THREE VIA BUZZFLASH

An op-ed essay from the NY Times:

Your Doctor's Drug Problem

To renew their licenses, doctors in almost all states are required to enroll in continuing medical education programs, and these are now largely subsidized, directly or indirectly, by the pharmaceutical industry. There are official guidelines for keeping these programs free of commercial bias, but they are voluntary. Most of these educational programs are presented by industry-friendly experts who are selected and paid by the companies selling the drugs being discussed, and most of their talks emphasize the medical benefits of those drugs. Some of this information is useful, but much of it is simply marketing disguised as education.

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An op-ed essay from the Houston Chronicle:

A president should read a newspaper

During his recent travels abroad, the president confessed amazement after learning that a couple of billion Asians and Europeans and Muslims throughout the world resent his foreign policies and are beginning to think less of the United States. Condi must have forgotten to tell him.

Bush complains that the press is overly focused on grim tidings from Iraq, but how would he know? He doesn't read press reports and therefore has no means of comparing what his aides tell him with what reporters and editors take to be reality.

Since Bush doesn't read a daily newspaper, Americans must assume he is ignorant of much that one contains. Without a newspaper, he can't even know the name of his latest campaign contributor to be indicted.

Does an aide tell him the price of milk, or whether socks are on sale? Does someone have to brief him on the World Series box scores, or does a wartime president have the leisure to watch every play? Apparently Bush has never read a profile of a family thrown out of work, bankrupted by illness or burnt out of house and home.

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A news story from the Boston Globe:

Bias taxes brain, research finds

According to the findings, the more biased people are, the more their brain power is taxed by contact with someone of another race, as they struggle not to say or do anything offensive. The effect is so strong, the team found, that even a five-minute conversation with a black person left some of the white subjects unable to perform well on a test of cognitive ability.

"Just having a prejudice makes you stupider," said John Gabrieli, a professor of psychology at Stanford University who was not involved in the research. "It is really interesting."

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