Health – Page 10 – Prog Gold

A Big Fat Profitable Meme

Published on May 31, 2007

It’s serendipitous that this admittedly ‘well duh’ set of research results should pop up this week while the issue of singers’ weight is a big online topic: :

Ubiquitous pop videos may harm girls’ self-image

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday May 31, 2007
The Guardian

Music videos are driving a wave of dissatisfaction among adolescent girls by promoting ultra-thin role models as the epitome of beauty, psychologists warn today.

Watching pop videos featuring thin, scantily clad women for just 10 minutes was enough to drive down girls’ satisfaction with their body shape, according to a study which appears in the journal Body Image.

Researchers fear the damage inflicted on the self-image of girls as they prepare to leave schools and sixth form colleges is widespread, given the near ubiquity of music videos on television and on big screens in clothes shops, cafes and bars.

Viewing figures for MTV have swelled to 342m worldwide, according the channel, and a survey in 1998 found that 12- to 19-year-olds were the most frequent viewers, watching on average for 6.4 hours a week.

But Helga Dittmar, a psychologist at Sussex University and leader of the latest study, said adolescents were likely to spend far more time watching music videos than the survey suggested. “Public places such as stores, bars and clubs increasingly display music videos on large TV screens, making them an inescapable, almost omnipresent form of media,” she said.

More….

Indeed they are omnipresent, even here in Amsterdam, which does at least keep a lid on the more blatant forms of public advertising; though we are forrced to watch ads on the trams, they’re not really of the music video type; more for sore arse ointment or real- estate agents.

But there are few fashion chainstores you can go into without an in your face dose of Christina, Pussycat Dolls or some identikit skeleton with inflated boobs, fake cheekbones, extensions and a spray-on tan gyrating over some German techno-trance monotony and there’s about to be an explosion of it all over, now that the Netherlands premier department store De Bijenkorf is getting in on the act.

“Introducing in-store television is a move towards the store of the future. It can be compared to the Internet 15 years ago, when not many people were exploiting it for commercial use. One of the really attractive features is the ability to develop our own content and programming.

“This means that we can produce content that is very specific to our needs and can be immediately tailored to reflect exactly our central and local marketing priorities.

“In fact, the ability to tailor content to reflect in-store initiatives, trends and promotions is central to the screens’ success.”

If you’re a teenager and want to keep up with your peers you can’t avoid it. I thought it was bad when I was young but the pressure teenagers are under now is horrendous, schoolgirls saving up from Saturday jobs for liposuction and so on.

Despite stating the bleeding obvious it’s still quite a timely report, considering the current furore about the perfectly normal, if tall (but then anyone is tall to me, being barely over five foot in a land of dairy-fed giants) winner of the latest US Pop Idol.

Some publicity-hungry suburban country club nonentity and one-member manufactured ‘pressure group’ that Fox picked up somewhere called Meme Roth called her ‘obese’. Obese. Really. Give me a break and get back to your obsessive jazzercise and mainlining aragula salad and ogling poolboys, you silly, silly woman. And ‘Meme’? What were her parents thinking? Let’s face it, when your name constantly reiterates your existence -‘me,me,me,me,me..’ – you’re bound to turn out a solipsistic narcissist.

But enjoyable cattiness aside, Ms Roth’s just another tool being used to create a sensation and push up Fox’s profile.

It’s Fox pushing this meme and Meme too. Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, it’s a company that has much invested in media worldwide, not just the US. It promotes music videos, it makes money from them. Of course they want to influence them. To think otheriwse is to mistake the purpose of a corporation, which is to make money.

To us it’s about more than mere vanity and fashion; it’s about whether we can look in the mirror and loathe or accept ourselves for what we are.

To them it’s just about making a market. Handily it also gives a nice lot of traffic to other mass media outlets too, who profess outrage but who are still happily counting the hits. Their ad revenue goes up as well and everyone’s happy, excpet the girls and women who are left wondering why it is they don’t look ‘normal’.

Weight is a hot-button issue for almost all westernised women and there’s lots of ways to make money from that. Again we’ve fallen into the corporate trap and they’ve created a controversy to frame the discussion andmake money out of it. They got us going and coming. No wonder we hate ourselves.

About that organ donor show

Published on May 29, 2007

The thing to remember is that this is meant as a publicity stunt to draw attention to the precarious donor situation in the Netherlands, where ever since the government started its big publicity campaign the amount of donors has only dropped. It’s not really real; no matter who will be the winner in this show, it’s going to be the doctors who decide who this kidney goes to, based purely on medical grounds. I doubt whether you even can donate your organs for use by specific persons.

As a publicity stunt this show has already served its purpose, as organ donation is back on the political agenda again. It’s clear the current system isn’t working. That’s because it’s an opt-in, rather than an opt-out system and worse a system where the deceased donor’s family can override their wishes even if they’ve registered themselves as donor.

The first step to change this is to switch to an opt-out system where the family cannot override the individual’s decision and you have to specifically state you do not wish to be a donor rather than the other way around.

Dutch Transplant News

Published on May 29, 2007

Should’ve known it would be the BNN channel though…

As someone who’s going to need a new kidney in the nearish future you can imagine how this story makes me feel.

Terminally ill woman to give away her organs on Dutch TV
dpa German Press Agency
Published: Saturday May 26, 2007

Amsterdam– Dutch TV on Friday is due to air a show in which a terminally ill woman choses one out of three kidney patients to receive her organs after she dies, reports said Saturday. The Dutch public can advice 37-year-old Lisa in making her decision by sending her text messages via mobile phone.

Earlier on Saturday, legislator Joop Atsma of the Christian Democrats (CDA) called the Big Donor Show, as the TV programme is called, “morally wrong and reprehensible.”

Atsma said he would question the Minister of Health Ab Klink (CDA) and Media Minister Ronald Plasterk of the Labour party (PvdA) about the issue in parliament next week.

The TV show is a production of Endemol Entertainment and due to be
aired by broadcasting company BNN.

BNN, which primarily targets teenagers and young adults, is known for its controversial and provocative shows, having aired highly explicit programmes on sex and drugs in the past.

The Dutch public has grown accustomed to the type of provocative shows that BNN prefers to air, and is usually indifferent when the company launches a new controversial programme.

The Big Donor Show however does not go unnoticed.

Atsma said: “I want to talk to BNN about this issue. BNN is solving one problem, but creates two others. Did BNN even consider how the two people will feel who will be rejected as donor recipients?”

BNN president Laurens Drillich said on Saturday the broadcast would go through as planned. “Participants have a 33-per-cent chance to get a kidney. That is substantially higher than people on the waiting list. One would expect the shortage of donor organs to diminish, but the contrary is true.”

Originally, BNN was founded by the late Bart de Graaf, a kidney patient since early childhood. De Graaf never received a donor kidney and died five years ago. BNN said the show wanted to demonstrate that five years after De Graaf’s death, there was still an alarming shortage of donor organs in the Netherlands.

The number of Dutch nationals registering as organ donors has been decreasing in recent years, causing the government to launch a new campaign urging the public to register.

Paul Beerkens, director of the Dutch Kidney Foundation, which collects money for research on kidney diseases, said he was very pleased BNN was paying attention to the donor shortage problem.

“But I do not support their methods,” Beerkens said, adding: “Besides, they do not offer a structural solution. For structural solutions, one must implement one of the donor masterplans our foundation developed.”

© 2006 – dpa German Press Agency

And yet I still have a better chance of getting a kidney here in NL than at home in the UK, because the UK hasn’t signed up to the EU transplant pool.

To those reading this who are disgusted by it – go and sign a donor card. Then you can be as disgusted as you like.

UPDATE:

Not often you get two bits of Amsterdam kidney news in one day – the nephrology department that I attend at Vrij Universiteit Medisch Centrum burned down on Saturday:

Amsterdam – Police in Amsterdam said Saturday they were still investigating the cause of a fire which heavily damaged one of the city’s largest hospitals but caused no injuries.

The VUMC hospital in Amsterdam said Saturday it will not admit any new patients following a fire on its second floor.

The first aid and dialysis departments remain closed. The measures were put in place after a fire broke out in the hospital just before 0400 GMT Saturday morning, resulting in heavy damage.

Not a good week for us Amsterdam kidney patients, really.

Quelling Qlink Quackery

Published on May 26, 20072 Comments

I don’t why it is that Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science pieces for the Guardian don’t get more front-page promotion. His current piece takes on a quack peddling anti-radiation jewellery in the form of the Q-link pendant, here pictured in in gold at 800 dollars:

As so many of us have I’ve been afflicted many times by perfectly well-meaning but also totally irrational and deluded new-agers who insist on giving me ‘medical ‘ advice. They are people that I’d really, really like to shake some bloody sense into. The trouble is that often it’s like talking to a brick wall, and before you know it you’re on the point of screaming ‘Oh for fucks sake!” which tends to cast a pall over a lunch with your boss or a family funeral.

So I like the way Goldacre looks at the actual evidence and calmly demolishes the mad claims of whatever the latest touchy-feely, crystal-powered craze is amongst the elves and rainbows types. It gives us rational people actual facts to hold on to when the conversation takes off into auras and spirit journeys.

Quackery is one of my hotbutton issues and to see otherwise educated, sane people off with the fairies, and not only that but proselytising, well you can tell, It Pisses Me Off.

I find it hard to engage new-agers politely; I get to boiling point in short order when confronted with mulish irrationality and so instead of calmly and politely explaining why they’re wrong I have to bite my tongue and walk away for fear of tipping the contents of my glass over their head. Don’t ever, ever mention homeopathy to me. It won’t be pretty.

So. This time Goldacre debunks the QLink pendant, and what a ripoff it is:

The QLink is a device sold to protect you from those terrifying invisible electromagnetic rays, and cure many ills. “It needs no batteries as it is ‘powered’ by the wearer – the microchip is activated by a copper induction coil which picks up sufficient micro currents from your heart to power the pendant.” Says Holford’s catalogue. According to the manufacturer’s sales banter, it corrects your energy frequencies. Or something.

The guy selling these has a whole self-created ‘scientific’ hinterland on his modelled-on-big-pharma shiny website (warning, Flash intro). Some of the pendants, as jewellery, are actually quite pleasing but the claims made for them are entirely laughable :

Last summer I obtained one of these devices (from somewhere cheaper than Holford’s shop) and took it to Camp Dorkbot, an annual festival for dorks held – in a joke taken too far – at a scout camp outside Dorking. Here in the sunshine, some of the nation’s cheekiest electronics geeks examined the QLink. We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any “frequencies” emitted, with no joy. And then we did what any proper dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open.

Camp Dorkbot? In Dorking? Really? The spirit of English amateurism is not yet dead , despite the antiterrorism regimes’ best efforts.

But I digress. As I said, the Qlink pendant, pretty as it is, is a piece of shit: it couldn’t possibly do what it claims.

No microchip. A coil connected to nothing. And a zero-ohm resistor, which costs half a penny, and is connected to nothing. I contacted qlinkworld.co.uk/2 to discuss my findings. They kindly contacted the inventor, who informed me they have always been clear the QLink does not use electronics components “in a conventional electronic way”. And apparently the energy pattern reprogramming work is done by some finely powdered crystal embedded in the resin. Oh, hang on, I get it: it’s a new age crystal pendant.

As the Qlink for pets above, priced $59.95, shows, there’ll always be money to be made from public credulity. But it becomes truly dangerous when fakery starts to replace real medicine. People die because of believing in hucksters.

Ultimately medical treatment is up to the individual’s choice, but it’s good to see a newspaper doing some actual fact-based science reporting and helping that choce to be an informed one.

Now about the political reporting…

In. Out. Shake It All About…

Published on December 19, 2006

Britain’s much-vaunted NHS, currently almost bankrupt due to New Labour’s ideologically neoliberal, market-based brand of incompetence, is nevertheless investing what is estimated to eventually be 31 billion pounds in a centralised national patient record database, known as The Spine.

Doctors, other health professionals and patients alike are opposed: given the propensity of UK government IT schemes to be shoddy, leaky, crap and easily compromised, a lot of people, including me, are not at all happy at the the thought of their confidential medical information being available to any petty bureaucrat or nosy parker, as will inevitably happen given the government’s IT project record so far.

At first there was no opt-out, then if you wanted to opt out you had to prove that you would suffer genuine mental distress if your records were put online. How the hell do you prove that before it’s happened?

The government has now given in and allowed patients to opt out without this necessity (how very nice of them) and the movement for everyone to opt out is growing apace. I’ll certainly be opting out – my notes run into several volumes and there’s no way I’m allowing access to my medical records out of my control at all.

The more that do opt out of this shabby piece of government deceit, the less viable the system becomes – if no-one’s in it, what use is it? The opt out movement is civil disobedience at its simplest, a simple ‘no’ against an unwarranted state intrusion. No-one seems to have a problem with medical records per se or that they should be held by your doctor or hospital: no, this is about who owns us, ourselves or the state as embodied by New Labour.

Whether the opt-out becomes massive and national is also a test of how strong the opposition to biometric ID cards is likely to be – if the populace rolls over supinely for this, then they’ll accept those too. Then we’ll really know where we stand.

Go here to find out more and how to opt out yourself.

Read more: UK politics, New Labour, NHS database, Opt-out