Apparently this is real, not a product of Photoshop.  Details here.

My answer: No, sir.  I do not.

But 8 years of you and 1 year of your successor have put me in a place I thought I’d never be: missing Bill Clinton.

Image by Liz Henry via Flickr

For the past 5 years, a 29-year-old car accident victim has lain, immobile and unresponsive, in a Belgium clinic in a so-called “vegetative state.” But now, according to the New York Times, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine reports consistent brain activity in response to yes-no questions.

Using an MRI technique, 54 unconscious patients – either in a vegetative state (no response to commands or questions) or “minimally conscious” (intermittently responsive by moving or blinking) were evaluated for brain activity in response to simple questions.

The researchers found three vegetative patients who responded.  In an earlier 2006 study, they learned that when asked to think of playing tennis, areas of a patient’s motor cortex lit up. A request to think of being at home lit up spatial areas in the brain.

The 29-year-old man was told to associate thoughts about tennis with “yes” and thoughts about being in his house with “no.”

They then asked questions, repeating the procedure numerous times, switching the associations — tennis with yes, then with no — to make sure the patient was in fact making conscious choices. The researchers had previously tested the technique in healthy volunteers.

“We asked basic biographical questions, like ‘Is your father’s name Thomas?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the United States?’ ” said Adrian M. Owen, who co-authored the paper. “We then checked whether the answers were correct. They were.”

Keeping in mind that this is extremely rare, and doesn’t include patients like Terri Schiavo who was oxygen deprived, it’s still unsettling.  Granted, we don’t know the levels of consciousness or perception, but any level in that condition – to be able to hear but not respond in any way perceptible to someone without an MRI handy – has to be a special circle of Hell.

And what if all somatic input, including proprioception (the orientation of your body) were cut off?  You’d be trapped in darkness with no sense of up or down.  That might be worse than pain.  I wouldn’t want to live like that.

Would this technique allow me to make that choice?  And would anyone listen?

“If you ask a patient whether he or she wants to live or die, and the answer is die, would you be convinced that that answer was sufficient?” said Dr. Joseph J. Fins, chief of the medical ethics division at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. “We don’t know that. We know they’re responding, but they may not understand the question. Their answer might be ‘Yes, but’ — and we haven’t given them the opportunity to say the ‘but.’

In an accompanying editorial, we get this from Dr. Allan H. Ropper, a neurologist.

“Physicians and society are not ready for ‘I have brain activation, therefore I am…That would seriously put Descartes before the horse.”

Cute, but not all that helpful.  No, you can’t equate neural activity and identity, but consistently giving accurate answers to questions about whether or not you have a brother named Harry and a father named Tom indicates intact language function and processing, and remembering Tom and Harry signals to me that there’s a person trapped in that shell.

Maybe we’ve just made contact.

“Acted unethically” might be just the tip of the iceberg.  How about homicide?

The doctor who first suggested a link between MMR vaccinations and autism acted unethically, the official medical regulator has found.   BBC News

The MMR is the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.  The UK’s General Medical Council also ruled that Dr. Andrew Wakefield

…acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in doing his research…

Get this: the guy is a gastroenterologist and he was doing spinal taps on kids.  He paid kids and his son’s birthday party £5 each for blood.  His so-called research was published in 1998 in the respected journal The Lancet, but he neglected to mention that he was being paid to advise the lawyers for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR.

The board said he had acted with “callous disregard for the distress and pain the children might suffer”.

The Lancet has admitted that it never should have published Wakefield.  The fallout was serious.  As the false belief spread that the vaccine was causing autism, parents refused to have their children immunized.  The result was, as the graph shows, a dramatic rise in the number of measles cases.

In 2006 it was catastrophic for one 13-year-old boy: he died.

He had other conditions that may have contributed to his death, but he wouldn’t have caught the disease in the first place if he’d been immunized.

I don’t know if he’d gone unprotected because of the autism scare, but if so…Wakefield’s got more to answer for than junk science and a breach of ethics.

It’s called “normal weight obesity.”

I came across the term in an article in yesterday’s WSJ titled, “The Scales Can Lie: Hidden Fat.” It quoted  a Mayo Clinic study, so I went to the source.

After an earlier 2008 paper, in which the researchers categorized people with a normal body mass index (BMI) but high body fat content as having “normal weight obesity,” they now report on over 6000 subjects.

They categorized the normal-BMI subjects with a body-fat percentage in the highest third of the sample (<23% for men and <33.% for women) as having “normal weight obesity” (NWO).  After following them for almost 9 years, they discovered that metabolic syndrome was four times higher in subjects with NWO.  They also showed a higher prevalence of lipid disorders, hypertension (in the men), and cardiovascular disease (in the women).  In fact, the risk for heart-disease related death in women with NWO was 2.2 times higher than the low body fat group.

Conclusion: even though you may have a normal BMI, you’re not out of the woods.  Because if your body-fat is over 23% for men and 33% for women, you’re at risk for all sorts of health problems.

Bummer.

Your own BMI is easily calculated.  Go here and enter your numbers.  Ideally your BMI should run between 18.5 and 24.9. (I just make the cut at 24.0.)

Calculating your percent body fat is not so easy.  It requires special equipment.  If you belong to a gym, you can often have it analyzed there.  I don’t know my fat percentage, but I’m pretty damn sure it’s above 23%.

Double bummer.

Every time you turn around it’s something else.  For a while there it appeared that if you kept your BMI in the healthy range and your waist below 40″ for males and below 36″ for females, you were doing okay.  Now these folks come along and add body-fat percentage to the mix.

Ah, well.  Never did want to live forever anyway.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

Did you ever come across a piece of writing that so perfectly encapsulates who you are and what you think, that you become convinced the writer is either your doppelganger or must have dipped into your skull and pilfered your thoughts?

We’ve been discussing homeopathy and other quackery on my website forum and someone posted this video.  I watched (well, listened and read) in awe: This is me.  I’ve been in this situation and, when no one’s been there to give me a warning look (because they know what’s coming), I’ve responded with an eerily similar skeptical rant (except not so elegantly, or with rhymes, or a British accent).

Spooky.

Check this out whether you’re a skeptic or not

‘Cause it’s s laugh-out-loud funny in spots,

But it’s also true, oh, so true.

Tim Minchin, I tip my calvarium to you.

(Now you all know why I’ve never committed poetry.)