I have no doubt that the Care Pathways have the best of intentions to make an inevitable death as painless and comfortable as possible. But at best this is euthanasia and at worst it is something else. The latest article in the Daily Mail’s “campaign” is more than a little disturbing. If a Care Pathway – by definition – is intended to lead to a dignified and pain-free death then causing additional suffering by being put on the Pathway cannot be right. I am not sure where the ethical line goes but I cannot help feeling that a final painless lethal injection may be preferable to 10 days of starvation and thirst and suffering as feeding and fluids are denied and a baby shrinks to death.
Posts Tagged ‘Daily Mail’
BBC has been just a lobby group for global warming since 2006
November 20, 2011
The less than objective “reporting” on global warming from the BBC was always fairly obvious but the role of Roger Harrabin, one of its senior environmental correspondents in driving that policy is now becoming clear. Christopher Booker has a long article in The Telegraph:
The BBC’s hidden ‘warmist’ agenda is rapidly unravelling
Since 2006, the BBC has relentlessly promoted the global warming orthodoxy as a pressure group in its own right.
The story of the BBC’s bias on global warming gets ever murkier. Last week there was quite a stir over a new report for the BBC Trust which criticised several programmes for having been improperly funded or sponsored by outside bodies. One, for instance, lauded the work of Envirotrade, a Mauritius-based firm cashing in on the global warming scare by selling “carbon offsets”, which it turned out had given the BBC money to make the programme. ……
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The irony is, however, that just as the BBC adopted its new hard line on climate change, in the real world the story was beginning to shift. Ever more searching questions have come to be asked about the supposed “consensus” on man-made warming, and the BBC’s coverage has come to look ever more one-sidedly absurd.
Last week, even Richard Black, another BBC proselytiser for man-made warming, was gloomily having to reveal the conclusion of a new IPCC report: that, over the next few decades, “climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variabilty”. In plain English, that means the great scare story is over. What a shame. But at what a price. …
Meanwhile the Daily Mail carries the following headline:
(Update! The Daily Mail article has been removed but has been reported here).
(Update 2! The Daily Mail article has now been restored)
BBC’s Mr Climate Change accepted £15,000 in grants from university rocked by global warning scandal
Alarmism is lucrative.
Goldacre vs.Sigman and The Biologist: when opinion articles are published in the guise of science
October 5, 2011Dr. Aric Sigman is a biologist with fine credentials (a Fellow of the Society of Biology and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society) but one who has been seduced by the notoriety and adulation that comes from creating headlines with nonsense science (usually in the Daily Mail – popularly known as the Daily Fail).
Children’s TV diet more harmful than thought
How super skinny TV stars are harming our health
Curse of the screen: PCs ‘dull children’s brains and should be banned until nine
Ban TV to protect children’s health, top psychologist tells EU politicians
How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer
Putting baby in nursery ‘could raise its risk of heart disease’
Just the headlines brand Sigman clearly as a publicity seeking “kook”. He has even gone on record – with the Daily Mail of course – to suggest that smacking children can lead to their success!! He may have been a scientist once but has now fallen to become a “celebrity scientist” and appears to be a psychologist suffering from some form of narcissism.
Ben Goldacre is the author of the Bad Science column in Saturday’s Guardian and of the Bad Science website and does not much care for Sigman (good for him).
But now Sigman has taken to publishing his crazy opinions in The Biologist. It is not science and the purpose is publicity and while The Biologist may well like basking in this publicity it degrades its own position as a scientific journal and degrades the work of those who publish real science in the journal.
Goldacre takes Sigman to task in The Guardian:
Last week the Daily Mail and the Today programme took some bait from Aric Sigman, an author of popular sciencey books about the merits of traditional values. “Sending babies and toddlers to daycare could do untold damage to the development of their brains and their future health,” explained the Mail.
These news stories were based on a scientific paper by Sigman in The Biologist. Itmisrepresents individual studies, as Professor Dorothy Bishop demonstrated almost immediately, and it cherry-picks the scientific literature, selectively referencing only the studies that support Sigman’s view. Normally this charge of cherry-picking would take a column of effort to prove, but this time Sigman himself admits it, frankly, in a PDF posted on his own website. Nobody reading The Biologist, or its press release, could possibly have known that the evidence presented was deliberately incomplete. That is, in my opinion, an act of deceit by the journal. ……
Sigman replies to the criticism also in The Guardian by claiming that his article in the Biologist was not science and was clearly an opinion piece. But this does not wash. It was opinion – and nonsense opinion at that – but he clearly wanted it to be taken as science at least by the popular press to satisfy his narcissistic urges. He whines:
….. columnists and bloggers cannot assume a sense of entitlement over science and dictate to learned societies, their journals and journalists what they should publish, stifling healthy debate.
But bloggers and columnists can certainly demand of journals who claim to be scientific, peer-reviewed journals that they refrain from the politicisation and corruption of science and assure the quality of what they publish. The Biologist needs to clean up its act and cannot just pander to a ”celebrity scientist” seeking publicity by passing off nonsense opinion as science. But it is Sigman’s ethics which are in doubt.
