| Bass, Hodes Spar On Iraq, Taxes, Ethics | | Posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 6:58:17 AM by Blog57 Team | | Iraq and taxes were the main focuses of Wednesday night's debate between Rep. Charlie Bass and challenger Paul Hodes. The race in the 2nd Congressional District has tightened in recent weeks, and in his campaign ads, Hodes has tried to paint Bass as following the Republican Party line. That strategy continued Wednesday, while Bass said that he was an independent voice in Washington. Much of the debate centered on the war in Iraq. Hodes said that his plan is to bring home the National Guard and reserve troops from what he called a "civil war" and have U.S. troops focus on training Iraqi security forces. .... | |
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| | | Physician leading movement to treat body and soul | | Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 12:59:00 PM by Blog57 Team | | Granted, Dr. Daniel Sulmasy is not your average physician. He's a Franciscan friar, a Catholic brother who has answered a call to serve. But Sulmasy said he believes all health-care providers, whether they are deeply religious, unbelieving or somewhere in between, must acknowledge the spiritual needs and questions of patients who are facing death. "This is new territory for physicians, and many are quite anxious about it," he said. "Many patients offer clues that spirituality is important to them — rosary beads, Shabbat candles, a Quran — but the typical way the physician reacts to such clues is to ignore them. In some ways, you're ignoring what is most meaningful to the patient." Sulmasy, the director of the Bioethics Institute of New York Medical College in Valhalla, has been a leading voice for more than a decade in a growing movement to "treat" the spiritual health of patients.... | |
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| | | Doctors not keen to admit errors: study | | Posted Wednesday, August 16, 2006 10:57:09 AM by Blog57 Team | | Doctors are less likely to reveal major medical mishaps if the error is not obvious to the patient, new research has found. A study of almost 2,700 American and Canadian doctors has found that 65 per cent would definitely disclose a serious mistake made during treatment. But the medics varied widely in when and how they told patients an error had occurred. A doctor confronted with a obvious error was far more likely to impart the news to their patient than one faced with a less apparent mistake. Doctors involved in the University of Washington study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, were presented with one of four serious mishaps. Two involved an obvious error that patient was likely to find out about - like a sponge left inside them during surgery - while the other two were less obvious, like an internal injury accidentally inflicted by a surgeon.... | |
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| | | The Guantanamo suicides reopen a festering question of medical ... | | Posted Saturday, July 15, 2006 8:57:51 AM by Blog57 Team | | GUANTANAMO BAY, the US detention camp in Cuba, has become a synonym for inhumanity: prolonged isolation with no recourse to the law; alleged beatings and torture; forcible feeding of hunger strikers; and now suicides. The recent deaths of three detainees are certain to reopen a festering debate among psychologists and psychiatrists about whether they should be sharing their expertise on the human mind with military interrogators. The rumours that particular prisoners have suffered unusual punishments ? one is said not to have seen sunlight for years ? have stoked suspicions that mental health experts with access to detainees? medical records have customised interrogation techniques (the prisoner allowed out only at night is reported to have a phobia of the dark). In the eyes of many, such assistance constitutes a violation of an ethical code, because it is about breaking minds rather than healing them.... | |
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