidence of a metastasizing cultural malady, but Polly is special. According to a Fox News report, he hosted an antiracist prayer service in which white attendees were made to apologize for their internalized racism, because, Polly teaches, all whites (like him) are racists.

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Profile In Courage? RFK Jr.’s Revealing Abortion Flip-Flop

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Four days ago, rebel Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was being questioned on his abortion views by a reporter from NBC at the Iowa State Fair and said, “I believe a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life,” but “once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.” Kennedy then said he would support a federal ban on abortion after the first three months of pregnancy.

That’s not a very intellectually consistent position on abortion, but it qualifies as moderate and reasonable for a progressive like Kennedy, especially as the Left’s pro-abortion Borg increasingly adopts the frightening position that unborn children should be candidates for extermination right up to birth. Unfortunately, because the Democratic Party now embraces the extreme version of “choice,” Kennedy immediately backed down, turned around, and retracted his statement.

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Comment Of The Day: “Painkiller”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Most of the comments on EA posts come from a solid base of experience and knowledge, but it is especially welcome when a commenter enlightens us on a subject he or she really knows well. Thus Tom P.’s observations on the pharmaceutical industry in light of the EA post on the Perdue Pharma/Sackler/ OxyContin horror as dramatized in “Painkiller” is a special pleasure. Here it is, a Comment of the Day:

***

I apologize for the length of this post, but the topic is complicated and does not lend itself to sound bites. What follows is my experience and opinions based on working in the pharmaceutical industry and extensive reading on my part.

Full disclosure: I am a retired pharmaceutical company executive. During my career, I worked for various cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies. I held positions in R&D, manufacturing, quality control, and supply chain management. For most of my career, I was responsible for a major Pharma manufacturer’s anticancer and biologics global supply chains. As a point of reference, I have not seen “Dopesick” or “Painkiller”. I am familiar, however, with the travesty the Sacklers perpetrated on the sick and society. The best summary of their unethical and probably criminal behavior I have read is in an LA Times May 5, 2016, article: https://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/

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“Painkiller”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Painkiller,” the new Netflix series about the origins of the opioid crisis largely created by the despicable machinations of the Sackler family and Perdue Pharma, could not be better timed. Just three days ago there was another development in the fall of the Sacklers, as the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked the implementation of the 2021 $6 billion deal in federal bankruptcy court that would have blocked future opioid lawsuits against family members, who added to their vast fortune by creating and peddling OxyContin to complicit doctors and unsuspecting members of the public.

OxyContin was introduced in 1995 as Purdue Pharma’s breakthrough drug for chronic pain. The company employed an unethical marketing strategy that family scion Arthur Sackler had pioneered decades earlier, lobbying doctors to prescribe the drug and increase its dosage by dangling gifts, free trips to “pain-management seminars,”( aka all-expenses-paid vacations), paid speaking engagements, and ego-stroking visits from comely sales reps with cheerleading credentials.

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From The “Stop Making Me Defend President Biden” Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The President says so many ridiculous, garbled and alarming things that there is no justification for fabricating examples. In so doing, the conservative media simply duplicates the unethical treatment of Biden’s predecessor by the mainstream media, in which journalists and pundits attacked him for statements that they intentionally misconstrued though their intended meaning was clear and benign to anyone assessing them in good faith. That conduct by President Trump’s critics was dishonest and despicable. Yet here is the Right, doing the exact same thing.

Yecchh.

“HE’S FINE, HONEST: Biden claims ‘we ended cancer as we know it’ and says there’s ‘no difference’ between a broken arm and a mental breakdown.” was the entry by conservative pundit Stephen Greene in Instapundit. The link was to the Daily Mail, whose headline was similarly misleading: “We ended cancer as we know it’: Biden raises eyebrows with stunning claim during speech on mental health treatment where he said there’s ‘no difference’ between a broken arm and a mental breakdown.”

Biden was speaking during an event on Tuesday at the White House to promote insurers expanding access to mental health coverage. He did not say that there was “no difference” between a broken arm and a mental breakdown. He said that both maladies were serious health problems that should be be equally covered by health insurance. The President was not asserting that clinical depression or a psychotic break were the same as breaking a bone, but that mental and emotional illness have not been covered by insurance to the extent that physical injuries have, and there is no good reason for it.

He’s right. I worked on an NIH task force examining the inadequate treatment of depression, caused in part by the lack of sufficient medical insurance. Joe’s statement, as quoted by the Mail—-“And folks, you know, I don’t know what the difference between breaking your arm and having a mental breakdown is. It’s health – there’s no distinction ‘We must fulfill the promise of true mental health parity for all Americans now….”— is typically inarticulate, but one can only misinterpret his message if one is determined to, fairness and logic be damned.

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Ethics Hero (Corporate Division): In-N-Out Burger

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Among the many ways the last few years of Wokemania has reduced the quality of American life and our access to the pursuit of happiness is the creation of the ideology-linked addiction to virtually useless masks and a near-crippling phobia regarding the threat of air-borne illnesses created by fearmongering during the pandemic.

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Falsely Describing Bad Research To Advocate Irresponsible Policies Is No Way To Serve On The Supreme Court, Justice Jackson…[Corrected And Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

UPDATE: A critical Ethics Alarms reader informed me that in his view the text of this post was too similar to that of its main source, The Daily Signal, in an article by Jay Greene. Although I linked to the piece and also credited Greene with a quote, upon reviewing the post I agree that it included too many substantially similar sentences and phrasings. I apologize to the Daily Signal, Jay, and Ethics Alarms readers. I was using several articles in preparing the piece (including one from another source that was also extremely close to the Signal article), and for whatever reason, did not notice that I had leaned so heavily on Green’s phrasing. It has happened before over the past 13 years, though not often, and never with the intention to deceive. Thus I have revised the post; in the future, if anyone feels that an Ethics Alarms article does not properly credit sources or seems insufficiently original, the favored response is to alert me, rather than to accuse me in obnoxious terms of “plagiarism.”

Fans of affirmative action reacted to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s depressing defense of racial discrimination by praising her remarkably hypocritical dissent in the recent 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court declaring Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s admission policies unconstitutional. Those who believe that Justices should base their analyses on law rather than group loyalties were appropriately critical. Both, however missed some really ugly trees for the metaphorical forest, as Jackson injected false statistics into her dissent. They were, of course—we’re used to this phenomenon—uncritically accepted and used in subsequent media propaganda condemning the decision.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in part,

“Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”

Wow! Racial discrimination saves lives! The problem, or rather problems, are that as Jay Greene of the Daily Signal points out, 1) the claim that survival rates for black newborns double when they have black physicians attending is based on a misleading analysis 2) Even if the results of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study were as Justice Jackson claimed, they are unbelievable and 3) even if Jackson had described the results of the study accurately, and even if those results were credible, they still wouldn’t justify the use of racial preferences in medical school admissions.

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“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Another Case from Yale, This One with a Twist

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

by Curmie

I had a post about half-written, talking about the fact that SCOTUS justices are nominated and confirmed (or not) primarily for their adherence to certain political principles rather than for their integrity, judgment, legal expertise, or temperament. 

‘Twas not ever thus.  In my lifetime, five SCOTUS Justices were confirmed by a voice vote and three others received all 100% of the votes. Another seven received at least 80% of the votes.  But of the current members of SCOTUS, only Chief Justice Roberts received majority support from Senators of both parties… and that was by a single vote.  Justice Thomas, who’s been around the longest, is the only currently-serving member of the Supreme Court to have been confirmed by a Senate controlled by the party not in the White House at the time.

This, I was about to argue, makes the process depressingly predictable: liberals over here, conservatives over there, with Roberts as the closest thing to an unreliable vote for “his side.”  I was getting around to talking about the allegations against Justice Alito: did he really do something wrong, or is furor mostly partisan in nature?  Answer to both questions: yes. 

But then, despite the predictable split in the two Affirmative Action cases, we also see Gorsuch writing a scathing dissent on Arizona v. Navajo Nation, Barrett and Kavanaugh voting with the liberal bloc on Moore v. Harper, and Jack saying pretty much what I would have said about the Alito case.  I may want to return to the general outline of my half-written essay at some point in the future… but the timing isn’t right, now.

So let me go off in a different direction and talk about a faculty member dismissed from an elite university for her political statements.  The headline on the FIRE article begins “Yale shreds faculty rights to rid itself of professor…”  Certainly we’ve seen a fair amount of that kind of fare here on Ethics Alarms.  What’s different is what follows in that title: “…who called Trump mentally unstable.”  Well, that sure goes against the whole “universities are cesspools of Woke indoctrination” mantra, doesn’t it?

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