It's Official! Big Brother Has Infiltrated the VA

The Department of Veterans Affairs has admitted to reporters at the Tampa Bay Times that it installed a surveillance camera in a patient's room.

Joseph Carnegie, an Air Force vet, checked into James A. Haley VA Medical Center last August to recover from an infection. Later on that month he suffered cardiac arrest and brain damage when staffers failed to notice fluid in his feeding tube had cut off his air supply. It was shortly after Carnegie's family notified the Haley VA Center of their intent to sue that the camera was installed.Although it was disguised to look like a smoke detector-and is even marketed by its manufacturer under the name "Vonnic C401W Smoke Detector Covert Camera"-VA officials denied the camera was hidden. They claimed instead that the smoke detector cam was necessary to monitor the patient's condition (because, you know, a pin hole camera stuck on the ceiling is much more effective than a standard heart monitor, or simply asking people to do their jobs). The family's request to have the camera removed was refused.

*This article has been edited for an error stating that Joseph Carnegie is comatose. In fact, he is brain damaged and unable to communicate. I apologize for the error.

A Rush to Judgment: When Medical Science Gets it Wrong

The mysterious illnesses in Le Roy have prompted some interesting divisions among observers, myself included. While some are willing to dismiss the girls’ symptoms as nothing more than conversion disorder, others of us recall all too clearly other times when experts in the scientific community got it just plain wrong. Here are but a few of those instances:

Autism- Once thought of as extremely early-onset schizophrenia, this condition was believed to be caused by parental detachment. Professional literature recommended treating affected children with electroshock therapy and LSD well into the 1970s. It wasn't until 1989 that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), the reference book health care professionals use to diagnose mental disorders, listed autism as a developmental disorder separate from schizophrenia.

http://www.neurodiversity.com/library_lichstein_1976.pdf

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062703062.html

Female hysteria – Most people think this diagnosis went out with the Victorian era, but it wasn’t removed as a disease by the American Psychiatric Association until 1952. At that time, it was apparently decided that women were responsible enough to use vibrators on their own (the standard treatment). That still didn’t stop ‘experts' from attributing everything from frigidity to “an unusual amount of sexual pleasure” to this so-called disease.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/maines-technology.html

http://psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=150892

Lyme Disease – In the early 1970s, mother Polly Murray was very worried about what was going on in her Lyme, Connecticut neighborhood. People were getting sick at an alarming rate and no one really seemed to know why. Doctors first brushed off the complaints of excessive tiredness, skin rashes, swollen joints, and headaches. Polly, an artist who was no longer able to paint because of arthritis in her hands, was told by physicians that she was a hypochondriac. When her son also became sick, the diagnosis was that he was mimicking her “neurotic” behavior. (Is any of this sounding familiar?) He was eventually diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, but Mrs. Murray was convinced something more was going on. She teamed up with another mother of a sick child, Judith Mensch, and together the two women uncovered evidence of thirty-nine children and twelve adults in their area who’d been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis—100 times the normal rate of incidence. Armed with this information, Murray and Mensch pestered the Connecticut Department of Health until they agreed to send someone to investigate. A condition named “Lyme arthritis” was recognized two years later. It wasn’t until 1981 that Dr. Willy Burgdorfer discovered the spirochete responsible for the infection.

http://www.publichealthalert.org/Articles/davidkocurek/how%20lyme%20got%20a%20bad%20rap.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/books/tick-doc.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/lymedisease/understanding/pages/intro.aspx#history

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC406537/

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1067442/index.htm

Moral of the story: Science is continually evolving. As a result sometimes even the experts are wrong. Question everything.