Category: Family and Friends

California/Health/Lifestyle/seniors/USA/Women
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Robo-seals invade U.S. nursing homes — perhaps a gadget too far?

by Fran Johns
Stuffed seal
Image by matsuyuki via Flickr

What with human affection so hard to come by these days, wouldn’t Granny be happy with a fuzzy mechanical toy? That, presumably, was the reasoning behind Japanese inventor Takanori Shabata’s idea for the nursing home’s new best friend, Paro the robo-seal. $15 million dollars later, Paro had hummed and buzzed his (her?) way into the hearts and homes of some 1300 Japanese adults who don’t want the hassle of real, live pets. Now cleared as a Class 2 medical device — a category enjoyed by his brethren the motorized wheelchair and similar less-cuddly items — Paro’s newest destination is U.S. nursing homes.

“Some of our residents need more than we as human beings can provide,” says Marleen Dean, activities manager at Vincentian Home, one of four facilities run by Pittsburgh-based Vincentian Collaborative System. Vincentian Collaborative recently used a $55,000 grant to purchase eight Paros and finds them especially comforting to patients with dementia. “We’ve tried soft teddy bears that talk and move. But they don’t have the same effect.”

Bill Thomas thinks it’s inhumane to entrust the task of emotional support to a gadget.

“If you give me a robot that helps perform mundane tasks associated with caregiving, such as vacuuming or doing the dishes, I’m all for that,” says Dr. Thomas, founder of the Green House Project, a campaign to make nursing homes smaller and more like regular houses. But “if we wind up with nursing homes full of baby-seal robots, the robots will be trying to fulfill the relationship piece of caregiving, while the humans are running around changing the beds and cooking the food.”

This space sides with Bill Thomas. At $6,000 per robo-seal, it just seems that some less anti-bacterial real creature could be found to serve the same purpose. But Paro has made believers in several U.S. nursing homes such as one in which a dementia unit resident is quoted as whispering to it, “I know you’re not real, but somehow, I don’t know, I love you.”   The question of whether offering Paro for love and affection (and often just for calming down the agitated folks who tend to populate nursing homes) is ethical and proper is stirring debate both here and in Denmark, where more than 100 Paros have found homes.

Sherry Turkle, a professor in the Science, Technology and Society program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, acknowledges Paro’s potential as a communication aid, but warns against regarding it as a companion. “Why are we so willing to provide our parents, then ourselves, with faux relationships?” she asks.

Danish filmmaker Phie Ambo, who spotlighted Paro in her 2007 documentary on interactive robots, “Mechanical Love,” dismisses such concerns. “When I came into nursing homes and found people sitting in rocking chairs with dolls, no one lifted an eyebrow.”

DTI (European distributor Danish Technological Institute) requires caregivers to attend Paro seminars, where they discuss such issues as whether it’s OK to leave an elderly person alone with a Paro, and whether patients must be told it’s a robot. Don’t allow someone to “escape into a strange seal robot’s universe,” cautions Lone Gaedt, senior consultant at DTI.

Admittedly, we carry on with perfect strangers in the parallel worlds of cyberspacial social networks. But somewhere, somehow, a few lines of human interaction might be better off left un-blurred.

What do you think?

Paro the Robo-Seal Aims to Comfort Elderly, but Is It Ethical? – WSJ.com.

California/Health/Lifestyle/seniors/USA
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Latest boomer gadget: tombstone microchips

by Fran Johns
Microchip e microciop
Image by Un ragazzo chiamato Bi via Flickr

This may be one step farther than some of us want to go. But for those seeking to live, somehow, forever, the Canwest News Service reports on a new e-gimmick on the market and apparently targeting the boomer generation. There are several more paragraphs in writer Misty Harris‘ report, but this space suggests that the following, and particularly the last sentence, cover everything you really need to know.

Ensuring virtual life after death, new microchip-enabled headstones allow the Me Generation to share their stories from the grave, with passersby simply swiping markers with a cellphone to retrieve biographical details — everything from the deceased’s political beliefs to their favourite recipes.

“My wife and I had just lost relatives and found it so underwhelming, in a sense, to know that these people had contributed so much and yet their lives were being summed up with just names and dates,” says John Bottorff, founder of Objecs, the Arizona company behind the RosettaStone grave markers.

The palm-sized tablets can be mounted to existing headstones or installed on new ones. Each is engraved with custom symbols representing the deceased’s life — an Rx for a pharmacist, for example, or a sheriff’s star for a police officer — and contains a Near Field Communications radio-frequency identification tag, which allows biographical data to be loaded onto any NFC-enabled phone with the wave of a hand (NFC is expected to be standard on new mobile phones in North America by 2012).

A unique web ID is also engraved so people without NFC can raise the dead — or at least their personal histories — on any computer.

As early as 2015, seniors will outnumber children for the first time in Canadian history, while the number of centenarians is projected to triple — perhaps even quadruple — by 2036.

For end-trepreneurs, this represents a killer opportunity.

Microchip tombstones latest boomer gadget.

California/Health/Law/Lifestyle/Politics & Causes/seniors/teens/USA/Women
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Marriage = procreation, Prop 8 backers say

by Fran Johns

It’s all about procreation, the Proposition 8 lawyers said; marriage between a man and a woman who produce babies to be raised by their biological parents, and thus insure the survival of the human race. Those arguments were the closing of an historic case that went to a federal judge in San Francisco yesterday.

During more than two hours of intense and sometimes skeptical questioning by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, attorney Charles Cooper maintained that society is entitled to reserve its approval of marriage for those who can naturally conceive children.”The marital relationship is fundamental to the existence and survival of the race,” Cooper said in closing arguments before a packed San Francisco courtroom. The reason the state regulates marriage, he said, is to steer “procreative sexual relationships” into a stable family environment so that children can be raised by their biological parents.

It’s an argument that has worked before, but supporters of same-sex marriage hope this time might be different.

Walker, who presided over the nation’s first federal trial on the issue, sounded dubious. He noted that the state allows couples unable or unwilling to have children to marry, suggesting that the institution has a broader purpose that same-sex partners might equally fulfill.

“Marriage is a right which extends fundamentally to all persons, whether they’re capable of producing children, incarcerated or behind in their child-support payments,” Walker said, citing Supreme Court rulings that allow people in all those situations to marry.

People marry not to benefit the state, but because they believe that “I’m going to get a life partner, who I’m going to share my life with and maybe have children,” the judge said. “Why don’t those same values apply to gay couples and lesbian couples loving one another?”

Cooper replied that same-sex couples are incapable of “irresponsible procreation,” which he said marriage laws are designed to discourage.

He also said California has provided equal treatment for all couples in its domestic-partner laws. But even a discriminatory marriage law would be valid, Cooper said, because the U.S. Constitution offers no special protection to gays and lesbians and “we don’t have to submit evidence” to justify treating them differently.Theodore Olson, lawyer for two same-sex couples who sued for the right to marry, responded indignantly. Prop. 8, he said, “takes a group of people who have been victims of discrimination” historically and prevents them from “participating in the most fundamental relationship in life.”

Gays and lesbians, Olson said, seek to wed for the same reasons as everyone else, to be in a committed, socially accepted family relationship with the one they love. “Tell me how it helps the rest of the citizens of California to keep them out of the club,” he said.

Walker’s decision, in whichever direction, is certain to be appealed.

Prop. 8 backers: Marriage promotes procreation.

California/Lifestyle/Politics & Causes/Religion/seniors/USA/Women
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When fear & hatred go viral

by Fran Johns

Illegal aliens threaten, Muslims are murderers, we should be Very Afraid. Or perhaps, like the author of these points, just Very Tired.

A super-patriot message (re)circulating in cyberspace could serve as a blueprint for how to spread hatred and fear across the land. It purports to spread Republican virtues, having been written (with apologies to someone else’s earlier blog in the same style) by retired military/public servant Robert A. Hall. Originally floated in a blog dated February 19, 2009, it has recently been picked up and dusted off for recycling. This writer has gotten it three times; though I am not on a lot of right wing Favorites lists I try to listen and understand messages received from friends with whom I disagree.

Hall, now a resident of Illinois but not an admirer of its current native son President, apparently served honorably in the U.S. Marines and the Massachusetts state senate. This space hereby commends him for his public service, accepts his right to whatever political beliefs he chooses, and takes very strong exception to his blog. It is the incendiary passage below that needs to be refuted:

I’m  tired of  being told that Islam is a “Religion of Peace,” when every day I can  read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters,  wives and daughters for their family “honor”; of Muslims  rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims  murdering Christian and Jews because they aren’t  “believers”; of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning  teenage rape victims to death for “adultery”; of Muslims mutilating  the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the  Qur’an and Shari’a law tells them  to.

I have not read the Qur’an, though I doubt that’s what it says. Iftekhar Hai has.  Co-founder and director of interfaith relations for United Muslims of America, Hai understands what the Qur’an has to say far better than do Hall or I. Here are a few clarifications — if only they could circulate as widely as is the above screed:

Whatever faith you are born in, you are in God’s image. The message is the same, but people keep adding on and that’s what messes things up. Diversity is part of Islamic belief.”

The Qur’an does not condone the killing of non-believers. Religious leaders cannot decide who is a non-believer. Islam is not exclusive, and extremists are wrong to judge others.”

As to the status of women in Muslim countries, Hai says inequality for women has no basis in the Qur’an, but is a cultural matter (as in the wearing of the burqa by women in Afghanistan. Only 18% of Muslims, he says, live in Arab countries, with the majority in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; he is quick to point out women leaders in those countries and in Indonesia.

It seems superfluous, but still appropriate, to mention that Christians have done a lot of killing “in God’s name,” as have people of just about every other faith, and that assorted acts of mayhem and violence are caused every day under every conceivable banner.

Iftekhar Hai, like millions of his fellow Muslims here and abroad, is a man of peace. He serves on the board of the San Francisco Interfaith Council and works with other organizations such as United Religions Initiative to promote understanding, cooperation and peace among all faiths. Wouldn’t less fear and hatred, and more peace and understanding be a good idea at this point in world history?

California/Education/Environment/Health/Lifestyle/Medicine/seniors/USA/Women
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Your doctor's in shape… but may just be getting in shape to retire

by Fran Johns

U.S. doctors as a group are “leaner, fitter and live longer than average Americans… male physicians keep their cholesterol and blood pressure lower… women doctors are more likely to use hormone-replacement therapy than their patients,” according to several recent surveys.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that they are taking all this health and fitness into early retirement. And thanks to the hordes of baby boomers hanging up their stethoscopes for good, finding enough doctors in any shape at all is going to be a challenge, particularly in light of the numbers of newly insured.

Nearly 40 percent of doctors are 55 or older, according to the Center for Workforce Studies of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Included in that group are doctors whose specialties will be the pillars of providing care in 2014, when the overhaul kicks in; family medicine and general practitioners (37 percent); general surgeons (42 percent); pediatrics (33 percent), and internal medicine and pediatrics (35 percent).

About a third of the much larger nursing workforce is 50 or older, and about 55 percent expressed an intention to retire in the next 10 years, according to a Nursing Management Aging Workforce Survey by the Bernard Hodes Group. New registered nurses are flowing from colleges, but not enough to replace the number planning to leave the profession.

“Moving into the future, we see a very large shortage of nurses, about 300,000,” said Peter Buerhaus, a nurse and health-care economist and a professor at Vanderbilt University. “That number does not account for the demand created by reform. That’s a knockout number. It knocks the system down. It stops it.”

According to the census, baby boomers include the 66 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964.

In an article for the Journal of the American Medical Association, Buerhaus and colleagues Douglas Staiger and David Auerbach predicted that there will be at least 100,000 fewer doctors in the workplace than the 1.1 million the federal government projects will be needed in 2020 under the health-care overhaul.

“There’s a much more rapid retirement of physicians,” Buerhaus said. “What does this retirement mean? This will mean at least 100,000 fewer doctors in the workplace in 2020.”He said the article does not estimate the change in demand or the level of recruitment by medical colleges, which is being beefed up significantly under the health-care law.

Although current studies involve more than a little conjecture — Will professions in the medical field continue to be as attractive as other areas? Will doctors and nurses work longer if truly needed? — there is no doubt about the coming shortage.

Lori Heim, president of the American Association of Family Practitioners, said someone might soon have to replace her. “My age group is looking at when we are going to retire,” said Heim, who is 54. “More physicians are changing their practice, doing things that have less calls. They want administrative roles.”

Heim said her statement is based on an impression. “I haven’t seen any numbers on this.” But, she said, her association is among the many that for years have pointed out the shortage of primary care doctors and nurses to the White House and Congress.

Staying healthy might be the best defense.

Retirements by baby-boomer doctors, nurses could strain overhaul.

California/Environment/Health/Lifestyle/Medicine/seniors/teens/USA/Women
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New 'morning after' pill meets opposition from abortion foes

by Fran Johns
MADRID, SPAIN - SEPTEMBER 27: In this photo i...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

With global overpopulation among the most critical problems of the 21st century, news of a highly effective contraceptive becoming available in the U.S. would seem very good news indeed. But as health writer Rob Stein reports in the Washington Post, it may not happen:

A French drug company is seeking to offer American women something their European counterparts already have: a pill that works long after “the morning after.”

The drug, dubbed ella, would be sold as a contraceptive — one that could prevent pregnancy for as many as five days after unprotected sex. But the new drug is a close chemical relative of the abortion pill RU-486, raising the possibility that it could also induce abortion by making the womb inhospitable for an embryo.

Plan B (the last emergency contraceptive vetted by the FDA), which works for up to 72 hours after sex, was eventually approved for sale without a prescription, although a doctor’s order is required for girls younger than 17. The new drug promises to extend that period to at least 120 hours. Approved in Europe last year, ella is available as an emergency contraceptive in at least 22 countries.

“With ulipristal (ella), women will be enticed to buy a poorly tested abortion drug, unaware of its medical risks, under the guise that it’s a morning-after pill,” said Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America, which led the battle against Plan B.

Plan B prevents a pregnancy by administering high doses of a hormone that mimics progesterone. It works primarily by inhibiting the ovaries from producing eggs. Critics argue it can also prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb, which some consider equivalent to an abortion.

Ella works as a contraceptive by blocking progesterone’s activity, which delays the ovaries from producing an egg. RU-486, too, blocks the action of progesterone, which is also needed to prepare the womb to accept a fertilized egg and to nurture a developing embryo. That’s how RU-486 can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting and dislodge growing embryos. Ella’s chemical similarity raises the possibility that it might do the same thing, perhaps if taken at elevated doses. But no one knows for sure because the drug has never been tested that way. Opponents of the drug are convinced it will. “It kills embryos, just like the abortion pill,” said Donna Harrison, president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

A federal panel will convene this week to consider endorsing the drug. Those favoring approval are worried that the ambiguous sentiments, and the power of abortion foes who seem poised to weigh in against it, will influence the outcome.

“FDA should be a ‘Just the facts ma’am’ organization,” said Susan F. Wood, an associate professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services who resigned from the FDA to protest delays in making Plan B more accessible. “I’m hoping the FDA will take that position.”

There is an great unmet need out there for emergency contraception that is effective as this for so long,” said Erin Gainer, chief executive of HRA Pharma of Paris. Studies involving more than 4,500 women in the United States and Europe show that ella is safe, producing minor side effects including headaches, nausea and fatigue, she said.

The company has no plans to test ella as an abortion drug, but it did not appear to cause any problems for the handful of women who have become pregnant after taking the drug, she said.

“The people who are opposing this are not just opposed to abortion,” said Amy Allina, program director at the National Women’s Health Network. “They also opposed contraception and they are trying to confuse the issue.”

Back to the issue: the planet has a finite amount of space for human beings. When one human being (and often two human beings acting as one) seeks not to add an unwanted human being, would it not make sense to furnish all available safe, legal tools to assist in that humanitarian effort?

Stay tuned for the answer from the FDA.

New ‘morning-after’ pill, ella, raises debate over similarity to abortion drug.

California/Health/Law/Lifestyle/Media/Politics & Causes/seniors/teens/Women
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Judge to rule on same-sex marriage

by Fran Johns

Can gay marriage be a fundamental right, when all legal protection has been denied until recently? In a state that treats domestic partners the same as spouses, “what purpose is served by differentiating – in name only – between same-sex and opposite-sex unions?”

These are two of the questions sent to opposing lawyers by U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who will hear their closing arguments next Wednesday in the San Francisco case being watched for broader implications. Supporters of gay rights are seeking to overturn Proposition 8, California’s voter-approved ban on gay marriage.

The closing arguments won’t be watched by just anybody. Judge Walker ruled late this week that arguments may not be televised beyond the closed circuit of the courthouse. So you’ll have to be on site to follow the proceedings up close and personal. Media organizations had sought to have the session, which is expected to last all day, televised; proponents of Prop 8 argued against the idea.

The denial means “the public will again only hear about this case second-hand,” said Thomas Burke, the media groups’ lawyer.

Andrew Pugno, a lawyer for sponsors of the ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage, countered that “the purpose of the court is not to entertain or educate the public, but to protect the right to a fair and impartial trial.” The sponsors had opposed televising any trial proceedings.

Two same-sex couples and the city of San Francisco have sued to overturn Proposition 8, the November 2008 initiative that amended the California Constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

Walker presided over the non-jury trial in January. He had proposed to televise the trial live to several federal courthouses around the nation and record the proceedings for a delayed Internet posting on YouTube.

The telecast, which would have been the first for a federal court in California, was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court just before the trial started.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court said Walker hadn’t given the public enough time to comment on the proposed change in court rules. The court also cited claims by Prop. 8’s sponsors that showing the proceedings outside the courthouse might intimidate witnesses.

Media organizations asked Walker last month to approve televising the closing arguments. They said that airing a hearing that included only lawyers and the judge couldn’t affect witnesses or the fairness of the trial.

Prop 8 supporters argued, though, that cameras in the courtroom could prompt “grandstanding and avoidance of unpopular decisions or positions.” Whatever the judge’s decision, it is guaranteed to be widely unpopular.

No TV for closing arguments in Prop. 8 trial.

California/Health/Literature/Media/Medicine/seniors/USA
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Is technology addiction messing with your brain?

by Fran Johns
my brains - let me show you them
Image by Liz Henry via Flickr

This is your life? Beginning at breakfast — or perhaps earlier, in the bathroom — one sizable screen with multiple streams of news, stock reports and data updates across the bottom; tweets in a box on the left; the iPhone nearby holding stacked up e-mails, IMs and calls that went into the mailbox? If so, you are not alone. As a matter of fact, it seems almost no one is alone, or disconnected from technological communications, any more. In the words of New York Times writer Matt Richtel, “This is your brain on computers.”

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people … these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

Richtel follows a family of four through their technology-addicted lives: they go on an oceanside vacation, but soon are all on their electronic devices; one day at the beach is mercifully unplugged. But on routine days, few moments are unplugged.

“And scientists are discovering,” Richtel reports, that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.”

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.

More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits.

For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as e-mail and TV, has exploded. In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

“We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” he said. “We know already there are consequences.”

We just don’t fully understand what those consequences might be. This space worries. Couldn’t we get our adrenaline the old-fashioned way?

Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price – NYTimes.com.

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