From a website for kids and marketing vehicle made by a “naturopathic doctor and mother” comes an instructional video:
This is how you use the Belladonna . . . you hold it upside down . . . then you twist . . . then you pop it in your mouth! . . . It tastes just like sugar.
Update: Its creator took Kids & Homeopathy off-line in reaction to this blog post. However, I had been careful to save a copy. Here are a couple of stills, edited to protect the child’s privacy:
“...you hold it upside down...”
“...then you pop it in your mouth!”
How many ethical issues does this raise? In my opinion, the video steps over the line by…
- Marketing medicine to children,
- Using the pills’ similarity to candy to sell them,
- Blurring the distinction between medicine and candy,
- Promoting a culture of pill-popping and keeping a medicine cabinet full of “remedies” at all times to children,
- Teaching children how to circumvent a child-safety device,
- Teaching children to self-diagnose instead of turning to a parent or guardian,
- Blurring the meaning of dangerous poisons such as Belladonna,
- Focussing on the symptoms instead of the underlying problems: Why does she have headaches frequently enough that she knows what “medication” she prefers for them? Is there some underlying problem that’s going ignored while she self-diagnoses and self-medicates?
- Marketing a disproven therapy (homeopathy) to children,
- Harming this particular child through the inculcation of these values.
Did I miss anything?
Update 2
- The video’s creator responds.
- Another problem with the video’s concept occurred to me: As can be seen in the screenshot above, the girl takes medication on camera even though she’s not experiencing any health problems. This is both questionable (further teaching that taking meds is a lighthearted & fun activity), and odd (evidence that homeopathic medications maybe really aren’t “real”.)
Malcolm Gladwell is Dead to Me
I’ve been a fan of his for a long time — I loved The Tipping Point, and saw him speak at Powell’s downtown Portland. I knew he had his critics who challenged his conclusions or methods, but I saw that many of the attacks were ideological, and so didn’t think much of them.
But I recently stumbled onto his blog post, Pit Bulls…. It’s short; just two paragraphs long. The first is decent; he describes how, even though a pit bull attack caused no serious physical harm,
. . . the attack could have been much more serious. If everyone hadn’t run to the defense of the boy so quickly, and if the boy’s mother hadn’t done exactly the right thing (lying down, with her body covering the boy) the boy could easily have been badly injured. The attack was horrifying, even if no one was seriously hurt . . .
But then the concluding paragraph is wrong on its face:
. . . part of the rhetorical arsenal of those who get hysterical about Pit Bulls is to pretend that every dog bite is a medical catastrophe. . . . [But] more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites—which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end.
[Emphasis mine] I mean, really? He really believes (and thinks he’s proved) that people, or at least owners of pit bulls, are more likely to bite you than their dogs are? My friend Morgan pointed out that this goes against our own experience: We could each remember numerous times we’ve been bitten by dogs, but we’ve never been bitten by a person.
And another thing
I have to also say that his “those who get hysterical about Pit Bulls” characterization is B.S. In my experience, pro-Pit Bull people (they exist) and Anti-BSL advocates often get hysterical. However, I haven’t seen this in advocates for BSL.
Laws that restrict dog breeds which are thought to be dangerous are called Breed Specific Legislation, or “BSL”. I haven’t made up my mind about them, but I lean in favor of thinking they’re a good thing: after all, (1) we already ban the ownership of many kinds of dangerous animals. And (2) the cost to society and individual freedom isn’t great, e.g.:
“No, you can’t keep that coyote you saw in Powell Butte. And if you want a pet, there are plenty of Labs waiting to be adopted at the Humane Society.”
So I conclude that if there are overly dangerous dog breeds, then it’s reasonable to restrict them in the same way.
A cute but questionable “IQ Test”
But there are many people and groups who advocate against BSL — and in favor of their being able to keep and sell these breeds. Ok, fair enough. And one of them, “Paul Glassner SF/SPCA”, has written a breed ban IQ test that begins,
1. If you were the sheriff in your town and you learned that Toyotas were disproportionally involved in more auto accidents than any other model, would you:
(a) ban Toyotas and confiscate the Toyota of anyone caught driving one
(b) arrest the drivers responsible for those accidents?
And that’s it — those are the only choices. The rest of the test builds on this question and makes the points one might guess it would. And so I found the “test” pretty shoddy—essentially propaganda. Because what about,
(c) look at car ownership to see if a disproportionate number of people own Toyotas as well. If not, investigate the Toyotas to see if they’re flawed by design.
…which then leads to,
(d) potentially all of the above.
Because that’s what we do in the real world: If a car type is too dangerous by design, then we ban it. If a model’s occupants would die from a single low-speed collision, we ban it. Ditto if a model’s brakes are fundamentally flawed.
The car metaphor works in favor of BSL
Now that I think about it, this does apply to dangerous dogs: The overly dangerous dog is one who’s likely to bite more often (a car that causes more accidents), and when it does bite, more often maims or kills its victim (a car that does the same to its occupants). In other words, the “overly dangerous dog” is one that’d be responsible for higher incidence and mortality rates. If there were a car like this — and there have been — you can bet we’d take action against them.
I love NPR and Fresh Air. But right now, I’m very disappointed.
Terri Gross is chairing a a discussion about health care solutions with two people. One is Paul Krugman. I knew the name, but not too much about him, and so here’s what I found:
- Professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton,
- Centenary professor at London School of Economics,
- 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize winner in economics,
- Author of “25 books and 40 scholarly articles” (Wikipedia).
I thought to myself, wow, awesome — I want to hear what he has to say. And the other person? “Stuart Butler, [some position at] conservative thinktank, the Heritage Foundation”. Ok, so red flags go up for me. Who is this guy? Here’s the best I can find:
- Author of a series of “WebMemos” and “Heritage Lectures” on the Heritage Foundation website,
- Adjunct faculty at Georgetown,
- Identified as a very influential person by a D.C.-insider periodical. (per his resume)
For cryin’ out loud — why why why? How in the world does a discussion between these two people serve listeners? How is Butler any different from Creationists who write “research” papers that they publish in their own personal “scientific journals”?
Here’s just one of the many problems with this:
As a consumer of news and content, I’m shortchanged.
If there is a well-represented competing current of research and solutions in the field, then I’d like to hear from someone who would disagree with Krugman on some issues. But please, this person should have similarly solid credentials, and should represent a similarly broad stream of research in the subject area.
I’ve seen a lot of conservative commentators make arguments that the Supreme Court’s decision is somehow a repudiation of Sotomayor. They’ve used the decision’s 90-page length as evidence of Sotomayor’s lack of good judgment, the fact of an overturned decision as evidence of it being “wrong”, and the fact that the appellants were White as evidence of her racism.
But I come to the opposite conclusions by calmly looking at the facts:
- The Court’s conservative majority reached its decision by creating law in the form of a new standard — a “strong basis in evidence” of the success of a disparate effect lawsuit is now required.Sotomayor shouldn’t have done the same (and didn’t) as an appellate judge, whose role is to interpret, not create law.
- The Court’s reasoning was based on a reading of the facts that was different from that of the trial court. Several long and conflicting recitations of the facts caused the decision to reach ~90 pages. In other words, the case was reviewed “de novo”. Sotomayor shouldn’t have done the same (and didn’t) as an appellate judge, who is required to give deference to the trial court’s findings of fact.
- The Court reached a 5-4 split decision along the supposed political lines: 4 conservatives, 4 liberals, and Justice Kennedy in the middle. Attempting to label Sotomayor’s decision to uphold the district court’s decision as radical or racist is simply disingenuous.
