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Lies About Women's Health
For the past 15 years, Ruth Shaber, M.D., has been an ob-gyn in San Francisco for Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest health maintenance organizations. She sees all types of women—union members, executives, waitresses. Most of them, Dr. Shaber says, have questions for her, including how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases, how to preserve their fertility, how to prevent breast and cervical cancer and whether the latest Internet health scare they've heard is really true.
Dr. Shaber tries hard to separate fact from fiction because, she says, "rumor and hearsay can start to seem real." In the past, she'd sometimes refer patients to government websites and printed fact sheets, or rely on those outlets to help create her own materials. Not anymore. "As a physician, I can no longer trust government sources," says Dr. Shaber. She is not a political activist or a conspiracy theorist; in addition to her own practice, she's Kaiser Permanente's director of women's health services for northern California and head of the HMO's Women's Health Research Institute. Yet this decidedly mainstream doctor and administrator says, "I no longer trust FDA decisions or materials generated [by the government]. Ten years ago, I would not have had to scrutinize government information. Now I don't feel comfortable giving it to my patients."
Such doctor mistrust represents a major change. For the past 100 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been the world's premier government agency ensuring drug safety. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have similarly stellar track records. But recently, Dr. Shaber charges, the government has lost its most precious asset: credibility.
How did it happen? Many prominent figures in science and public health think they know the answer. "People believe that religiously based social conservatives have direct lines to the powers that be within the U.S. government, the administration, Congress, and are influencing public-health policy, practice and research in ways that are unprecedented and very dangerous," says Judith Auerbach, Ph.D., a former NIH official who is now a vice president at the nonprofit American Foundation for AIDS Research. In fact, Glamour, has found that on issues ranging from STDs to birth control, some radical conservative activists have used fudged and sometimes flatly false data to persuade the government to promote their agenda of abstinence until marriage. The fallout: Young women now read false data on government websites, learn bogus information in federally funded sex-education programs and struggle to get safe, legal contraceptives—all of which, critics argue, may put them at greater risk for unplanned pregnancies and STDs.
"Abstinence is a laudable goal," says Deborah Arrindell, vice president of health policy for the nonpartisan American Social Health Association, an STD-awareness group. "But it is not how young women live their lives—the reality is that most women have premarital sex. Our government is focusing not on women's health but on a moral agenda." Consider this a wake-up call.
If it had been left up to the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee, American women would be able to walk into any drugstore and buy the emergency contraceptive Plan B over the counter (OTC). When the committee was convened in 2003 to review Plan B, a "morning-after" method of birth control that can reduce the odds of pregnancy by 95 percent if taken within 24 hours of unprotected sex, all 28 members agreed that the drug was safe and effective. The vast majority of them also voted to make it available OTC at any pharmacy. Susan F. Wood, Ph.D., then the head of the FDA's Office of Women's Health, heartily supported that decision.
Because of her focus on women's health, Wood examined the research and closely watched the review process for Plan B, a drug that has been available by prescription since 1999. Among the facts: Several studies showed that it works with few side effects and that making it more accessible does not lead to an increase in unsafe sex or promiscuity. In 2000 alone, the drug prevented approximately 51,000 abortions, according to a Guttmacher Institute estimate. But women who need Plan B often have difficulty obtaining a prescription and getting it filled—hence the need to approve it for sale OTC.
"One member of the panel told me, 'I wish we had data this good on everything that comes before this committee,'" Wood recalls. Fast approval should have been a mere formality.
But Christian fundamentalist groups like the Southern Baptist Convention and powerful religious conservative organizations like the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America campaigned hard against OTC status by lobbying members of Congress, testifying before the FDA panels and bombarding the agency with letters. They argued that the drug was dangerous, would lead to unsafe sex and would corrupt children. Pia de Solenni, director of Life and Women's Issues at the Family Research Council (a pro-life group that also believes there are "long-lasting negative consequences of premarital sex," including "emotional problems" and "future marital breakup"), also argued inaccurately in a press release that Plan B "will most certainly make [women] ill from an overdose of hormones and potentially cause further complications."
The campaign worked. Rather than rely on the recommendations of its medical advisory board, the FDA delayed ruling on Plan B for nearly two years. Why? Insiders speculated that the delay was, in part, the handiwork of conservative activist and ob-gyn W. David Hager, M.D., an active member of Christian right political groups and the author of As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now. Appointed by the Bush administration to the FDA panel that reviewed Plan B, Dr. Hager first voted with the committee that Plan B is safe and effective, but then went on to write what he termed a "minority opinion," laying out a case against OTC status. Contrary to numerous studies and the review panel's findings, he argued that the drug might not be safe for teens and that they might not understand package instructions. Shortly thereafter, Steven Galson, M.D., a high-ranking FDA official, cited similar concerns in a letter to Plan B's manufacturer—denying the drug approval at that time. Some women's health advocates had hoped that the logjam would break when Lester Crawford, DVM, Ph.D. was confirmed as FDA commissioner in 2005. But last August, Crawford put off a decision indefinitely.
Why did Plan B get deep-sixed? According to FDA officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office, the decision to deny approval for Plan B had been made by top political appointees at the FDA months before staff even completed reviewing the application; many others suggested that pressure from the religious right played a key role.
FDA spokespeople have denied those accusations, but religious-activist organizations crowed about swaying the FDA, and Dr. Hager claimed the decision was God's work. "I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA," he told an assembly at the Christian Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. "God took that information, and he used it through this minority report to influence the decision."
Crawford's ruling outraged the mainstream medical community. Both Wood and Frank Davidoff, M.D., a consultant to the FDA's Nonprescription Drug Advisory Committee, resigned in protest. Wood, a cautious woman who avoided political issues before this, is still shocked by the decision. "If this drug had nothing to do with sex, this wouldn't have happened," she told Glamour. "This decision was not based on science and clinical evidence. This threatens the FDA's credibility, and it threatens the faith the public has in the FDA for making sure products are safe and effective." The New England Journal of Medicine, the nation's leading medical journal, agreed, running an editorial titled "A Sad Day for Science at the FDA." The decision, it said, "appeared to reflect political meddling in the drug-approval process."
Women's access to emergency contraception (EC) has been mysteriously derailed by political forces in other cases, too. In April 2002, the Department of Defense decided to allow military women the same access to EC that civilian women have, adding Plan B to what's called the Basic Core Formulary, and thus making it available by prescription in all military health facilities. But one month later, Glamour discovered, Defense Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs William Winkenwerder, M.D., a political appointee, made the extraordinary decision to remove it from the Formulary. Dr. Winkenwerder's office declined to comment to Glamour, but sources familiar with the events say they were stunned by what happened and could not recall any time when a drug was added, then removed a month later. "It was very upsetting," says one, who specifically cites Plan B's "political sensitivity" as the reason for the change. Says another source: "It was like a slap in the face" to be overruled by the civilian leadership.
Even the Department of Justice (DOJ) may have been influenced by this political climate. For years, women's advocates have asked the federal government to establish national guidelines for the treatment of rape victims. Hospital protocols, they argued, vary too much from state to state and even county to county, and such guidelines could help a woman traumatized by assault to get good care no matter where she lived.
Mainstream medical organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Medical Association, agree that emergency rooms should offer victims EC after a sexual assault. Doing so could prevent the estimated 32,000 pregnancies—and, subsequently, many abortions—that occur as a result of rape. "What person who has been raped would really welcome a pregnancy from that?" says James Trussell, Ph.D., director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Even if you oppose abortion, what could be better than preventing the pregnancy in the first place?"
So when the DOJ was developing its first-ever guidelines for the treatment of rape victims, an early draft included EC. Yet strangely, in September 2004, when the guidelines were issued, any mention of EC had been deleted.
There was an immediate outcry. A petition signed by hundreds of nongovernment organizations including the American Public Health Association, the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches and the Union of Reform Judaism urged the department "to include the routine offering of emergency contraception to sexual-assault victims." The failure to do so, the petition said, "is a glaring omission."
Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) agreed, and she spearheaded a movement by 97 members of the House of Representatives to demand that the DOJ include the EC information in the guidelines. "I think it is unconscionable to deprive women who have been victimized information about their options for treatment," Rep. Maloney says. "It is unconscionable to deprive them of access to medicine." Her efforts were unsuccessful.
The department has never fully explained why it deleted EC from the guidelines. (A DOJ spokesman told Glamour that EC wasn't mentioned "because it's not up to a bunch of lawyers in the Justice Department to tell doctors what options should be available." But the 130-page document was comprehensive in other ways; it even suggested that examiners avoid wearing jewelry when treating mentally impaired victims.) Rep. Maloney and many others are convinced that they know what drives such decisions. "I'd say it is the fundamentalist right," Rep. Maloney says. At the root of the religious right's objection is the belief that EC constitutes a form of abortion. Most experts agree that EC works by preventing ovulation and therefore fertilization, but scientists cannot rule out the hypothetical possibility that in a tiny number of cases the drug may prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. This loophole has led some pro-life groups to argue that Plan B causes abortions, even though the World Health Organization (WHO), ACOG and the NIH all agree that pregnancy begins at implantation and not before. (The most extreme groups contend that the Pill could work in the same way, and therefore is also a form of abortion. Some pharmacists have even used this reasoning as moral grounds to refuse to fill EC and everyday Pill prescriptions; see "What If You Can't Get EC?" on page 310.) The debate has had real consequences for rape victims: As many as 80 percent of them are kept in the dark about EC or struggle to get it in emergency rooms, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Maya Jacobsen* was one such victim. In fall 2001, she was raped in her room on campus at the University of Denver. After her attacker escaped through a back door, she sat crying on a couch, frightened and stunned. Like many sexual-assault victims, she was too shaken at first to report the incident and waited until the next morning before she drove to the closest hospital, Porter Adventist. She says she spent hours undergoing a sexual-assault exam, but nobody brought up the issue of how she might prevent pregnancy—until she asked.
"I said, 'What are my options here if I become pregnant?' The nurse said I would have to wait to take a pregnancy test, and if I was pregnant, there was always adoption. I said, 'That's it? What about the morning-after pill?' And she said, 'You would need to do that on your own.'" Fortunately, Jacobsen was able to get the drug from a nearby Planned Parenthood clinic later that day.
Sharon Pappas, chief nursing officer for Porter Adventist, agrees that Jacobsen should have been administered EC if she wanted it. In fact, she says the hospital recently established new procedures reinforcing their policy of offering EC to all rape victims.
But the confusion at Porter Adventist illustrates exactly why uniform federal guidelines for EC are so critical. In the absence of any local laws, it's up to individual hospitals to decide whether a rape victim will be given—or even told about—the drug that could keep her from conceiving her attacker's baby. Many have not developed clear protocols yet, so Jacobsen's experience will be repeated in emergency rooms around the country. Ironically, that could lead to numerous unnecessary abortions. "I would have had an abortion," Jacobsen says. "I had dreams of a career; my whole life was in front of me. Carrying a rapist's child was not my dream."
A few years ago, several conservative congressional legislators asked King K. Holmes, M.D., Ph.D., how well condoms protected against STDs. "They asked whether condoms were effective against everything," says Dr. Holmes, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the world's leading experts on STDs. He told them yes, condoms were especially effective against HIV, and worked well against all STDs with one exception: human papillomavirus, or HPV, a few strains of which can cause cervical cancer. At that time, he said, researchers suspected that condoms did offer some HPV protection, but the data were incomplete.
"That is what they wanted to hear," says Dr. Holmes. "It was clear the goal was to discredit condom use, and this was what they were trying to hang their argument on."
It seems that conservative activists saw an opportunity with HPV. Here was a disease connected to cancer against which condoms weren't yet proven effective. The perfect argument against premarital sex, and condoms, was born. "Condoms, whether used correctly and consistently or not, do not prevent the spread of HPV," the Family Research Council warns on its website, going on to note that "HPV has been linked to over 90 percent of all invasive cervical cancers and is the number-two cause of cancer deaths among women." In truth, cervical cancer is only the thirteenth-highest cancer killer of women in the U.S., behind bladder and kidney cancer. In the majority of cases, the immune system fights off HPV before people know they have it. Even when precancerous cells develop, they can be detected early by a Pap smear.
Nevertheless, the HPV fear campaign continued to escalate. Through lobbying and testimony before Congress, the religious right attacked government sex-education programs that included information on condom use. The Family Research Council argued that such programs expose "our youth to incurable disease on a daily basis. Most notable among these diseases is human papilloma virus, HPV." The government appeared to be listening. Until then, the CDC had accurately encouraged condom use as smart safe-sex behavior—but in 2002, around the time of the HPV flap, it backed off. The agency suddenly removed from its website a fact sheet on condoms that stated "laboratory studies show that intact latex condoms are highly effective barriers to…HIV and other STDs" and that told readers how to use them. Later that year, the fact sheet was replaced with one stressing sexual abstinence.
Despite condoms' proven effectiveness against many STDs, especially HIV, conservatives continued to suggest that they were more of a hazard than a help. Just last year, Senator Tom Coburn, M.D., (R-Okla.) went so far as to demand that the FDA place a warning label on every condom package saying condoms don't help protect against HPV. (He was unsuccessful.) The idea, contends Katharine O'Connell, M.D., an ob-gyn and assistant professor at Columbia University in New York City who studies contraception, is to hype the dangers of sex before marriage: Exaggerating condom failure and the risk of HPV "is simplifying the facts for the purposes of manipulating sexual practices," she says. "This is not about condoms. It's all about the sex."
Glamour has also discovered that blatantly false anticondom information has been incorporated into several federal and state health websites. One, an official Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) site designed for families seeking health information for teens, 4parents.gov, suggests that there is no evidence that condom use reduces the risk of HPV infection and downplays its effectiveness against chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. Similarly, several states, including Louisiana, Wisconsin, Virginia and North Carolina, have online abstinence programs that link to a site called abstinencedu.com, which warns that HIV might be able to penetrate a latex condom (patently false), that "condoms offer no protection against HPV infection" (not true) and that "there is no scientific evidence that condoms reduce the risk of becoming infected with the other 23 major STDs" (also false). It even claims that "the Federal Drug Administration [sic] allows up to 4 percent of a batch of condoms to be defective before the batch is rejected!" (Actually, the FDA rejects a batch of condoms if even one-tenth that number are defective.)
How do lies like these become official government health information? Both abstinencedu.com and 4parents.gov get some of their information from yet another outfit, called the Medical Institute for Sexual Health (MISH), which opposes premarital sex and has become a leading provider of the kind of "scientific" data now appearing on government sites.
For more than a decade, public-health doctors and scientists have charged that MISH generates dubious and sometimes outrageously false data. One example: A 1995 letter from David R. Smith, M.D., then the Texas Commissioner of Health, rebuked MISH for a slide presentation given by founder Joe S. McIlhaney, M.D., to a panel of experts about a proposed sex-education program. Dr. Smith called the show "misleading," "false," "inaccurate" and even "ridiculous." Yet MISH continued to present the same data for years, and in the last two years, the federal government gave the group at least $600,000.
Dr. McIlhaney told Glamour that in the early days of MISH, he was still working as a physician, not an academic, and did not have the same access to resources as the now-larger organization does today. Nevertheless, he continues to stress condom ineffectiveness against HPV. "I think our conclusions were right," he says. "I was right on almost all of it, and they were wrong." Yet science does not back him up: Last November the FDA reaffirmed that condoms reduce the risk of every major STD including HPV.
Soon, there will be another weapon even more effective against HPV than condoms. The drug company Merck has found that its new vaccine Gardasil is nearly 100 percent effective against the HPV strains that most often cause cervical cancer. Another vaccine, Cervarix, made by GlaxoSmithKline, appears to be just as effective.
The world's first anticancer vaccine would represent an incredible scientific breakthrough. But conservative groups began voicing objections as soon as the drugs started making headlines. Sen. Coburn, for one, testified before the House of Representatives that "going after one or two types [of HPV] is halfway," a charge health experts find illogical since the HPV strains prevented by the vaccine account for most cases of cervical cancer.
"The public should be outraged at this misrepresentation of facts for political reasons," says Dr. Holmes. "This really reveals the true agenda for those who have argued that the reason for not promoting condoms is to protect girls against HPV." If you truly cared about HPV prevention, his reasoning goes, you'd be thrilled at the advent of a vaccine to save women's lives. "It really illustrates that the opposition to condoms has nothing to do with protecting women and girls," he says, "but everything to do with opposition to discussion of sexual health."
The movement against the vaccine—Merck's version of which could be approved by the end of the year—has left John Santelli, M.D., chairman of Columbia University's Department of Population and Family Health, mystified. "We have a vaccine that could prevent cancer," he says. "People should be lining up and saying this is a great medical achievement, and yet people are actually opposing it. That's nuts."
Teens are perhaps the people most in need of trustworthy sexual-health information. Ironically, they are also the most likely to absorb misinformation from organizations like MISH that provide pseudo-science not just to websites but to abstinence-only sex-ed classes in public schools. One reason why public-health researchers now take a dim view of such programs: They may mislead students. In a meta-analysis of abstinence programs published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, Dr. Santelli found that such curricula "do not seem to be well designed and have incomplete information, misinformation and questionable information." And last year, the office of Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) examined the most popular federally funded abstinence-only sex-education programs and found that nearly 70 percent of them include "serious medical or scientific errors." Among the wholly inaccurate claims: that up to 10 percent of women become sterile after an abortion and that "premature birth, a major cause of mental retardation, is increased following the abortion of a first pregnancy." Says Princeton's Trussell, "It's an outrage. This is clearly another ideological distortion of what the real evidence shows." Yet such erroneous facts continue to be taught in public school districts in Montana, California, Washington, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
As a result, many experts believe abstinence-only programs leave teens unprotected against pregnancy and STDs. "These young women and men who are taught that condoms have a high failure rate say, 'Well they do not work anyway, so why bother?'" observes Kellie Flood-Schaffer, M.D., an ob-gyn and associate professor at Texas Tech in Lubbock, where high-schoolers are taught a strict abstinence-only health curriculum. "I'm a Catholic. I believe in abstinence until marriage. But I'm also a realist. And condoms prevent a huge percentage of STDs and are 90 percent effective against pregnancy."
She has data to back up her strong feelings. Along with Samuel Prien, Ph.D., Dr. Flood-Schaffer conducted a lengthy study that found that among girls under 18, the Lubbock area has quadruple the average national rate of chlamydia—an STD that often goes undiagnosed and that can cause infertility. Why are the rates so high? "It's the education they are not getting," says Prien, who considers himself a conservative Christian. "At least in our area, abstinence-only is not working."
In November 2002, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which is run and funded by the federal government, placed this statement on its website: "Some studies have reported statistically significant evidence of an increased risk of breast cancer in women who have had abortions, while others have merely suggested an increased risk. Other studies have found no increase in risk."
Confusing? Absolutely. But the facts are straightforward: Abortion does not increase a woman's chance of breast cancer, according to numerous independent professional groups like the American Cancer Society, ACOG and the WHO. (Unlike the NCI, these organizations are not part of the federal government.)
Radical pro-life groups partly base their charge of an abortion-cancer link on research by a biochemist named Joel Brind, Ph.D., but his work—subsidized in part by an antiabortion group called Americans United for Life—has been widely discredited. So scientists protested vigorously when the NCI placed the statement on its website, and the NCI convened a special panel to address the issue once and for all.
The group found no increased risk of breast cancer after abortion—and by spring 2003, the NCI had amended its website to reflect that. But serious damage had already been done. The abortion-breast cancer link had gained airtime: Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate, cited Brind's research to suggest that "abortion increases a woman's risk of breast cancer by 30 percent." And some state governments went further, actually passing laws requiring doctors to tell patients seeking an abortion that the procedure could increase their risk of breast cancer.
"The government allowed people to believe—and encouraged people to believe—that abortions were a risk factor for breast cancer, even when the government knew that this research had been discredited and that better research showed no connection," says Marcia Angell, M.D., a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School in Boston and former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. She goes so far as to call the pressure from the religious right "a source of corruption."
To date, abortion-breast cancer laws, called "Women's Right to Know," have been passed in Texas, Kansas, Montana and Mississippi. Texas State Representative Dawnna Dukes (D-Austin) vociferously opposed such a law, pointing to the scientific evidence that abortion does not raise the risk of breast cancer. But, she says, legislators who "pushed this law, supported this law, were terrified by right-wing Christian organizations. Some of my colleagues said, in confidence, 'I agree with you, but we are told that if we vote with you on this, we are supporting abortion.' They knew this information was invalid. They were frightened. These folks are afraid of this Christian coalition." Why? She says legislators were worried that the groups would mobilize against them in upcoming primaries. Herb Brown, M.D., an ob-gyn and faculty member at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, says these laws "put doctors in a terrible position. You have to show a pamphlet produced by the state to the patient and explain that it is part of the regulation. The conversation I have is that, 'This is what is written in the pamphlet. I disagree with it ethically and scientifically, but this is what the legislation has forced upon me.' That's all I can say… If I want to be consistent with the law, I have to lie."
Before experts can come up with cures or prevention strategies for complex sexual-health problems like STDs, researchers have to discover how diseases are spread, how they change and how they affect people. But in recent years, religiously motivated activists have interfered with that research process, arguing that some studies are immoral.
In 2003, Tooru Nemoto, Ph.D., a public-health expert at the University of California-San Francisco, was conducting a federally funded study of sex workers in massage parlors. He wanted to find out what influenced risky behavior—including why some women chose not to use condoms with customers.
The study had implications far beyond high-risk sex workers. "This is a huge public-health issue," Nemoto says, because massage-parlor workers spread HIV and other STDs to their clients, who then pass on the diseases to their unsuspecting spouses and girlfriends.
But unbeknownst to Nemoto, his study caught the attention of the Traditional Values Coalition, a lobby group that represents more than 43,000 churches. Since the late nineties, the group had been tracking what has been widely reported in mainstream newspapers and scientific journals as a "hit list" of government-funded health projects it found morally objectionable, and, by early 2003, it had given the list to congressional allies. Nemoto's study was on it.
Once again, legislators apparently took the bait. After congressional prodding, HHS began an in-depth audit of Nemoto's project in May 2003 and brought his research to a standstill. After months of scrutiny, the audit uncovered no improprieties, but he narrowly missed losing his funding.
HHS has argued that Nemoto's audit was nothing more than routine. But other groups and researchers say they, too, have been harassed by seemingly punitive reviews. Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization that educates teens about topics like drug abuse, sexual violence and birth control, is still feeling the sting. In all, the group underwent three government investigations into how it spent federal money, none of which found any wrongdoing. By the time of the third audit, James Wagoner, the president of Advocates, recalls saying to HHS, "Let's call it what it is. This is the third audit in 11 months. This is starting to feel like more than routine attention." He estimates that the inquiries cost the organization $160,000, money that could have been spent on programs targeting dating violence or preventing teen pregnancy.
Such audits, Rep. Waxman said in a 2003 letter to then-secretary of HHS Tommy Thompson, "are creating at least the perception that [HHS] authority is being abused" for ideological reasons. To support his assertion, he noted that no organizations receiving federal money to promote sexual abstinence had been investigated. (HHS spokespeople never fully responded to Rep. Waxman's queries, and didn't reply to phone calls from Glamour.)
Many scientists believe the audits are part of a larger pattern. In February 2004, 62 leading scientists and educators, including 20 Nobel Prize winners, signed a statement accusing the Bush administration of "misrepresenting and suppressing scientific knowledge for political purposes."
No researcher contacted by Glamour said he or she had been denied funding because of studying sexual issues. But, says Wood, the former FDA official, NIH researchers now practice an "internal self-censorship" because of the way politics have invaded science. The harassment, says Auerbach, the former NIH official, "has put the chill on people. It makes them think twice about their lines of research and their own careers. They do not want to have to spend their lives doing audits. Folks say, 'It is not worth it. I am not going down this line of work.'"
It's extremely rare for a scientific conference to turn into something more like a political rally. "Scientists do not normally engage in what is going on in Washington, D.C., or politics," says Wood. But at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last February, a special conference was added to the agenda to discuss how politics have invaded the realm of science.
It quickly became a standing-room-only event, and scientists applauded as speakers like Wood and Nobel winner David Baltimore, Ph.D., president of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, condemned the government's interference in research.
Wood was struck by the overwhelming number of people who attended. "Scientists from across the country, from all kinds of fields, were there," she says, "because they care a great deal about how science is done and how data are analyzed and how the information is used." Why were they finally voicing their fears? "I think as people become more aware [of the interference in science], they are willing to step up and say, 'This is not what we want,'" Wood says.
For a group of researchers, the rhetoric was fiery. Baltimore accused the Bush administration of suppressing science. And when Wood said that morale at the FDA had sunk to a new low because of overwhelming pressure from social conservatives, she got a standing ovation.
Outside of the halls of science, who are the real victims of this political maneuvering? "The American public, particularly American women," says Trussell. "Who's hurt when you can't get EC over the counter? When there is a suggestion that abortion causes breast cancer—something that is entirely made up? When it's suggested that condoms are not effective against STDs, when in reality they are effective against HIV and even HPV? Women."
But many women can't imagine how these lies could possibly have an impact on them, Trussell says. "The first time one of them walks into a pharmacy and can't get her birth control pill prescription filled, that will have a wake-up effect. Most won't feel the effects until these rights are gone—they can't believe there would be a time when these things would be outlawed. I hope their belief is true, but I'm very worried."
Brian Alexander is a contributing editor to Glamour and the author of Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion.


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Florence Welch gets cat for company
Florence Welch has revealed that she has a new "writing partner" - a cat called Missus.
The Florence And The Machine frontwoman wanted a pet for company because she is spending so much time at home writing her new album.
She fell in love with a tortoiseshell rescue cat from Battersea Dogs And Cats Home after visiting the charity.
The singer, 27, said: "I'm at home quite a lot working on my third album and it will be lovely to have a cat around the house again.
"I've had two cats before and decided to get a rescue cat because it felt like the right thing to do... the only problem is I want to take them all home!"
Florence, who lives in south London, said Missus was "extremely friendly" and made herself comfortable straight away.
The You've Got The Love singer added: "She'll be a very good writing partner and we'll probably spend lots of time together."
According to Battersea Dogs And Cats Home, comedian Alistair McGowan, presenter Lauren Laverne and Prime Minister David Cameron have previously rehomed rescue cats.

subset: commoncrawl


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|South Plainfield, N.J.
|High School:
|South Plainfield
|Criminal Justice
2012: Returns for his senior year as a key member of the Spartan bullpen ... his unorthodox pitching style and his very heavy fastball enables him to get a large number of strikeouts and easy ground balls for the Spartan infield ... has great composure on the mound and is a highly competitive pitcher.
2011: Saw action in 18 games with three starts as he threw 35.0 innings ... went 1-4 with a 4.84 ERA and two saves for the season ... came out of the pen to throw a career-high six innings in the March 27 game against Stevenson as he allowed one run on five hits with four strikeouts and a walk in the Spartans' 5-3 win ... picked up a save against Wesley on March 5 and notched his second with a two-inning save against Montclair State ... had nine scoreless outtings during the year ... finished the year with 19 strikeouts as opponents hit .259 against him.
2010: Exploded on the scene for the Spartans having an outstanding season as he was 1-1 with three saves and a sterling 1.71 ERA in 26.1 innings of work out of the pen ... made 19 appearances and held opponents to just a .235 batting average ... had 25 strikeouts and just two walks for the year ... picked up his first collegiate save on April 2 against Mary Washington as he threw the final third of an inning, getting a strikeout and preserving York's 5-4 win ... allowed one earned run in his first appearance of the year against LaGrange and then did not allow another earned run over his next 14 appearances spanning 18 innings ... registered a career-high four strikeouts in his three innings of work in the April 30 win over Piedmont.
2009: Saw action on eight games as a freshman as he came out of the pen in all eight games ... finished the season without a decision as he tossed 12.2 innings ... had his final regular season statistics very skewed by his March 29 outing at Salibury .... five of his eight appearances were scoreless .... established a career-high with four strikeouts in the March 2 win over Eastern and again in the March 6 win over Gallaudet ... subtracting the Salisbury game from his statistics, he would have had a 3.40 ERA with nine strikeouts and four walks in 10.2 innings of work.
Personal: Is a Criminal Justice major and a Sociology minor at YCP ... is the son of Kurt and Carol Ullom ... lists his dad Kurt as the person he most admires ... lists New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera as his favorite professional athlete ... earned 2010 ABCCL All-Star accolades after playing this summer with the Jackson Thunder along with current teammate Rob Klinck.


text:
The 2012 Quincy Daze annual event is set to begin, with a full slate of activities for all to enjoy.
The 2012 Quincy Daze annual event is set to begin, with a full slate of activities for all to enjoy.
Event highlights
1 Events will kickoff on Thursday evening with a fireworks display following the Quincy junior varsity football game. There will be concessions available and music playing at the Quincy Schools campus until the fireworks begin.
2 Friday's events will begin with the popular Q-Town 5k/10k race, starting at the Quincy Schools campus (at Colfax Street and Educational Parkway) at 5 p.m. In addition to the 5k/10k race, the event will offer a 5k walk, a mile fun run and the tot dash.
More information on the race can be obtained by contacting Race Director Loretta Tobolski-Horn at 517-283-1726.
3 The annual Quincy Daze Car Show will be held from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday in the North Main Street park. Registration is free, and there will be 15 trophies awarded, as well as dash plaques to the first 100 entries.
The top winning vehicle will also be featured on next year's dash plaques.
Musical entertainment
Quincy Daze will offer a variety of musical entertainment, beginning on Friday evening from, with Delbert Walling and Haley Smith, and followed by Don Middlebrook from 8-11 p.m. All will be performing uptown, on North Main Street.
Saturday's entertainment will include deejay services by Mello Productions from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (uptown); deejay Rod Harper form 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.(at the Village Park); The Haskells (at the Village Park) from 2-5 p.m.; Jim Dove from 5-7 p.m. (uptown); and The Lovey Howl Band from 8-11 p.m. (uptown).
As always, The Stables will offer their food and beer tent, from 5-11 p.m. on Friday, then from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturday, at North Main Street and US-12.
There will also be a number of food vendors on hand from 5-11 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday.
In addition, on Saturday, the Quincy Lions Club will offer coffee and donuts, beginning at 9 a.m. at the Village Park. Habitat for Humanity will host an Ice Cream Social from 12-4 p.m., and the Quincy Rotary Chicken Barbecue will take place from 12-2 p.m., also at the Village Park.
More offerings
The annual Arts and Crafts Show is set for Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., along with children's activities from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; outhouse races from 11 a.m. to noon; and a cornhole tournament from noon to 4 p.m. The Quincy Historical Museum will also be open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Little River Railroad will offer a special train ride, with a one-hour layover in Quincy, at 1 p.m.


text:
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich (16 May 1929 – 27 March 2012 / Baltimore, Maryland)
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There are many people who desperately want religion and science to be compatible, having been one of them I see why they want this.
However wanting something to be true doesn't make it true.
Usually people try to make this work by explaining away (or trying to) where religion and science contradict eacch other (eg. by saying genesis allows for evolution).
I've happened to entertain the idea that this goes deeper; that religion and science are fundementally opposed.
The basis of each goes against what the other stands for, i.e. science is based on free inquiry and needs to be questioned in order to function properly where religion requires faith and does not do well when questioned.
What do the rest of you think?
Views: 584
Four words say it all:
Faith Is No Reason.
This is the basic equation: irrationality versus rationality, fact as opposed to myth, substance against wishful thinking. To have faith is to believe because someone else said so, no questioning, no examination, nothing. To know is to observe, apprehend, examine, analyze, deduce, and most of all to question. This is anathema to faith, where you believe what you are told, regardless of how absurd the belief may be, where, indeed, their holy books elevate belief above knowledge for reasons as ridiculous as the concept is.
Science and religion are utterly at loggerheads, from where I sit. You'd have an easier time getting oil and water to mix.
Technology and religion can work together. Science and religion can't.
The only reading of Genesis that allows for evolution, is one where Genesis is considered metaphor. Religion claims knowledge from supernatural sources. Science does not allow supernatural input. Science seeks knowledge. Religion opposes knowledge. Science is physical. Religion is metaphysical.
You are right, the basis of each goes against what the other stands for. A scientist who is religious is compartmentalizing. Any religionist who claims to follow science, is also compartmentalizing.
Loren said - Science and religion are utterly at loggerheads, from where I sit. You'd have an easier time getting oil and water to mix. It might work if there was an emulsifier, like that used in salad dressings Problem here, is that there is no emulsifier that I've ever been made aware of.
Stephen J. Gould tried, and in my humble opinion failed, when he tried to argue that science and religion represented Non-Overlapping Magisteria. In 1997, Gould stated
Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.
Here's the problem with Gould's argument, as I perceive it. He is correct in that the concept of a "soul," like that of a pink unicorn, flying spaghetti monster, leprechaun, or other man made mythological construct, cannot be proven or disproven. But, since there is no basis for these beliefs in the real and natural world, and understanding that they are man made mythologies, why do we give them the slightest credence? But the real problem is when he says it does not impact his domain - science. It certainly does, and in a very large way. Darwin disproved the literal reading of Genesis. Science has disproven that lightening is a tool of Thor. Plate tectonics has disproven the goddess Pele of Mt. Kilauea, and the Roman god Vulcan of Mt. Etna. Yet, when science disproves these ideas, the "magisteria" of religion and faith scream at the top of their lungs that they are being "attacked." Would anyone seriously consider abandoning forensic pathology for a return to the days of church sanctioned medical theory of cruentation?
Of course religion complains of being attacked. They're being called on their bullshit, and when told to put up or shut up, they have nothing of substance to offer, yet cannot stop blabbing. Their god or their savior or their prophet told them to spread the word, so spread it they must. Their belief has reached the point of delusion, where what they believe is true, MUST be true, and anything or anyone who says otherwise indulges in heresy, regardless of proof.
We're dealing with the longest standing lie in the history of mankind, here. It has existed for millennia and has the weight of that time in its social inertia. If it could exist without spreading, without indulging in proselytism, without insisting on its own misguided dominance, it might be tolerable. All the evidence and history says it CANNOT. We're living in the time of the showdown between rationality and irrationality right now, and the outcome of that showdown will determine humankind's direction for uncounted years to come.
Pardon me if I sound melodramatic, but that's how I see it.
Sam Harris made the observation, and correctly I think, that not all religions are equal. Judaism, the Amish, Mennonites, to name a few, do not proselytize. Unlike the counterparts of Christianity, Islam and Mormonism. While we agree that the latter are intolerable, and a threat to mankind, are the former "tolerable?"
And, my question is based upon this. Judaism, for instance, doesn't come knocking at my door, Jains don't threaten my life if I poke fun at them, and the Amish don't openly threaten my freedom of conscience, or association. However, they do keep their children locked in ignorance and superstition (I'm referring to the Hasidic variants of Judaism, though Orthodox would also fit in). On the one hand, they don't bother or threaten me. On the other hand, they represent a form of xenophobia of the outside world which, by their very nature, precludes their adherents from fully experiencing the freedom and participation in the world that is a basic right of every human.
As regards children, that may be the next argument in this business. Would teaching an unproven or questionable doctrine to a child, insisting on that doctrine and indeed, indoctrinating a child before he or she has the means to evaluate it for him or herself, amount to a violation of that child's civil rights? In a society where religion is an option and not a given, such a train of thought should at least be considered. Religions will protest, of course, since childhood indoctrination in religion is one of the primary means they employ to survive and expand, yet the untoward impact of religion on unsophisticated youth is well documented.
How the rights of children might be codified regarding early instruction would be a neat knot for someone schooled in the law to unravel. About all I can do here is acknowledge the existence of the knot and the need for it to be examined.
You've certainly identified the Gordian Knot. Our society guarantees freedom of association which, when applied to these cults, means the freedom to be a xenophobe. Add to this, what in Illinois law is recognized as the "superior rights doctrine." What this doctrine states is that absent abuse, neglect, dependency, or a parent's inability or unwillingness to carry out normal day to day decisions concerning a child's welfare (food, clothing, shelter, and "basic" education), a parent has superior rights to direct and control their children over anyone else on the planet. And, of course, this applies to religious inculcation. There are limits, but the limits are the same as those placed on adults practicing their preferred form of superstition. No actual human sacrifice (symbolic cannibalism in the form of communion, however, is OK), no child participation in adult naked sex based fertility rituals, and... well, you get the idea. Short of these extremes, I don't really see the law changing this, so much as I see social pressure being the primary catalyst.
" ... this doctrine states is that absent abuse, neglect, dependency, or a parent's inability or unwillingness to carry out normal day to day decisions concerning a child's welfare (food, clothing, shelter, and "basic" education), a parent has superior rights to direct and control their children over anyone else on the planet." When a child's right to learn facts not approved by the parent's belief system, such as evolution, ancient earth, and finding truth through science, this limits the child's occupational options to a huge degree. Indeed, a strictly limited education can preclude acceptance into a legitimate university program. Such a case would be an aggressive stance for a lawyer to take, but I think there is some argument here.
A showdown would be nice, but religion is so evasive.
It is a privilege to live in a time where religion has lost its grip on the world and there is a contest rather than reason being punishable by death.
It depends on what one means by religion. Einstein was religious in a way, and he had passionate convictions about how physics would work, that amounted to a kind of faith. I read that when developing his theories, he would choose the most beautiful way, considering that to be the right way.
And scientists can be kind of culturally religious, enjoying the traditions of their religion.
Some liberal Christians seem to be essentially atheists, without supernatural beliefs, although they would passionately deny being atheists.
By religion I mean something that requires belief in the supernatural and (most relevant to this disscussion) revealed knowledge.
As for people who do not believe but practice religion, (speaking under correction) they often "believe in belief" and do not have as much reason to oppose or reject science.
But, what is "supernatural"? A cellphone would be a supernatural object to someone who was from a pre-technological society. We have faith that it isn't supernatural. Most of us don't know much about what exactly a cellphone is doing, but we trust that it comes from people who made it by reasoning and experimenting.
Phenomena can be transferred from supernatural to natural by knowledge and exploration and reasoning.
I think what you are talking about is whether one believes knowledge that comes from inner experience as a valid way of knowing the outside world.
People can find things out about themselves by prayer or meditation or visions. They can find out about their buried feelings, what they really want in life, find compassion and love for others. And people can find things out about human nature, this way.
But when people take their inner experiences as a valid way of knowing the universe, it's a mistake. Doing that doesn't account for one's subjectivity, ignores the possibility of illusion.
Mistakes can be fruitful, for scientists too. Einstein DID have a faith that the universe worked a certain way, which didn't come from reason or experiment. It was just his conviction. It may have been misleading, for example he Believed that "God doesn't play dice with the universe" and it led to him rejecting quantum mechanics and being somewhat marginalized as a physicist later in his life. But his faith may also have helped him in developing his relativity theories.
Many scientists passionately believe in some theory, even when evidence piles up against it. It's all the different scientists conflicting and discussing that gives science a long-term ability to figure out the truth, not any individual scientist being super-rational.
As for whether religion necessarily conflicts with science, that depends on the religion. I could make up a religion that doesn't conflict with science. Perhaps our universe was designed by aliens long ago. Perhaps our whole universe is a ball rolling on a floor in some higher universe, with a baby alien giggling at it. You could believe that without cognitive dissonance.
I found out about my subjectivity when my experience of the world changed a lot, because I quit eating gluten and a lot of other foods I had immune reactions to. And many years before that, many things changed because of meditation. I had, and I still have sometimes, spiritual experiences, a sense of the presence of God, different sometimes than others. But I never took these experiences as evidence of the nature of the universe, objective reality. It really is going too far, to do that, and it's going too far to take someone else's spiritual experiences as showing something about objective reality.
So because my subjectivity changed, I got a sense that I was subjective. This isn't something people naturally start out with, it's natural to take your subjective experience as having a kind of authority. But science somewhat counteracts that illusion.
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The last hours of our Mega Clearance Event are happening now! Tops, pants, medical devices, gifts…it's all on sale! We have hundreds of items for $10 or less. And that's not it–you can also save up to 10% off your entire clearance purchase if you spend $50 or more. With these prices, you can surely give yourself or someone else a nice treat! Here are some quick links to browse the merchandise:
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More than 300,000 home and small-office (SOHO) routers have been compromised by hackers and are being used to distribute massive quantities of spam and malware.
Florida-based security firm Team Cymru sounded that alarm Monday in a research report into the router takeovers, which it's been tracking since January. Hacked routers have been found everywhere from the United States to Russia, although the largest quantity were traced to Vietnam, India, Turkey, Thailand, and Columbia.
Team Cymru has shared its findings with multiple law enforcement agencies, and tried to contact all affected manufacturers, which it said include D-Link, Micronet, Tenda, and TP-Link, among others.
The attackers appear to have gained access to the routers by exploiting known flaws in the devices to gain administrative access and change their DNS settings. (Unlike other hacks, whether or not the users kept the routers' default passwords does not seem related to this attack.) For example, some exploited devices were vulnerable to a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack, which allowed attackers to inject malicious JavaScript and alter the routers' DNS settings. Others were running firmware with a known flaw that "allows attackers to download the saved configuration file, and thus the administrative credentials, from an unauthenticated URL in the web interface," according to Team Cymru.
[Want to learn more about router vulnerabilities? See D-Link Router Vulnerable To Authentication Bypass.]
Who's behind the 300,000-router takeover campaign? The compromised devices are connecting to two servers -- located at 22.214.171.124 and 184.108.40.206 -- which handle all external DNS requests. Team Cymru spokesman Steve Santorelli told PC Pro that both of those IP addresses are registered to a supposedly London-based company called 3NT Solutions.
Last month, security analyst Conrad Longmore published a blog post reporting that those IP addresses assigned to 3NT Solutions were involved in "something evil." In particular, the company's IP addresses appeared to be associated with a spam campaign distributing "FlashUpdate.apk" Android malware, which as of Tuesday was only being detected by about half of all antivirus scanners on the market. If the malware is executed on a vulnerable Android device, it then downloads a second piece of malware named "Security-Update.apk," which is a Trojan proxy.
About 10 days ago, Longmore traced 3NT's mailing address to a London branch of Mail Boxes Etc., and the address listed in its WHOIS entry to a London-based mail-forwarding service. But based on a lookup of the IP ranges associated with the business, he said it connects with Inferno.name, which has had a reputation for hosting "scammy sites" since 2011. "I had a look into some of 3NT's IP ranges and you can tell instantly from these samples that they are pretty low-grade spammy sites," he said. "What you can't tell from that list are the command and control servers that they run, and of course they also host malware."
Longmore said that while 3NT appears to be based in Serbia, it's also operating sites in Russia and the Ukraine. He noted that "Ukrainian hosts often serve as black-hat hosts for Russian criminals" and that "Serbia and Russia also have close ties."
Compromising businesses' routers would allow attackers to channel all external traffic through their own DNS servers and launch man-in-the-middle attacks. Accordingly, one possible motive for the 3NT attack campaign could be to intercept consumers' banking credentials, as happened in a recent router-exploitation campaign that targeted users of five Polish banks, including mBank.
But in this case, the quantity of exploited routers suggests that attackers have a different goal. "The scale of this attack suggests a more traditional criminal intent, such as search result redirection, replacing advertisements, or installing drive-by downloads; all activities that need to be done on a large scale for profitability," according to Team Cymru. "The more manually intensive bank account transfers seen in Poland would be difficult to conduct against such a large and geographically disparate victim group."
The twist with the 300,000-plus compromised routers is that they could have been patched, and related exploits thus blocked. "Our research into this campaign did not uncover new, unknown vulnerabilities. Indeed, some of the techniques and vulnerabilities we observed have been public for well over a year," according to Team Cymru.
As that suggests, the number of routers that run unpatched firmware with known, exploitable vulnerabilities, remains rife. Researchers at security firm Tripwire, for example, recently studied the 50 most popular routers for sale on Amazon.com, and found that 74% of them contained vulnerabilities thatMathew Schwartz served as the InformationWeek information security reporter from 2010 until mid-2014. View Full Bio


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The Internal Revenue Service announced the start date for filing taxes will be Jan. 30, more than a week later than normal.
The Internal Revenue Service announced the start date for filing taxes will be Jan. 30, more than a week later than normal.
IRS officials explained that this is due to the American Tax Relief Act, passed by Congress on Jan. 2. This repealed tax hikes, which went into effect Jan 1, and renewed several tax credits.
Because of the changes, the IRS needed more time to ready their software and systems to begin accepting electronic returns.
While there will be a minor delay, Tom Swearingen, a Shawnee accountant, explained that it likely won't have a large affect on the average filer.
"They won't see a lot of changes," he said.
While it is possible that people won't see returns as quickly this way, Swearingen doesn't believe that will be a problem either, he said.
However, he fully expects the IRS to busy on Jan. 30.
"When that day comes, there's going to be a lot of returns filed," Swearingen said.
This is likely because many accountants and other tax filing services, including Swearingen, will have the software ready and will be able to do everything "except push that button," to send the IRS the information, he said.
From this it is possible the IRS could get backed up, however Swearingen doesn't expect that to be the case, because many people don't file until later during tax season anyway, he said.
While the average taxpayer will see only a slight delay, businesses are likely to see a larger delay. Swearingen forecasted businesses won't likely be able to file until late February, or even March.
He explained that this is because the IRS has to reprint all of their forms due to changes brought on by the Jan. 2 tax relief act. Because no action was taken, the IRS printed all their forms based on the Bush-era tax cuts expiring and lesser tax credits.
"We knew something was going to happen, but we didn't know what," Swearingen said.
When the law was passed, the IRS had to reprint the bills to reflect it, he said.
While many criticize the law, Swearingen said one benefit for taxpayers is that it made the tax cuts permanent.
"That's one good thing – we know where we stand on tax rates," he said.
The law will likely make things easier for him next year as well, Swearingen said.
"The biggest thing that affected the majority of us [accountants] was not being able to advise our clients at the end of the year," due to not knowing what would happen with the Bush-era tax cuts, he added.
With these permanent tax cuts in place, he will know what future tax rates will be and will be able to advise his clients accordingly, he said.


text: Single guitar. theme in three parts and a coda (quiet, exciting, passionate and calm again). This music will be good for those projects that require the presence of high-quality sound acoustic guitar. Such as advertising software for guitarists, manufacturing guitars, etc. Or for those projects where you need to unite different moods.


text:
BOULDER, Colo.—The University of Colorado is weighing a contract with a company that allows universities to offer free online courses that are available to hundreds of thousands of students worldwide.
CU spokesman Ken McConnellogue tells The Daily Camera ( http://bit.ly/SSem40) the university will decide sometime in February whether to sign a contract with Coursera, which offers massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The classes would be produced by professors at the Boulder campus.
McConnellogue says he can't release details because the university is still negotiating with the company.
Coursera says its site has reached more than 2 million students across the globe, though some sign up and don't completely follow through with the courses.
The American Council on Education announced earlier this month that it will evaluate MOOCs for possible college credit.
Information from: Daily Camera, http://www.dailycamera.com/


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A Cochrane Review of data relating to about 45,000 patients involved in approximately 350 individual studies has provided an evaluation of the effect you can expect to get if you take commonly used painkillers at specific doses. The review also identifies pain killers for which there is only poor or no reliable evidence. This review will help doctors and patients to make evidence informed decisions of which pain killers to use, and is published in the latest edition of The Cochrane Library.
Acute pain occurs when tissue is damaged either by an injury or as a result of surgery. The pain felt after surgery happens because tissues become inflamed, and giving pain killers is a critical component of good patient care. Managing pain well helps keep a patient as comfortable as possible and aids their recovery.
Working at the Oxford Pain Research Unit at Oxford University, Dr Andrew Moore and colleagues analyzed the findings of 35 Cochrane Reviews of randomized trials testing how well different pain killers work when used against postoperative pain.
Our aim was to bring all this information together, and to report the results for those drugs with reliable evidence about how well they work or any harm they may do in single oral doses, says Moore.
A key finding was that no drug produced high levels of pain relief in all patients. If the first pain killer a person tries doesnt seem to be working, then a doctor should look to find an alternative reliable drug and see if it is more effective in that individual patient. There are plenty of options that have a solid evidence base, says Moore.
The range of results varies considerably between different pain killers. In some cases such as taking 120mg etoricoxib, or the combination of 500mg paracetamol plus 200mg ibuprofen, over 70% of participants with moderate or severe acute pain who took a single-dose achieved good pain relief. With other drugs, such as 1000mg aspirin and 600mg paracetamol taken on their own, only 35% benefitted. The worst was codeine, with only 14% getting significant pain relief. The period over which pain was relieved also varied, from about two hours to about 20 hours.
Pain relief doesnt have to be a mystery. There is a body of reliable evidence about how well 46 different drug/dose combinations work against acute pain, but the review also shows there are many examples of drugs for which there is insufficient evidence, and the drugs in question should probably not be used to treat acute pain, says Moore.
Full citation:Moore RA, Derry S, McQuay HJ, Wiffen PJ. Single dose oral analgesics for acute postoperative pain in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2010 , Issue 9 . Art. No.: CD008659. DOI:10.1002/14651858.CD008659


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10 Ways To Eat Vegetables For Dessert
Getting our recommended servings of fruits and vegetables every day can sometimes be a tough challenge. But eating enough vegetables doesn't mean you only have to stick to salads and savory dishes — veggies are highly adaptable and have no problem finding a delicious home in the dessert course. Here are 10 tasty recipes where veggies have made their way into bread pudding, cupcakes, and even crème brûlée!
10 Ways To Eat Vegetables For Dessert
- Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
- Double Chocolate Zucchini Bread
- Creamy Avocado Lassi
- Sweet Potato Bread Pudding with Pecan Streusel & Whiskey Sauce
- Pumpkin (or Sweet Potato) Crumb Cakes
- Apple Zucchini Muffins
- Tomato Soup Cupcakes
- Korean Pumpkin Porridge with Rice Dumplings (Hobakjuk)
- No-Bake Pumpkin Crème Brûlée
- Olive Oil and Whiskey Carrot Cake
Which is your favorite?
Published: Aug 26, 2014


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Panthers Lock Up QB Delhomme Until 2014 Season
As reported by nfl.com, the Carolina Panthers have signed Jake Delhomme to a 5 year extension worth $42.5 million with $20 million guaranteed.
The Carolina Panthers have signed Jake Delhomme to a five-year extension that keeps the quarterback under contract through the 2014 season.
While details weren't immediately available Thursday, NFL.com's Steve Wyche reports the deal to be worth $42.5 million, with $20 million guaranteed. The move also clears needed salary-cap space for the Panthers.
The extension comes just over three months after Delhomme had the worst game of his 11-year NFL career, throwing five interceptions and losing a fumble in the Panthers' 33-13 loss to the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC divisional playoffs. But Panthers coach John Fox and general manager Marty Hurney had expressed strong support for Delhomme, who has been the team's starter since 2002.
The move also gives Carolina some breathing room under the salary cap, which is weighed down by defensive end Julius Peppers' franchise-tag tender worth $16.7 million over one year.


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Newton's laws of motion(redirected from Strong form of Newton's Third Law)
Also found in: Dictionary, Encyclopedia.
Newton's laws of motionthree laws that relate the forces and motions of bodies or objects (from the viewpoint of a fixed observer), first proposed by Isaac Newton. (1) An object will remain at rest or continue with constant velocity unless acted on by an unbalanced force. (2) The rate of change of momentum (or acceleration for a body/object of constant mass) is proportional to, and in the same direction as, the force applied to it (force = mass ×1 acceleration). (3) When two objects are in contact, the force applied by one object on the other is equal and opposite to that of the second object on the first (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction).
lawprinciple or rule
Davis' law soft tissues' tendency to shorten and contract unless subject to frequent stretching
Hilton's law a joint and its motive muscles (+ insertions) are all supplied by the same nerve
Hook's law tissue strain (i.e. change in length) is directly proportional to applied compressive or stretching stress, so long as tissue elasticity (recoil ability) is not exceeded
inverse-square law radiation intensity is inversely proportional to square of distance from radiation source (rad = κ1/cm2)
law of excitation muscle tissue contracts in direct proportion to stimulating current strength
Newton's first law; law of inertia an object at rest will not move until acted upon by a force; an object in motion will remain in motion at constant velocity until acted on by a net force
Newton's second law; law of acceleration acceleration is directly proportional to applied force and indirectly proportional to object mass (i.e. force = mass × acceleration)
Newton's third law; law of reciprocal actions to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; i.e. a body is maintained at rest by equal and opposing forces
Pascal's law a fluid at rest transmits pressure equally in every direction
Poiseuille's law vascular blood flow is inversely proportional to fourth power of vessel radius (i.e. the narrower the vessel, the greater the resistance to flow)
Starling's law the greater the stretch imposed on a circular muscle (e.g. muscle layer of an artery), the greater its reciprocal recoil and contraction
Wolff's law bone function changes cause bone structure modification (see bone modelling)