Life Ethics

UTHouston reports on the beginning a phase 1 study using bone marrow harvested adult stem cells in the treatment of stroke:

[Dr.] Savitz said animal studies have shown that the healing effects of stem cells can occur as early as a week but cautioned it is too early to attribute Henrich’s improvement to the stem cell treatment. “I’m hoping he will get better and it will be because of the cells, but it’s just hope at this point,” Savitz said.

The stem cells were harvested from the bone marrow in the iliac crest of his leg, then separated and returned to Henrich several hours later. Because they are his own stem cells, rejection is not expected to be an issue.

When he arrived at the hospital, Henrich could not speak and had significant weakness on his right side. When he was released after nearly two weeks of hospitalization and rehabilitation, he was able to walk and climb stairs unassisted and said his first words.

The problem with strokes is that we don’t have any way of determining the damage until the damage is done. We do have a treatment for blood clots – if you can get to it within 3 hours of the onset of symptoms (slurred speech, sudden onset of one-sided numbness or weakness or loss of consciousness).

However, if more than 3 hours has passed and there are no symptoms, we pretty much have to wait and see. Wait and see how much of the brain dies due to the blood clot, and how much damage is done over all. Some of the damage is probably due to the body’s own inflammatory process: what we would expect would cause healing may cause more cell death and scarring.

All of this damage interferes with the normal working of the cells.If the cells aren’t vital or if the body has back ups for those cells, then the brain may be stunned and function may return to some extent in days, weeks or months. In other cases, the damage is not only permanent, but may increase over months.

This new experiment may use the body’s healing processes to efficiently repair damage – or it may not. So, the people who are receiving the treatment are the ones for which our only treatment would be “watch and wait.”

Note that these are not embryonic stem cells that are derived by destroying a human embryo.

Try and find a news article on the lost $1.3 Billion that the United States Federal General Accounting Office discovered in its audit of Planned Parenthood. There isn’t a single “Mainstream Media” article out there.

Newsbusters reports what I found: Only the Houston Chronicle reported on the $627 Million of United States tax money that was spent by PP from 2002 to 2009. However, even that article did not mention the discrepancy!

Hey @whitehouse.gov! I know where to get that $1/2 Billion that you are trying to skim off the top of Medicare! You could get $1.3 Billion back from Planned Parenthood!

Of course, if they’re ready to kill, what’s a little theft, right?

I spend a lot of time on Facebook. The “Notes” on that site work pretty well for a blog. Come see, sometimes.

I’ve been reading about the Jemmotts’ work with inner city kids for a while. There’s an article in this month’s Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine - one of the American Medical Association journals – about a randomized trial of abstinence-only vs. “safer sex” with encouragement to use a condom. The results were a significant difference in first intercourse and intercourse in the previous 3 months, during the 24 months of follow up. There was no difference in condom use between the two groups, when the kids did have sex. A repeat intervention decreased the likelihood of multiple sexual partners.

Here’s the abstract:

Objective To evaluate the efficacy of an abstinence-only intervention in preventing sexual involvement in young adolescents.

Design Randomized controlled trial.

Setting Urban public schools.

Participants A total of 662 African American students in grades 6 and 7.

Interventions An 8-hour abstinence-only intervention targeted reduced sexual intercourse; an 8-hour safer sex–only intervention targeted increased condom use; 8-hour and 12-hour comprehensive interventions targeted sexual intercourse and condom use; and an 8-hour health-promotion control intervention targeted health issues unrelated to sexual behavior. Participants also were randomized to receive or not receive an intervention maintenance program to extend intervention efficacy.

Outcome Measures The primary outcome was self-report of ever having sexual intercourse by the 24-month follow-up. Secondary outcomes were other sexual behaviors.

Results The participants’ mean age was 12.2 years; 53.5% were girls; and 84.4% were still enrolled at 24 months. Abstinence-only intervention reduced sexual initiation (risk ratio [RR], 0.67; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.48-0.96). The model-estimated probability of ever having sexual intercourse by the 24-month follow-up was 33.5% in the abstinence-only intervention and 48.5% in the control group. Fewer abstinence-only intervention participants (20.6%) than control participants (29.0%) reported having coitus in the previous 3 months during the follow-up period (RR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.90-0.99). Abstinence-only intervention did not affect condom use. The 8-hour (RR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.92-1.00) and 12-hour comprehensive (RR, 0.95; 95% CI, 0.91-0.99) interventions reduced reports of having multiple partners compared with the control group. No other differences between interventions and controls were significant.

Conclusion Theory-based abstinence-only interventions may have an important role in preventing adolescent sexual involvement.

Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00640653

Nature News has an article on a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that ties lower levels of serotonin to an increased risk of sudden infant death syndrome (also called “cot deaths,” “crib deaths, or “SIDS”). The authors are not sure what causes the low levels or whether the low serotonin levels are the cause or an effect of the deaths and don’t make any sort of recommendations for treatment or changes in care of children.

I’m still surprised at the decrease in crib deaths that happened when we all started telling moms to lay their babies on their backs in the crib. All of my life (and when my kids were babies) we had been taught to lay them on their tummies or sides. However, the more I thought about it, babies are on their backs when nursing from the breast, and so putting them in bed this way probably brings about some protective effect of mimicks one.

Don’t forget: Back to Bed!

Sarah Palin has written a note on her Facebook page on the move to oppose an ad that’s scheduled to be run during the Super Bowl. The active opposition to the ad by the National Organization for Women (incorrectly named, btw) and other groups, shows just how pro-abortion, rather than pro-choice, they are.

The 30 second segment is sponsored by – and paid for by – Focus on the Family. It tells the story of Pam Tebow, mother of Heisman Trophy winner, Tim Tebow. Tebow’s mother was encouraged to abort him due to medical problems.

Colorado Springs, Colo (Friday, Jan. 15, 2010) – Focus on the Family will broadcast the first Super Bowl ad in its history February 7 during CBS Sports’ coverage of the game at Dolphin Stadium in South Florida.

The 30-second spot from the international family-help organization will feature college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam. They will share a personal story centered on the theme of “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.”

Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family, said the chance to partner with the Tebows and lift up a meaningful message about family and life comes at the right moment in the culture, because “families need to be inspired.”

“Tim and Pam share our respect for life and our passion for helping families thrive,” Daly said. “They live what we see every day – that the desire for family closeness is written on the hearts of every generation. Focus on the Family is about nurturing that desire and strengthening families by empowering them with the tools they need to live lives rooted in morals and values.”

Daly added that all the funds to air the ad came from a handful of “very generous and committed friends” who donated specifically to support the project. No money from the ministry’s general fund was used.

The Tebows said they agreed to appear in the commercial because the issue of life is one they feel very strongly about.

The Washington Post reports that there has been opposition to the airing of the ad:

After learning of the ad late Monday, Women’s Media Center (speaking on behalf of the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation and other organizations) asked CBS to pull the ad. It also questioned how and why the network, which used to forbid “advocacy” advertising, agreed to air Focus on the Family’s spot, which is valued at $2.5 million to $3 million.

“An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year — an event designed to bring Americans together,” Jehmu Greene, president of the Women’s Media Center, said in a statement.

The pressure on CBS proves my earlier assertion that as a society, we in the US have moved from the 1960′s slogan “Our Bodies, Our Choice,” to “Our Bodies, Our Choice, and You Don’t Have Choice.”

 Next up: doctors, section 8 housing owners, ????? Grocery stores, drug stores???

A year ago in December, Ms. Berry and more than 40,000 other home-based day care providers statewide were suddenly informed they were members of Child Care Providers Together Michigan—a union created in 2006 by the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union had won a certification election conducted by mail under the auspices of the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. In that election only 6,000 day-care providers voted. The pro-labor vote turned out.

Many of the state’s other 34,000 day-care providers never even realized what was going on. Ms. Berry tells us she was “shocked” to find out she was suddenly in a union. The real dirty work, however, had been done when the state created an “employer” for the union to “organize” against.
Of course, Michigan’s independent day-care providers don’t work for anybody except the parents who were their customers. Nevertheless, because some of these parents qualified for public subsidies, the Child Care Providers “union” claimed the providers were “public employees.”
Michigan’s Department of Human Services then teamed with Flint-based Mott Community College to sign an “interlocal agreement” in 2006 establishing a separate government agency called the Michigan Home Based Child Care Council. This council was directed to recommend good child-care practices—and not coincidentally, to serve as a “public employer.” Although the council had almost no staff, no control over the state subsidies and no supervision of the providers’ daily activities, it became the shell corporation against which the union could organize.
Thus the state created an ersatz employer and an ersatz “bargaining unit” against which what was essentially an ersatz union could organize.
Today the Department of Human Services siphons about $3.7 million in annual dues to the union—from the child-care subsidies. The money should be going to home-based day-care providers—themselves not on the high end of the income scale. Ms. Berry now sees money once paid to her go to a union that does little for her. She says she is “self employed and wants nothing to do with the union.”

Emailed to the AMA Board:
I paid my Texas Medical Association dues for 2010 but will not renew my American Medical Association membership. I do not want to be counted as an AMA member.

I dropped my membership once before due to political moves by the leadership of the AMA. I rejoined hoping to work within the House of Medicine to influence policies of the AMA. I became more active in my TMA, the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, national meetings of the AMA and the American Academy of Family Physicians and accepted the Chairmanship of the Family Medicine Section of the Christian Medical Association.

This weekend, AMA President-Elect Wilson announced support for the Reid substitute and manager’s amendment, which dropped the effort to correct the “Sustainable Growth Rate” and does not even mention (much less achieve) tort reform. Instead, current language provides billions of dollars in special deals for Democrat Senators, support for payment for elective interventional abortion in healthy mothers and on healthy babies, and an expansion of Medicaid that threatens to bankrupt my State of Texas.

The AMA leadership have told us that they hoped to protect our patients and the practice of medicine in the final legislation, just as I had hoped to influence AMA policies by lending my name and paying my dues to them. I will no longer give the AMA my name or my money, since neither of us has achieved our goal.

Beverly B. Nuckols, MD
New Braunfels, Texas

The Hasting Center has published an online collection of essays called“The Values and Health Care Reform Connection” allowing the public to comment on health care and “American Values.” You have to admire the awareness of the academics – not only have they noticed that the conservative, pro-life, religious “American” is concerned with values, but they are trying very, very hard to appeal to those of us with a Judeo-Christian background. I’ve only skimmed a couple of the essays so farm but I have found a glaring inability to stay on task or a basic lack of understanding of the world view of the intended target, uh, audience.
For example, in “Stewardship: What Kind of Society Do We Want?,” Len M. Nichols misses the mark in spite of peppering the essay with terms like “stewardship,” “abundant life” and “covenant” and appeals to the writings of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.

(Skip over the use of a faulty, biased 2009 Institute of Medicine report on the consequences of lack of universal health care insurance in the U.S., already thoroughly debunked by Steven Malloy’s “Junk Science” blog.)

In his appeal to “American Values,” Nichols attempts to define “stewardship” to include a “covenant” as a duty of property owners to ensure that the poor have food to eat. He refers to the book of Leviticus and Jewish Law that land owners leave “the corners” of their fields for the poor to glean, rather than going back to harvest all that is there.  While noting that the rule was propagated the “other books that Moses wrote,” Nichols explains that only adult males could own land “in ancient Palestine.” He would have been better off referring to the “Torah” or “the Law,” which was given by G_d, not Moses, and to the Nation of Israel, since there was no “Palestine” at that time.

Nichols almost persuades me that he “gets it” in his discussion of the basis for rights: the belief that humans are created in the image of G_d. However, he asks what good is the right to life or the pursuit of happiness without access to essential health care and quotes Jefferson’s comparison of liberty with health. He does not seem to understand that both Locke and Jefferson described these as negative rights: the right not to be killed, and the right not to be enslaved or have ‘the fruit of one’s labor” forcibly taken. In other words, no one has the right to cause another to be sick, but there is no right to medicine or medical care.
Nichols does not resort to the usual call for Christians to remember the Good Samaritan. In fact, he turns to an argument that might be more appealing to Libertarians, whom he calls “a tiny group of argumentative people.” His discussion of rights and stewardship by is converted to support for the rationing of health care, noting that Leviticus does not require the landowner to bring the poor person home and cook him a meal. In this, too, he demonstrates his lack of understanding of the Judeo-Christian world view. The covenant to care for the sick and poor is between individual believers and G_d. Government hasn’t proven itself to be trustworthy enough for me to assign my duty to G_d over to its stewardship.