Letters to the Editor
firefly82
Published Letters: 286 Editor's Choice: 30
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Just wondering
[Read the article: ABC's of gender]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]about a possible bias in the execution of the study: since this was conducted by BYU, and given that the majority of the population of the Provo area, as well as Utah, are culturally conservative Mormons or Republicans, the toddlers involved in this study are far more likely to have been brought up in homes where stereotypical/conservative gender roles are more fully modeled by their parents than kids in more demographically liberal areas.
Not to minimize the substantial role of biology in gender, only to point out that the exceptional nature of this pool of kids' political environment might have something to do with exacerbating the effects of toddlers' normal observatory behaviors.
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Thanks again, Ann
[Read the article: The body electric]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Of course she wants to have it all ways; she's a parent and she wants things to clear up for her child as easily as possible, but there are a lot of painful ambiguities, and harrowing biological realities involved that no one really understands.
Unlike a lot of readers are, I'm not finding her dishonest by excluding drug names in this article, or ECT in the "Psych Meds" article. She's writing as a memoirist and a journalist and her son's mother. All involved have been both betrayed and helped greatly by the medical community. The information she's gleaned from her son's experiences is potentially invaluable to others, and I think she's detailing the story as fully as she feels she ethically can on that account, while omitting specific info so as not to seem to be endorsing certain treatments, which, while positive in her son's experience, may be equally harmful in others'. I've been continually perplexed by Salon readers' tendency to take a single aspect of any story wildly out of the context of the story to villify or evangelize. She's provided a great deal of information to people who should be following up on it with their own health care professionals, not looking to popular writers to lay the path out for them.
Ann, thanks again for telling this important story. I'm sure you have a lot of people praying for your son's recovery.
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More defense of Bauer
[Read the article: The body electric]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm a little mystified at this point at the number of people still wondering why Ann left out certain information in the "Psych Meds" article. She explains very clearly in the first paragraph of this article. She was writing specifically about her son's experience with mis-diagnosis and inappropriate/ignorant/possibly unethical use of medication. As for providing more detailed information about the treatment that finally helped him, she already did that before writing this article--if you'll find her own letter, one of the last in the letters section of "Psych Meds", she provides a link to her personal website with just that information. So on the count of disclosure of the actual treatments, I think she'd more than fulfilled her responsibilities even before writing this.
As for the charge of exploiting her son--as far as I can tell from all her writing, she's doing her best to give him (19 years old, a legal adult) as full and communicative and autonomous a life as is possible within the functioning of his condition. So I'm trusting her just a little bit to have her son's knowledge of and consent to write about his situation in whatever form he's capable of giving.
And I'm so glad she is, for individual stories from people brave enough to tell them are crucial to begin to illuminate and demystify these phenomena for the rest of us. Her past two stories are perfect examples of the personal being political.
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And thanks, James Elliot
[Read the article: The body electric]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"While it is incumbent, of course, to note that the plural of anecdote is not data, it would seem to be a worthy line of inquiry for future research."
Such a sublime statement.
I'm always stunned, though I suppose I shouldn't be anymore, how hard this is to understand for most people. So much of the scientifically illerate population has no sense of evidence beyond anecdote. And a surprising number of scientists discount and disparage any anecdotal evidence that doens't fit their own hypotheses, rather than acknowledge that while anecdotes are weak and incomplete evidence, they should point us toward further experimentation and questioning.
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Harm
[Read the article: Pump it]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"In the case of milk expression, there is no harm, the employer is just failing to benefit the offspring of an employee, to whom they have no obligation."
Um, actually, there is. Failure to express milk on a regular basis will lead to the milk supply drying up, and in the meantime, cause pain and leakage for the mother. So even if a child is being bottle-fed while the mother is at work, if she's not able to pump, the milk supply is being compromised.
I would never make the judgement that people who formula-feed exclusively are doing explicit harm to their child, as there are certainly situations in which a mother just can't breastfeed and formula may be the next-best option. But for a parent who wants and is able to breastfeed, yes, restriction of that is a preventable harm to both mother and child, given the known health and immune system effects of breast milk.