Advertisers can get us to harm our health

When will the average American start believing what his frontal lobes tell him? It seems that we are very easily influenced to act against the advice of our own reasoning capacity. A recent post on Sharon Begley's blog, Lab Notes, says that 36% if us will go along with an unwise suggestion if we like the way it sounds.

Begley writes:

"In a disturbing study from Canada, scientists find that names can strongly influence decisions patients make about treatment.

"To investigate what role a name plays, scientists at McMaster University started out by showing volunteer patients information on the benefits and harms of various treatment options...

"The treatment options were labeled "treatment A," "treatment B" and "treatment C," ...virtually all (96 percent) of the participants said [an educational presentation] helped them choose among the three treatments.

"Then the scientists replaced A, B and C with the treatment's true name "warfarin, acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) and "no treatment."

"36 percent of the patients changed their initial choice, including 46 percent of those who initially chose warfarin and 78 percent who initially chose no treatment, the scientists are reporting this evening in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

"Although they grasped the risks and benefits, that rational decision was trumped by the pull of the name, or the belief that no treatment (which is actually the best option in some cases) must be the worst choice. No wonder drug advertising is so effective."

Parents to spend 2 years in prison for beer at party

A Virginia woman and her ex-husband will spend 27 months in prison for allowing her son’s16-year-old friends to drink beer at a sleepover. Elisa Kelly’s reason for providing the beer was that she didn’t want the kids to drive to get alcohol. About half of the kids at the sleepover drank no alcohol at all.

Ryan Kenty, Elisa’s son, was so distraught about his mother’s situation, for which he felt guilty, that he dropped out of high school. Ryan’s younger brother, now 16, will not have his mother around for quite a while. It seems unlikely that anyone’s life has been improved by the government’s actions in this case.

Still, Albemarle County Commonwealth's Attorney James L. Camblos III isn’t feeling the family’s pain. It would appear that he didn’t become a public servant in order to make life better for other people, but to make life better for himself. This seems like another case where the justice system is being abused by someone with a pathological need to inflict pain. Camblos knows that a good way to get people to vote is by identifying an evil, and working everyone into a frenzy over it. Certainly underage drinking is a problem, but it’s also a reality, and Mr. Camblos’ actions are not likely to stop 16-year-olds from drinking. Camblos will just make it more likely that they’ll drive somewhere to get their alcohol.

Daniela Deane of the Washington Post writes:

“"No one left the party," said Kelly, 42, who collected car keys that night almost five years ago to prevent anyone from leaving. "No one was hurt. No one drove anywhere. I really don't think I deserve to go to jail for this long."

“Kelly said she's "scared" to go to the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail, where each of her sons will be able to visit her only once a month for 15 minutes at a time, and worried about how her sons will fare without her. "I'm going to miss the end of Brandon's high school," she said of her 16-year-old son, choking back tears.

“After the incident, Ryan dropped out of high school, where he was an athlete and a member of the school's basketball team, saying he couldn't take the constant attention. He shelved plans to attend college and now works full time at UPS. The brothers will live nearby with their father, Marc Kenty, until their mother is released.”

600 Years Ago, Samoans Sailed to Chile and Introduced Chickens

We assumed that Spanish conquistadores brought chickens to South American, but we were wrong. Thor Hyerdahl assumed that South Americans sailed on rafts to Polynesia. He got it wrong, too.

It was the other way around. A rare mutation in chickens first appeared in Tonga two thousand years ago. Descendants of those Tongan chickens were flourishing in Samoa 600 years ago, and at the same time, they showed up in Chile.

Scientist Alice Storey from New Zealand worked on the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The truth was revealed after a team stumbled across some old chicken bones in Chile, and decided to carbon-date them and DNA test them.

Forget the kids. Can we teach teachers to do critical thinking?

I believe that most school teachers are capable of critical thinking. But it seems that this capacity gets tossed by the wayside all too frequently when the facts aren't in line with with school politics.

How can an intelligent college graduate convince himself or herself that black is white? The answer is in this week's Newsweek. It's a column about the very human coping mechanism of denial.

The author, Sharon Begley, also has a blog about good science and bad science called Lab Notes.
Here's the article:

The Truths We Want to Deny

By Sharon Begley
Newsweek
May 21, 2007

A man who resented his parents' favoritism toward his younger brother was receiving
psychotherapy in Boston for relationship problems. His therapist thought they were
making progress, but she knew a problem loomed. Pregnant, she worried that her fragile
patient might view her maternity leave as abandonment or rejection. She held off revealing
her situation until she was six months along, last year.

"Have you noticed anything about me?" she asked. The patient said he had not, so she
told him she was pregnant. Looking at her bulging abdomen, he said she couldn't be; he
was a keen observer of women's bodies and had made a habit of scrutinizing her because
he worried this would happen. No, he said; you're not pregnant.

Denying the evidence of your eyes is the most extreme form of the coping mechanism
called denial. But denial comes in milder forms as well.

Parents refuse to believe their child is on drugs; that baggie under his bed contained
oregano. A husband maintains his wife cannot be cheating; those late nights she spends
with a friend are purely platonic. A wife denies that her husband is gay; he's just been too
tired for sex with her these last few years.

And a president who insists that a war will succeed despite setback after setback? It's risky
to put a politician on the couch, but that has not kept President Bush's critics from
charging that he is "in a state of denial" about the situation in Iraq, as Sen. Harry Reid said
last month. The phrase was the title of Bob Woodward's latest book on the war, and in
January, USA Today editorialized that Bush is "in denial about the insurgency that has
plunged [Iraq] into civil war."

This could all be dismissed as psycho-babble, except for one thing. Psychology
researchers, including some who advise politicians, have reached the same conclusion. "I
do think there is denial on Bush's part in his running of the war," says Kerry Sulkowicz,
clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center. "He seems unmoved
by the extent of the evidence that things are far worse than he believes. The tip-off for
denial is perpetual optimism, a pathological certainty that things are going well."

Bush could, of course, know full well that the United States cannot achieve its goals in Iraq.

If so, then he is lying not to himself but to us (for reasons scientists would have a field day
with, but that's another story).

But while it's always risky to psychoanalyze a politician from afar, a few things in his past
are consistent with the capacity for denial. When he was 7, his baby sister died of
leukemia. Bush, while certainly not denying her death, tried to cheer up his grieving
mother, saying everything would be OK.

Also, those who abuse alcohol, as Bush has admitted doing, typically need to see the world
in black and white in order to stay on the wagon. "It's how they control their addiction,"
says Sulkowicz. "It reflects an inability or refusal to see shades of gray."

People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy something they hold
dear.

In the case of a cheating partner, denial lets you avoid "acknowledging evidence of your
own humiliation," says New York psychoanalyst Leon Hoffman. Short of catching a spouse
in flagrante delicto, evidence of infidelity is usually ambiguous. "It's motivated skepticism,"
says psychologist Peter Ditto of the University of California, Irvine. "You're more skeptical
of things you don't want to believe and demand a higher level of proof."

Denial is unconscious, or it wouldn't work: if you know you're closing your eyes to the
truth, some part of you knows what the truth is and denial can't perform its protective
function.

One thing we all struggle to protect is a positive self-image. "The more important the
aspect of your self-image that's challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into
denial," says Ditto.

If you have a strong sense of self-worth and competence, your self-image can take hits
but remain largely intact; if you're beset by self-doubt, however, any acknowledgment of
failure can be devastating and any admission of error painful to the point of being
unthinkable.

In their new book, "Mistakes Were Made," psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
argue that self-justification and denial arise from the dissonance between believing you're
competent, and making a mistake, which clashes with that image.

Solution: deny the mistake. Similarly, if a political leader believes himself competent and
wise, and a decision has disastrous consequences, the only way to reconcile self-image
with failure is to deny the failure. As Tavris and Aronson write, a president who believes
"he has the truth becomes impervious to self-correction." He blinds himself to information
that might make him doubt his decision.

There are exceptions, however. When the Bay of Pigs proved to be a fiasco, JFK said
responsibility was "mine and mine alone."

No denial there.

Good Teacher or Bathroom Bully?

How a teacher handles bathroom privileges tells a lot about a teacher. But asking that a teacher be fired for denying bathroom privileges is like asking that a lawyer be disbarred for--well--refusing to allow a client to go to the bathroom.

This behavior raises a question about whether a professional has adequate respect for those he serves, but it doesn't ANSWER that question.

The science teacher at Charles M. Goethe Middle School in Sacramento, California who earned a spot in the news in April 2007 sounds suspiciously like someone who does not have a handle on classroom management. The mother of student Michael Patterson, with the backing of the local NAACP, is demanding that a teacher be fired for making her son urinate in a bottle in the back of his science classroom rather than allowing him to go to the bathroom.

But before I judge the teacher, I'd like to know what exactly was going on in class when he refused to allow 14-year-old Michael Patterson to go to the bathroom. Was it a once-in-a-lifetime science demonstration? Or was it independent work time?

Many teachers are bathroom bullies. Some of them should be fired, others shouldn't.

Some bathroom-bully teachers are of limited intelligence and even more limited teaching ability and are impossible to rehabilitate. They should be fired. Some teachers are out-and-out racists. They usually reveal themselves as such only in off-guard moments. We must be careful before pinning the racist label on a teacher for a single action, but when a racist teacher is exposed, he or she should be given a chance at rehabilitation, and should be fired only if he or she continues to disobey the laws regarding equal treatment of all.

But there is another group of teachers who are basically good at what they do, and who happen to have a few blind spots.

This second group of bathroom-bully teachers are good enough teachers that they should be allowed to keep their jobs; they simply need some attention from the school administration. Ideally, they would receive professional counseling to help them deal with their demons so they wouldn't bully kids. Most teachers of this type have a handful of students they don't like, and these children are the targets of their abusive tactics. If the teacher can't grow up and behave more maturely toward all the children in his or her care, then there is a another alternative for dealing with the situation. The principal should handle the problem by protecting targeted kids, transferring them to another class or giving the teacher specific instructions on how to show adequate respect to that child.

Bathroom privileges are not at the top of the list of important school issues. At the top of the list should be the teacher's basic respect and fairness toward his or her students, and the teacher's ability to expand the knowledge and understanding of his or her students. Bathroom bullying simply raises a warning flag.

The Serious Issues Behind Bathroom Bullying

Many teachers are unmoveable in their negative attitudes towards bathroom privileges for students, and toward just about any other privilege for students. In fact, these teachers are unmoveable in their opposition to the idea that education is the main goal of teaching.

The main goal, they believe, is to teach kids who's in charge.

If Student A does his homework, but gets failing grades on tests, while Student B fails to do his homework, but scores 100% on tests, what will these teachers do?

In many cases, they will give Student A a higher grade than Student B. Student B is likely to drop out. Student A will get a worthless diploma. Is it any wonder our schools are failing?

But these rigid teachers don't just cause problems within their classrooms. They also cause many problems in their schools. One reason is that the teachers union consists largely of just this type of teacher. In some districts, there are innovative teachers who challenge this control, but these districts are rare. My union president boasted to me that her students at Castle Park Elementary in Chula Vista were fond of the saying AVOID BOYD. She thought it was something to be proud of. Needless to say, Gina Boyd supported abusive teachers. During her presidency, four above-average teachers were forced out of Castle Park Elementary in a period of six years.

One thing you can count on the California Teachers Association to do is to back up an abusive teacher, no matter how cruel or incompetent that teacher might be, when a parent or child complains about the teacher.

I hope Michael Patterson's mom (see next post) will be able to start a discussion and an investigation into bathroom rules at her son's middle school. It's something that should be done at every school. And then the discussion needs to be expanded. Schools shouldn't be havens for Little Ceasars. They should be places where children and education come first.

Right-wing special interests in schools

Since we’ve all come to accept that our government is for sale, I suppose it's unrealistic to expect the public to rush out and demand that education be cleaned up.

Perhaps we need to clean up government before we can clean up education.

We need to take money out of political campaigns, and politics out of schools. It’s a joke to say that political contributions don’t result in legislative and administrative decisions to benefit contributors. We have huge amounts of taxpayer money flowing into schools, and we have entrenched interests, both left-wing and right-wing, that want to channel that money, and the power that accompanies it, to themselves and their friends.

Is all the hoopla about Reading First just self-serving baloney?

The government is letting READING FIRST evaluate its own reading program! In fact, it's paying them to do it!

The Associated Press writes:

"A billion-dollar- a-year federal reading program that ran into scathing criticism over conflicts of interest now has a new one: The government contractor that set up the program for the Education Department is also part of the team hired to evaluate it. Reading First -- part of President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind education law -- has been under scrutiny following a string of federal reports that found it rife with conflicts of interest and mismanagement. The program provides intense reading help to low-income children in the early elementary grades. RMC Research Corp. was the contractor hired to establish and implement the program starting in 2002, under three contracts worth about $40 million. Recently, the Department of Education inspector general reported that RMC failed to keep the program free of conflicts of interest. For example, RMC did not screen subcontractors for relationships with publishers of reading programs."

See full article:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/03/30/reading.conflicts.ap/index.html

Do poor whites and poor blacks rise and fall for similar reasons?

Not always. Skin color does make life easier for some and harder for others.

But one characteristic that makes future success difficult for children of all skin colors is constant disrespect meted out by their caretakers. I have seen overly-harsh punishments and ugly language dealt to children of all colors, and I've seen the long-range harm it does.

But this morning on Showtime I saw SATURDAY NIGHT LIFE, a short, simple story of how to help one's children succeed in life by using a soft voice and a little imagination. Showtime says, "Writer-director Ava DuVernay's short drama concerns a poor, struggling single mother whose trip with her three children to a 99-cent store in Los Angeles becomes an unexpectedly uplifting family experience. The pretty-mother-next-door is Melissa DeSousa ("The Best Man"). It's family fare with a handsome guardian angel in the next aisle.

Explosive parents result in nervous children

Here are some quotes from ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MENTAL DISORDERS
at www.minddisorders.com:

“People with intermittent explosive disorder have a problem with controlling their temper. In addition, their violent behavior is out of proportion to the incident or event that triggered the outburst. Impulsive acts of aggression, however, are not unique to intermittent explosive disorder.”

“Several medications have been used for treating IED. These include… propranolol (Inderal), a heart medication that controls blood pressure and irregular heart rhythms…”

“As of 2002, preventive strategies include educating young people in parenting skills, and teaching children skills related to self-control. Recent studies summarized by an article in a professional journal of psychiatry indicate that self-control can be practiced like many other skills, and that people can improve their present level of self-control with appropriate coaching and practice.”

Do you believe in strictness or nurturance?

"The conservative/liberal division is ultimately a division between strictness and nurturance as ideals at all levels--from the family to morality to religion and, ultimately, to politics. It is a division at the center of our democracy and our public lives, and yet there is no overt discussion of it in public discourse."
--George Lakoff
Moral Politics

Disciplinarian Parents Have Fatter Kids?

Children with disciplinarian parents tend to gain more excess weight than other children, says a report from Boston University School of Medicine. Reuters reports that researches suspect that the weight gain is a result of comfort-eating due to anxiety. There also seems to be some eating-for-comfort by children of permissive and neglectful parents, but these children do not have as much of a weight problem as the stricter parents.