Is Simply Being Alive Becoming a Medical Condition?!

Things that make you go, humm?!?  If you have not done so, I suggest watching the movie, The Road to Wellville.  It humorously documents the pseudo-science and alchemist-medicine that led to the creation of breakfast cereals and the Kellogg -v- Post rivalry.  (Did you know that corn flakes were offered as a remedy for national health pandemic of rampant masturbation?)  I wonder if we have really come that far...maybe we are just deluding ourselves into thinking that we really understand what it is to be human?!



By Alasdair Cross
Producer, Medicalisation of Normality

Restless leg syndrome, social anxiety disorder, female sexual dysfunction, celebrity worship syndrome - it seems that a new illness is invented every week, covering every potential quirk in human behaviour.

Is the human condition becoming a medical condition?

Ten per cent of British children are regarded as having a clinically recognisable mental disorder, 34 million prescriptions for anti-depressants were written in the UK in 2007, while it is estimated that 10% of US children take Ritalin to combat behaviour problems.

Dr Tim Kendall, Joint Director of the National Collaboration Centre for Mental Health and a key government adviser is deeply concerned at what he sees as a medicalisation of a vast swathe of society.

He said: "I think there is an inherent danger from increasingly classifying people.

"If you look at the American Psychiatric Association 'bible', you'll see almost every piece of human behaviour can be classified as being in some way aberrant."

Dr Kendall sees dangers in a "tendency for new categories to be invented, often at the behest of drug companies looking for a new drug".

Medical historian, Dr Louise Foxcroft agrees, pointing to ill-defined conditions such as female sexual dysfunction and to the erectile hardness scale promoted by the producers of Viagra which she claims "is a creation of fear and anxiety".

It is certainly not a new phenomenon.

Historical ailments

Dr Foxcroft, author of 'Hot Flushes, Cold Science', has shelves of old medical textbooks stuffed with long-forgotten ailments.
“ I think there is an inherent danger from increasingly classifying people ”
Dr Tim Kendall National Collaboration Centre for Mental Health

Among them is hysteria, the symptoms of which could range from excessive masturbation to excessive novel reading and a tendency to wander.

Common treatments for hysterical women, and they were invariably women, included opium, the removal of the clitoris and incarceration.

Later, neurasthenia became the fashionable mental affliction, suffered by the likes of novelist, George Eliot and philosopher Immanuel Kant.

These over-worked intellectuals were offered the more convivial option of Priory-style rehab retreats to help ease their troubled minds.

Such ailments and the chance of treatment were once confined to the upper classes but that has changed in the past 20 years.

US advertising

In 1997 the US fully legalised the advertising of prescription medicines.

Since then television ad breaks and popular magazines have been packed with explicit claims for the effectiveness of anti-depressants, behaviour modifying drugs and pre-menstrual tension treatments.

Prescriptions for the most heavily-advertised drugs have risen significantly.

Could we see a similar effect in the UK?

Dr Kendall is concerned by current European Commission proposals that could loosen the blanket ban on the advertisement of prescription medicines to European consumers.

Do not expect Prozac ads before Coronation Street or a Ritalin sponsored X-Factor.

However, the proposed shift would allow adverts on medical websites and in relevant magazines.

Dr Richard Tiner of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry says that his members are completely opposed to 'direct to consumer advertising' on the American model.

Dr Kendall, an adviser to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, said: "It's far better that independent bodies like NICE provide the evidence, turned into plain English for patients.

"I'd far rather that's what patients got than so-called information provided by a pharmaceutical company."

If the proposals become law then, as in the US, we can expect to see even more new conditions and new drugs to treat them, new ways not to be 'normal'.

'The Medicalisation of Normality' is broadcast on BBC Radio Four at 2100 BST on Monday 30 March and repeated on Wednesday 1 April at 1630 BST.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/7967851.stm

Published: 2009/03/30 07:04:55 GMT

© BBC MMIX

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MSNBC Answer Desk: Big bonuses for everyone? How much money is there?

Some very interesting information that seems to contradict many policy wonks and much of the "conventional wisdom" spewed on talk radio and editorial news shows...please consume with much salt!



By John W. Schoen
Senior producer
msnbc.com
updated 8:37 a.m. CT, Mon., March. 30, 2009

With the government's latest handout to investors looking to profit on the bank bailout, more than one reader is wondering: Why doesn't the government just give the money directly to taxpayers?

Why isn't the stimulus money being given to the taxpayers that are going to have to pay for it? I keep hearing that this would be about $500,000 each, which would go to pay off mortgages, buy cars, vacations, you name it. Wouldn't this do more to "kick-start" the economy?
— Gary J., Greenville, S.C.

It sure seems like you and I have somehow gotten left off the list of people getting some of those trillions of bailout dollars the government is handing out.

Maybe it’s because the government isn’t sure exactly how many of us are out here. (More on that in a minute.) But it wouldn’t come close to $500,000 a head. And it’s not clear it would provide the “kick start” we’re all looking for.

So far, the list of bailout recipients includes banks (some of whom got us into this mess in the first place), a failed insurance company (ditto), car companies, foreign central banks, and investors who are getting risk-free loans to profit from buying up bad bank assets. Congress is doling out hundreds of billions more to state and local governments, schools, health care providers and people who build roads and bridges for a living.

To be sure, there is some money in there for individual taxpayers: roughly $360 billion. Most of that money will pay for tax cuts targeted to specific groups — including people with the lowest incomes, first-time home buyers, people whose unemployment benefits are about to run out or the rapidly growing middle-income households who are being victimized by the "alternative minimum tax" originally created to make rich people pay their fair share. Some of these people who are eligible for a tax cut, and don’t owe any taxes, get a “refundable tax credit” (aka “a check.”)

Figuring out how much we’d all get if the government gave the rest of that money directly to taxpayers turns out to be harder than it looks. Though the Federal Reserve has doled out several trillion dollars (so far) that money represents loans backed by collateral that includes other forms of debt. This, after all, is what the Fed does in “normal” economic conditions: it swaps its Federal Reserve Notes (aka “cash”) for U.S. Treasuries held by banks and other “primary dealers” in the financial system.

To pump more money into the system, the Fed usually pays cash for Treasuries; to drain cash, it sells them back. Despite a massive expansion of lending since last September, the only real change has been the types of debt the Fed is accepting and the companies it does business with. The list of both has gotten much longer.

The Treasury, on the other hand, is spending our money and getting no hard assets in return. The $787 billion “stimulus package” is money the government won’t get back. The other big chunk of change, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Plan, or TARP, is being invested in bank stock and, soon, to help investors buy chancey loans and bonds backed by dicey mortgages.

These assets are worth something, but no one knows how much because no one can predict how much further the economy will slide and how many more homeowners will default on their mortgages. If all this paper changes hands at a steep enough discount, the government might actually make money on the deal — which they'll split with investors who took none of the risk. For investors, it's a "heads I win, tails I don't lose" deal.

So far, the money that’s been actually spent (not lent with a good chance of it coming back) comes to about $1 trillion (this year’s $787 billion stimulus package plus the last year's $168 billion stimulus that was mostly paid out as tax rebate checks.)

So how much would every taxpayer get if that $1 trillion went directly to individuals? That’s hard to say. The IRS estimates there will be roughly 154 million individual returns filed in 2008, but many of those are joint returns filed by married couples. Because of the way it collects its data, the IRS can’t say exactly how many people those returns represent. Same goes for the Joint Committee on Taxation – the arm of Congress that handles tax matters. (You’d think Congress would at least want to have a rough estimate of how many taxpayers there are out here.)

The Tax Foundation, a private research group, estimates there are 194 million of us who file income tax returns, individually or jointly, though many don’t end up owing tax. (And some get that "refundable tax credit.") But if you spread $1 trillion evenly over 194 million people, each of us would get a check for $5,154.64.

That certainly would be a nice little bonus. Not exactly AIG material, but it would relieve at least some of the financial pain most taxpayers are feeling right now. But it wouldn’t come close to replacing the trillions of dollars in lost home values or the trillions more in retirement savings and investment losses. That huge money crater is the main reason the economy is in a tailspin.

To pay you a $500,000 bonus, the government would need to borrow roughly $100 trillion, and there just isn’t that much available wealth on the planet. (If the government created that much money, the surge in inflation would mean you’d use up your $500,000 to order a pizza.) You also probably wouldn’t get the biggest economic bang for all those bucks.

It turns out when times are tough, people tend to take a windfall and save it for an even rainier day. That’s what happened to a lot of the money that was handed out in tax rebates last year. There was a noticeable uptick in retail sales as the checks cleared, but sales fell right back down again — and kept falling — as home prices fell and unemployment rose. That’s why Congress took a different tack this time around.

Economists say the best way to stimulate the economy is to put the money where it has the highest “multiplier effect.” If the money is targeted to build a highway, for example, those dollars start off on the books of the contractor with the winning bid. The contractor then keeps a little in profit, which gets spent to buy a new backhoe or pay for groceries for the contractor’s family. Most of the money goes to pay for labor and materials; the workers take the original dollar and spend it again on, say, a new set of tires for the pickup truck that gets them to work. The tire shop owner spends the dollar a fourth time — maybe it goes back to the tire plant, where the manager can call up a worker who’s been laid off and turn the dollar over yet again, so the newly rehired worker can take her family out to dinner, and tip the waiter, and so on. Every time that dollar moves along, it creates fresh economic activity. That's what we need most right now.

The folks at the Congressional Budget Office have even gone through the $787 billion stimulus package and estimated which parts of it provide the most efficient stimulus. According to their report, tax cuts and direct payments to individual have the lowest “multipliers” — some less than 1.0, which means those dollars won’t get past the original recipient. The biggest multipliers are direct spending on goods and services by the government and transfers to state and local government for infrastructure. But only $132 billion of the stimulus package was spent on those two categories, according to the CBO.


How much American currency is in circulation?
— David T. Clifton, Ariz.

On Wednesday, Mar. 25, there was just shy of $900 billion ($899,798,000,000) Federal Reserve notes (dollars) in circulation, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve. That includes cash sitting in bank vaults, but most of it is out there making the rounds of the global economy.

That cash represents less than half of the $2.1 trillion in assets on the Fed’s books. The rest is largely debt securities, like U.S. Treasuries that the Fed swaps for cash when it wants to add or drain cash from the system.

The supply of paper money is about $100 billion higher than this time last year. But that's just the minimum monthly payment on the $2.6 trillion in consumer credit outstanding. These days, paper currency is only one form of money. The contraction of consumer wealth from lost retirement savings and falling home values is much bigger than the increase in supply of paper money.

And that's why, for now, the folks at the Fed say they're not too worried about stoking inflation with all these trillions of dollars in fresh lending and spending.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29920296/page/2/

© 2009 MSNBC.com

Just Something to Consider...

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How Obama can repair AIG damage

I am not sure that anyone really knows what is going on in the economy...but I am sure that there are some profiteers and robber barons who know exactly how to take advantage of the situation.  I believe in free markets(at least I think I do)...but they must also be fair and accountable markets.  Actions taken by our government, regulators, and business insiders over the past dozen years have eliminated much of the fairness and accountability of the market, which may result in much of the freedom being stripped away.  Let us all remain vigilant, be willing to speak truth to power, and never allow our current view to block our vision as we navigate these uncertain waters.



By Drew Westen
Special to CNN

Editor's Note: Drew Westen is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies and author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation." He has been a consultant or adviser to several candidates, nonprofit organizations and Fortune 500 companies, and informally advised Barack Obama's campaign.

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- In getting the nation's economy back on its feet and pursuing an agenda aimed at keeping it there for the next 40 years, the White House has to do two things at once: implement effective policies and keep the public behind the president long enough to keep implementing them until they work.

As the president learned in the stimulus debate, even the best policies don't sell themselves, especially when the other side is aggressively attacking them. President Obama's inspiration, Abraham Lincoln, noted that without public opinion behind you, good governance is impossible.

In this sense, the AIG debacle, in which the government has handed nearly $200 billion of taxpayers' money to one of the corporate Leviathans whose misadventures have cost many taxpayers their jobs, homes and savings, is both instructive and destructive.

The White House needs to be able to go back to the American people if the banks need another infusion of capital or the economy needs another stimulus -- both of which are high-probability events -- and the president needs public opinion at his back to enact his ambitious agenda on infrastructure, health care and education.

So aside from offering the kind of sweeping and long-needed regulatory reforms he proposed Wednesday (the policy side of the equation), what does President Obama need to do to prevent the AIG fiasco from eroding public confidence in what government can do in times like these?

Three things. First, he needs to make sure, when a story like this one breaks, that he and his public surrogates are all on the same page. The president got it right with his cool public outrage and his order to his Treasury Secretary to look harder for ways to stop another round of public theft.

In the same way, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, responded with just the right tone to Dick Cheney's attempt to pin both the Bush economy and the next terrorist attack on the new administration. Gibbs wryly noted that Rush Limbaugh was apparently unavailable to do the interview and that the former vice president was not in much demand right now for his economic advice.

But watching some of the president's chief economic advisers publicly throw up their hands in helplessness, suggesting the government could feed the monster but couldn't control it, was a reminder of what happens when presidential surrogates speak without proper media training, a unified message and a clear sense of why getting their message right on this really matters.

Second, the White House needs to speak in plain language to the American people about what needs to be done, so it harnesses their legitimate anger and anxiety and continues to inspire their confidence and hope.

Americans understand that if you own 80 percent of a company (like the federal government owns of AIG), you are in the position to tell senior management what to do, and if you can't, you need a new lawyer, because you wrote a bad contract.

Americans could readily understand that if a single company is so important that its demise would spell the demise of the entire economy, then it should either be owned, tightly regulated (as public utilities are), or split up by the government, because we can't afford to have our common interest held hostage to the private interests of any single company.

Americans also would not have a visceral reaction to temporary "nationalization" of failing banks if someone would stop calling it nationalization and tell a coherent story about what happened and why we have to take the steps we do: that the Bush administration, in its bank bailout, socialized the risks of sleazy business practices while privatizing the gains, and that isn't fair.

If we as taxpayers are going to assume the risk as stakeholders when bankers make bad decisions, we should reap the profits as shareholders when those banks are profitable again, and use that money to pay down the national debt, cut our taxes and get a solid return on our investment.

That leads to the third point. The president needs to tell the American people the story, over and over, of how we got in this mess, who put us in it and what will and won't get us out of it. Franklin Roosevelt had no trouble pinning the nation's economic difficulties on the Republicans who had fiddled with free-market extremism as the nation's economy burned, and it took 40 years and the charisma of Ronald Reagan for anyone to put voice to that ideology again.

A good story typically has protagonists, antagonists, a battle between them and a resolution. The president has a penchant for telling stories without antagonists (even while those antagonists are antagonizing him, with their rhetoric of "borrow and spend," "socialism," etc.).

When referring to the causes of our economic meltdown, he often reverts to passive voice (something "was done") or to nameless, faceless, impersonal forces ("corporate greed"). The reality is that we're in this mess because for eight years we were in the grip of a radical economic ideology that preached that all would be well if we just gave free rein to corporate greed and removed all constraints on it.

The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) idea was that if we just let the people who know the most about energy (energy executives, of course) shape our energy policy in private meetings, the people who know the most about meat production (the cattle and meat-packing industries) regulate meat production, and the people who know the most about Wall Street (bankers, hedge fund managers, and derivatives traders) regulate (or refuse to regulate) banking and investing, everything would be fine.

The fact that the federal government engineered a $170 billion no-strings-attached, no transparency required bailout to AIG when the economy was melting down was not a deviation from that philosophy. It was its logical extension.

The president needs to make clear where his policies -- and values -- depart from those of the previous administration if he wants people to hang onto their tenuous, newfound belief that maybe this time government is part of the solution and not the problem.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Drew Westen.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/19/westen.obama.aig/index.html
 
Copyright 2008 Cable News Network

War Message Found Inside Lincoln's Watch

I think I am starting to believe that movies like National Treasure might have some truth in them?!  This is really too cool!



By Kelly Marshall

(CNN) -- A long-hidden message has been discovered inside Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch, the Smithsonian's Museum of American History announced Tuesday.

Watchmaker Jonathan Dillon was repairing Lincoln's watch in April 1861 when he heard about the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and wrote a short message on the metal inside the watch, the Smithsonian said.

There it remained, unseen for almost 150 years, it said.

In a 1906 interview with The New York Times, Dillon reported that as soon as he heard the news about the first shots of the Civil War, he unscrewed the dial of the watch and wrote on the metal, "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."

The actual message that the museum found differs from the watchmaker's recollection. It says, "Jonathan Dillon, April 13-1861, Fort Sumpter [sic] was attacked by the rebels on the above date J Dillon, April 13-1861, Washington, thank God we have a government, Jonth Dillon."

According to the Smithsonian, it was not unusual for professional watchmakers to record their work inside a watch.

"Lincoln never knew of the message he carried in his pocket," said Brent D. Glass, director of the National Museum of American History.

The museum decided to open the watch after being contacted by the watchmaker's great-great-grandson, Doug Stiles, who had heard about the message Dillon said he had inscribed and wanted to see if it was really there.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/10/lincoln.watch/index.html
 
Copyright 2008 Cable News Network

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Sojourners: Our Moral Audit of the Budget

While there may be some specifics to disagree with, I concur with the overall assessment of the change in our national budget priorities.  I hope the evangelical center and left will continue to speak truth to power and lay aside quibbles for the time being...I hope.  I hope the evangelical right can find a way to acknowledge honest policy differences with their brothers and sisters in Christ yet remain in loving fellowship bound by a common love for a risen Lord and a willingness to walk in his Way...I hope.



by Jim Wallis 03-02-2009

Four years ago, faced with a disastrous federal budget proposal, Sojourners coined a phase, “budgets are moral documents.”  That phrase has now entered the common lexicon, but it remains our fundamental principle.  Budgets reflect the values and priorities of a family, church, organization, city, state, or nation. They tell us what is most important and valued to those making the budget. So, it is important that we do a “values audit” of President Obama’s proposed budget, a “moral audit” of our priorities. Who benefits in this budget, what things are revealed as most important, and what things are less important?  America’s religious communities are required to ask of any budget: what happens to the poor and most vulnerable — especially, what becomes of the nation’s poorest children in these critical decisions?

The values of the American people should also be applied to the budget, e.g. fairness (everyone paying their fair share); opportunity for all Americans; fiscal, personal, and social responsibility; balancing important and different priorities; defining security more broadly than just military considerations, as it is related to economic and family security too; compassion and protection for the vulnerable; building community; and upholding the common good.

That’s a principle that has been forgotten in the past years.  We have trusted in “the invisible hand” of the market to make everything turn out all right, but things too often haven’t turned out all right. The invisible hand let go of some things, like the common good. The idea that policies which benefit the wealthiest will eventually benefit everyone has proven false. The president’s budget is a step toward restoring the value of the common good to our policy.  It is a step to rebalance our priorities, protect the vulnerable, and strengthen the middle.

It contains major investments in the president’s three priorities: significantly expanding health care coverage, focusing on climate change reduction and developing renewable energy, and investing in education – early childhood programs, strengthening and reforming public schools, expanded opportunities for college — all of which will benefit low-income people.  There are also specific changes in important areas such as tax policy, food and nutrition programs, housing, needed aid to veterans, prisoner re-entry, global food security, and increased foreign aid for combating pandemic disease. It’s a budget aimed at redressing the imbalances.

The growing inequality in America over decades is a sin of biblical proportions, and it’s time to bring our principles of social justice to bear.  As columnist E.J. Dionne wrote,

The central issue in American politics now is whether the country should reverse a three-decade-long trend of rising inequality in incomes and wealth.  Politicians will say lots of things in the coming weeks, but they should be pushed relentlessly to address the bottom-line question: Do they believe that a fairer distribution of capitalism’s bounty is essential to repairing a sick economy? Everything else is a subsidiary issue.

It is that question that should guide our moral audit of the budget. The fundamental moral question in the upcoming budget debate is whether to begin to reverse the rapid and massive increase in American inequality which has grown over the past thirty years — and has dramatically increased during the past eight. I believe it is time to stop helping the undeserving rich, under the now demonstrably false assertion that this will then benefit the rest of us. When the top 1 percent of the country now get 20 percent of its income, control 33 percent of its wealth, and pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than their receptionists do (as Warren Buffet has pointed out)—something has gone terribly wrong in America. The new Obama budget is the first and dramatic step to fix all that, and turn the nation in a different direction.

The new budget proposed by the White House is a dramatic step in the direction of the common good, with strong support for the middle of America, real help for the poorest among us, and the proposition that the wealthiest pay their fare share. And my prediction is that many in the faith community, especially those on the front lines of serving the poor, will rally around the principles and priorities of this budget, bringing their energy and advocacy to bear on the debate that now lies ahead. Because this will not just be a policy debate, but also a moral one; the prayers of the faithful — along with their watchful eyes, willing hands, and ready feet — will surround the congressional budget process over the next few months.

This post comes from Jim’s remarks at a media teleconference on March 2, 2009. Click here to listen to the call.

Sojourners | 3333 14th Street NW, Suite 200 | Washington, DC 20010 
Phone 202.328.8842 | Fax 202.328.8757 | sojourners@sojo.net

Unless otherwise noted, all material © Sojourners 2008

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Secretary of Defense: Obama Is More Analytical Than Bush

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. -- George Orwell



WASHINGTON - Tell us, Robert Gates, what's the difference between working under Barack Obama and working under George W. Bush as defense secretary?

"That sounds like the subject of a good book," Gates said with a smile.

"It's really hard to say," he continued during an interview aired Sunday on "Meet the Press" on NBC.

"I think that probably President Obama is somewhat more analytical. And he makes sure he hears from everybody in the room on an issue. And if they don't speak up, he calls on them."

And the former president?

"President Bush was interested in hearing different points of view but didn't go out of his way to make sure everybody spoke if they hadn't spoken up before," Gates said.

Bush picked Gates to succeed Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary in November 2006. The following June, Gates recommended that Bush appoint Adm. Mike Mullen as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's top military officer.

When Mullen was asked Sunday to compare the styles of the two presidents, he demurred.

"Well, I think individuals are always different," Mullen said on "State of the Union" on CNN. "But, you know, I mean, I wouldn't characterize them one way or the other."

That said, Mullen remarked that Obama listens to his military advisers.

"He's anxious to get the military's input to all his decisions," Mullen said. "The discussions have been broad and deep, and I've been very comfortable both with the access and the ability to give that advice."

Both Gates and Mullen remained in their positions in the opening weeks of the Obama administration. Gates told NBC that it would be "a challenge" to serve as defense secretary for the entirety of Obama's term.

The Associated Press
updated 2:27 p.m. CT, Sun., March. 1, 2009

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29453760/

© 2009 MSNBC.com

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