Religious nurses in a secular NHS
I've just seen the story of a Weston-Super-Mare nurse who's been suspended after reportedly offering to pray for a patient's recovery. She's already being compared to the BA crucifix lady, with similarly broken arguments. The problem isn't that she's religious: the problem is she's brought her religion into work, and in some jobs there are good reasons you shouldn't do that.
Presumably, doing so makes nurses' lives harder. I woudn't have any problem being treated by an openly religious nurse, but I'm sure there are believers in other religions who would. What if some religious patients decide they'd rather be treated only by religious nurses? And only of their, specific religion? What if some nurses, through either non-belief, alternative religions, or just a secular approach, 'refuse' to pray for patients, while others don't? Isn't it unfair to put them into that position? And presumably nobody wants to be getting into metaphysical discussions on the ward. Also, while I wouldn't be offended if someone offered to pray for me, I might get a bit worried: why, with all this medical equipment, are you offering to pray? What's wrong with me? It seems to me that once a nurse's religion becomes a factor in patient care, in any way, things can surely only get tougher.
Nurses are utterly fantastic. You could not pay me to do once the things they do every day, in 12-hour shifts, for little acclaim, little money, and the occasional vile spewings of Tories. I feel bad coming within a mile of saying a nurse is doing something wrong, but surely a completely secular approach is the wisest stance, here? I'm pretty sure codes of practice dictate as much, too.
I wasn't sure about the suspension at first. If it violates a code then fair enough, but it seemed a touch extreme. Then I saw she'd previously been reprimanded for handing out prayer cards(!), so she's only been suspended because this is the second incident. And the BBC article has this:
"My faith got stronger and I realised God was doing amazing things in my life.
"I saw my patients suffering and as I believe in the power of prayer, I began asking them if they wanted me to pray for them. They are absolutely delighted."
Which suggests she's been asking multiple patients, not just the one. And then:
Mrs Petrie said: "I stopped handing out prayer cards after that but I found it more and more difficult [not to offer them]. My concern is for the person as a whole, not just their health.
"I was told not to force my faith on anyone but I could respond if patients themselves brought up the subject [of religion]."
'The person as a whole'? That's a bit much. I'm sure she has the best of intentions, but she's left the realm of evidence-based healthcare at this point. You can't be in medicine and bring in your own remedies.
I think there are valid reasons for a completely secular NHS, as well as any public sector institution. But as a non-believer I'm mildly bothered she said something so ridiculous. Daniel Dennett, when told a friend had prayed for him, said 'thank you - did you also sacrifice a goat?'. Her comment is undoubtedly well meant, but is equivalent to 'I will petition the soil goblins to send ephemeral bunnies of health and beauty up through the hospital concrete, and they will burrow into your soul and make you better'. And her version makes even less sense: in the case of the Christian healing deity, there's empirical evidence intercessory prayer doesn't work (furthermore, knowing someone's praying for you may actually make things worse).
I don't care what nurses privately believe, but if I'm in a hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses who've gone through years of training in real ways to make people better, and millions of pounds worth of medical equipment designed to make people better, backed by thousands of research scientists who've devoted their lives to making people better, I don't want to hear 'do you want me to ask my sky fairy to help you out?'. It may be well intentioned, but it demeans the medical establishment, and it makes me sad.
Evil Immigrant Babies
What's with BBC News going all BNP over 'foreign-born mothers'?! It was all over the Ten O'Clock News, too. It's costing £200m a year more than a decade ago, apparently, and in 2006 over 20% of births were to 'foreign-born mothers'. Oh no! How terrible! Let's tell immigrants they can't have children, or deny pregnant women visas, or something. It's our NHS, we don't want any dirty immigrants using it, especially to have evil immigrant babies.
The real story seems to be that the NHS isn't coping as well as it should with high numbers of births. But the emphasis is on immigrants, and how evil they are for having children. Weird. Maybe it'll make sense in the morning.
Friday bits and pieces
Still going with the cold and needing aspirin to get through the day, but I no longer care as it could be much, much worse.
---
I've been working on a writing project for the last couple of days, and made a breakthrough late this evening. I've no idea why I find it so much easier to work after 2200, but I've done as much work in two hours as I have the rest of the day. Hopefully I'll finish tomorrow, and it'll be an enormous guilt-ridden weight off my mind. Then I'd best start working on an essay due into uni on the 14th. Have left that waaaay too late, but such is the way of things sometimes.
---
I finally bought the £40 Student version of Office 2007, as it was becoming far too much of a hassle to deal with uni stuff in .doc format. Having used the new UI for a few weeks, it's really quite the thing1. Everything's just there, in the expected place, and it practically forces you to use proper styles, rather than individually formatting headings etc.. A massive improvement, imho.
---
I would like to register my distress at Kevin dying in Eastenders, as he was one of the few characters I actually liked.
---
I'm aware I link to almost everything Ben Goldacre does, but that's because he rocks and I'm not sorry at all. He's released a podcast of a lecture he gave on:
how attractive we all find it, as a society, to dodge important social, political and personal problems by reducing them to mechanical and sciencey-sounding explanations involving serotonin or fish oils
He finds this more of a danger than homeopathy / the usual band of other actively anti-science treatments, as it encourages the classification of the 'deserving sick' by making us believe people can solve their health problems if only they looked after themselves properly. I hadn't thought of it that way before. Definitely worth a listen.
---
The blog is now de-Christmas-ified, which makes me sad. I've fixed up a few things that needed doing, like updated the blogroll to come straight from Google Reader, finally fixed the Grazr link etc.. I'd like to work on a new design. I'd also like a pet monkey. It's on the list, anyway.
---
Via Damian, a Guardian columnist's experience of tagging along with various paparazzi following, amongst others, Amy Winehouse:
She darts into a shop. I stop and catch my breath. And then, all of a sudden, a great wave of revulsion crashes over me. I'm stalking Amy Winehouse. What am I doing? This is weird. And what if she sees me? It's so cold that I've worn a furry Russian hat. She saw me earlier in the newsagent's, so she's bound to recognise my stupid big hat. I am mortified, and desperate for Hammond to get here so that I can hide. I could stop and turn around - only by now I really like him and don't want to let him down.
And then it dawns that what I'm experiencing is precisely the same emotional spectrum every pap describes: predatory adrenaline rush, horrified shame, professional dissociation.
It's fascinating, and not nice.
---
Finally, I'm making an effort to learn more words. If I'm honest, this is more due to admiration of Russell Brand's lexicon than anything else. Here are a few I've looked up today:
- operculum: A lid or flap covering an aperture, such as the gill cover in some fishes or the horny shell cover in snails or other mollusks.
- hermeneutic: serving to explain
- esoteric: intended for or understood by only a particular group / not publicly disclosed (no idea why my brain is incapable of remembering this one - I've looked it up so many times)
- especially when you turn on the black theme
[↩]
Defending homeopathy against evil nasty bigoted scientists
The Guardian has an article defending homeopathy, which includes a moment of genius. Most of it is the usual:
I am sure that there is a placebo effect in homeopathy, but it is a fact that many of the people who end up visiting a homeopath do so as a last resort, when nothing else is working. That such people often see an improvement suggests that the remedies themselves are contributing to the wellness of the individual.
Bit of a non sequitur, there. Then there's:
Homeopathy seeks to understand everything we are, everything we do, as a web of relatedness. The reason why I have a recurring sore throat will not be the reason why you have one, and what helps me may not help you.
This seems to be partly why tests used for conventional medicines fail when used to test homeopathy.
If only there were some kind of testing system based on, oh, I don't know, efficacy? Ah, right - the reason your homeopathic remedy doesn't work for me is that it's designed for someone else! Now I get it.
I take New Scientist every week [I am not sure this is wise - Andrew] and I am continually amazed at how the seemingly well-known physical world of ours is beginning to show itself as stranger than anyone imagined.
You see? New things are being discovered, therefore my made-up-crap is true. This is the logical fallacy of Completely Missing The Point.
And finally, if you're particularly masochistic:
Objections to homeopathy begin with what are viewed as the impossible dilutions of the remedies, so that only nano amounts of the original active substance remain, and in some cases are only an imprint, or memory. Yet our recent discoveries in the world of the very small point to a whole new set of rules for the behaviour of nano-quantities. Thundering around in our Gulliver world, we were first shocked to find that splitting the atom allowed inconceivable amounts of energy to be released. Now, we are discovering that the properties of materials change as their size reaches the nano-scale. Bulk material should have constant physical properties, regardless of its size, but at the nano-scale this is not the case. In a solvent, such as water, nano particles can remain suspended, neither floating nor sinking, but permeating the solution. Such particles are also able to pass through cell walls, and they can cause biochemical change.
We do not know whether this has a bearing on homeopathic dilutions, but it may well be that nanoparticles offer a clue.
I don't know where to start. I expect it was a bit of a shock when somebody first accidentally split an atom, though. Thus far, the article is nothing particularly interesting, but then I saw this:
This homeophobia is[...]
Homeophobia. Genius. Google turns up a few previous references, but I'd never seen it before. I can see that term spreading. Article via Bad Science.
Witnessing tragedy
Religion = cult + followers + time. This is particularly obvious in the case of the Mormon church, which has enough of a profile to be considered 'reasonable', until you start actually reading about it1, and also Jehovah's Witnesses, in the news today for the usual reason:
A young mother has died after giving birth to twins, amid claims that she had refused a blood transfusion because of her faith.
I heard tell of claims she would have died anyway, but it's immaterial - the issue comes up often enough for it to be a problem in non-secular societies.
Jehovah's Witnesses, along with avoiding any notion of Christmas, evangelising non-stop, and awaiting the imminent armageddon after which they, Jesus and 144,000 friends will be all that remains of the human race, take certain parts of the Bible literally. One such sentence comes from Acts 15:29:
You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.
God, as ever, considers this kind of arbitrary thing very important for reasons never elaborated. Meat of strangled animals? Yep, I can see that's not so nice. Food sacrificed to idols? Standard divine jealousy. Sexual immorality? Begging the question: what's moral? But blood? How the hell can you abstain from blood? Given that this was obviously written by some unknown person, it's hard to see what this could be about. Is it just to sound dramatic? Or some primitive fear of vampires? Whatever the origins, the phrase is taken seriously by Jehovah's Witnesses, who will regularly refuse blood transfusions in hospital operations.
Obviously, this is completely demented. But it's too stupid, and just makes me sad - no rational brain comes to this conclusion without years of brainwashing, and it's hard to feel anything but compassion for people who are taken in by it.
Of course, parents who demand their children not receive blood transfusions can go to hell. I may feel sorry for the parents, but it's unquestionable child abuse: there is no other option than to take the decision away from them, and thankfully the state can and does override parents in life or death situations. Compassionately unwavering rationality is the only solution in such cases.
I don't know what, if anything, should be done about adults who make a decision to die rather than receive blood. I'm all for adults being able to make their own decisions - if you want to believe the world's going to end soon and tell me about it at every opportunity, sure, whatever - but when it's a life or death situation I waver. There are possibly grounds for intervention on the basis of a lack of sanity: none of us would see any problem with forcibly pulling someone back from jumping off a bridge - why should claiming 'religious privilege' make any difference? I suppose the argument is the slippery slope, but I don't see the issue with intervening in life or death situations. But, in a situation like this, what of the rights of the children? The BBC reports that:
a young woman in Dublin lost a lot of blood after giving birth to a healthy baby a year ago. A Jehovah's Witness, she too refused a transfusion.
But an emergency ruling permitted the hospital to carry out the procedure, arguing that the right of the newborn baby to have a family life overruled the mother's right to refuse treatment.
It's a messy precedent, but I don't have a problem with that.
I don't have any theoretical problem with the NHS making minor concessions for religious believers, but in practice it simply won't work: there's no logical difference between the small stuff and the life/death decisions, and it will only cause problems. Medicine has to be secular if state-approved death-by-cult is to be avoided.
- the story of the Book of Abraham is entertaining, and Julia Sweeney has a great introduction to the Church's overtly racist overtones in 'Letting Go of God' [↩]
Religious objections to cervical cancer vaccinations
I've been away from the news today so haven't seen the coverage of the cervical cancer vaccine. I remember that similar proposals caused something of a fuss in the US, and I'm wondering whether the UK media gave the nutters any airtime. The main BBC News article doesn't even mention them, which is cool. The health Q&A mentions them briefly, but it's only a dumb Have Your Say question that really raises the issue. Quite glad I didn't listen to Jeremy Vine today, though.
There are probably some anti-vaccination nutters out there, but I'm specifically thinking of the extreme religious variety:
Some Christian groups have expressed unease, concerned that the jab may encourage promiscuity.
Colin Hart, Director of The Christian Institute, said the way to tackle the problem was not to offer injections, but to tell girls not to have under-age sex.
Because cervical cancer is god's way of punishing women for having under-age sex. Or over-age sex, for that matter. I'm sure they could pick up an STD from their husband, if he'd had extra-marital sex, but presumably it's still up to the women to suffer, as ever. What a vile little shit these people worship.
Obviously it's not all Christians and is limited to an extreme fringe. But it's still astonishing to me that anybody could fall for a belief system which requires them to publicly suggest they would prefer to see women have underage sex and get cancer than them have underage sex and not get cancer. How do you break your brain that much?
Kids should always avoid infection, but embrace the dirt
You know how it's a good idea to expose children to colds, measles etc. as it makes them immune in later life? Turns out, not true. In fact, opposite:
In 1989, an epidemiologist in Britain, David Strachan, observed that babies born into households with lots of siblings were less likely than other babies to develop allergies and asthma. The same proved true of babies who spent significant time in day care. Dr. Strachan hypothesized that the protection came from experiencing an abundance of childhood illnesses.
Dr. Strachan’s original hygiene hypothesis got a lot of press, not only in the news media but in serious medical journals. Less publicized was the decade-long string of follow-up studies that disproved a link between illnesses and protection from inflammatory disorders like allergies and asthma. If anything, studies showed, early illness made matters worse.
Moreover, studies now show that the more infections a person has during childhood, the greater his or her chance of premature death from scourges of old age like heart disease and cancer. The link appears to be chronic inflammation, a kind of lingering collateral damage from the body’s disease-fighting response. [my emphasis]
But what about the original observation? Well, children raised around many other children are indeed less likely to develop allergies and asthma, but not for the reasons thought:
But the link isn’t disease-causing germs. It’s early and ample exposure to harmless bacteria — especially the kinds encountered living close to the land and around livestock and other young children. In other words, dirt, dung and diapers. Just as disease-causing microbes clearly bring on inflammation, harmless microorganisms appear to exert a calming effect on the immune system.
Got it. Don't go nuts about hygiene, let kids play in the dirt and vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate.
More detail in the NYT article, which also points out that colds are not 'natural' and part of life as they're only 5000 years old - nothing in evolutionary terms.
My new rule: never believe anything health-related unless it's stated, directly, by a trained professional, and even then it's not a bad idea to check it out with reputable sources online. And keep up with latest research.
Reporting the gaps
The BBC's headline ticker is currently running with:
Experts refuse to rule out long-term mobile phone use causing cancer.
Damn those experts! They simply refuse to make long-term health predictions on recently-developed technology. What is wrong with these people!?
The article itself concentrates on the long-term health worries, all of which are entirely speculative, and is heavy on lung-cancer/smoking comparisons:
He said: "We can't rule out the possibility at this stage that cancer could appear in a few years' time.
"With smoking there was no link of any lung cancer until after ten years."
He said the problem during the study was that there had been very few people using mobile phones for over ten years.
Cancers do not normally appear until ten to 15 years after exposure.
The last sentence is weird. Exposure to what? Radioactive materials? Do you think the reporter is confusing different types of radiation?
And this is with a decent study that's pretty conclusive in its analysis that using mobile phones for ten years isn't dangerous, a fact you'd think might be newsworthy.
Science reporting by non-science-reporters always tends towards 'scientists don't know anything'. If it's a health study that shows no effect, it's a tentative conclusion. If it does show an effect, it's an obvious common-sense result. If it's new evidence that contradicts previous research, it's impossible to know what to believe. What do you mean, you can't win?
Electrosensitivity challenge
This is interesting: the results of a large electrosensitivity study will be published on Wednesday, and both sides of the debate are looking forward to its findings. Panorama recently cited it as positive evidence, despite its results not being available, and it's been widely publicised as a consequence. The methodology is known, and (to my, non-expert) eyes seems to be valid:
We tested 56 people who suffered from EHS as well as 120 people who did not. In order to be scientifically valid, the study was conducted under “double-blind” conditions. This simply means that neither the person conducting the research, nor the person being tested knew when the base-station was “on” or “off”. Once we had completed the data collection phase (testing all our participants) we were able to “crack the code” and see to what extent the electromagnetic fields affected a variety of symptoms that people had reported, as well as measures of blood pressure and heart-rate.
Full details here, including the power output of the 'base station'.
The electrosensitivity blogosphere has apparently been making noises about this study, and skeptics-hero Ben Goldacre has proposed an agreement: everybody write their analysis of the methodology before the results are published, then commit to covering the results, no matter which way they go. Assuming they don't reveal a load more information about the methodology tomorrow, this should make ad hoc refutations blindingly obvious, on either side.
There have been many studies of this kind before. According to Mr Goldacre negative studies outweigh the positive, and the latter are all either statistically flawed, contradictory or have results that can't be repeated by the same researchers. But it doesn't seem to have helped much, and more evidence is always good. Either way, the results will be interesting. Electrosensitivity, coupled with the supposed dangers of phone masts, are increasingly prevalent in the public consciousness, and if an effect really exists it would clearly be a major health issue. If it doesn't, though, it needs to stop being bandied about by the media as a scare story. Also, people are clearly suffering with something, and more evidence of what is isn't can only help narrow down what it is.
The Soil Association says organic food is healthier if we ‘go on feelings’ above science
We've had various discussions on organic food here, and the BBC today has a short article looking at the evidence for industry claims. It pretty much comes to the same conclusions: 'organic' is a wide-ranging term that can't be easily summed up, but plenty of the claims are dubious at best. One part is particularly telling. The British Nutrition Foundation studied the topic and came to the conclusion that there is not enough evidence to claim organic food is healthier. The Food Standards Agency agree. Yet here's the official response:
But science alone cannot prove the point, says Lord Peter Melchett, a director of the Soil Association, who believes consumers must trust their instincts.
"Science doesn't tell us the answers so some of it we have to go on feelings," he says.
Yes, it's out of context. But still, that's a hell of a thing to say when simultaneously marketing organic food as being the healthier option.
Hello!
Hey, thanks for coming! I'm Andrew, and this is where my headthinks come to breed. They often meander around humanism and photography, but they're flighty and you can't trust them, so anything is possible.
Do feel free to email me - I get lonely:
Your hair looks swish, by the way - have you done something new?
Recent Comments
- vicky: going up this weekend having done all the welsh peaks except 4 snowdon, cant wait
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: what, how can u live in the 21 c and say that, probably a sexist thing
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: da iawn laura, cant believe what im hearing, all this fuss, anyway love the site, and i agree, normal people who swear and curse clomb mountains cos we live in the...
on Climbing Snowdon. - Andrew: Did a few quick test shots to check the light levels, then balanced the camera on the arm of a bench, set it for a 20s exposure and hoped for the best
on ISS. - lynsey: Wow, how did you take that photograph?
on ISS.
