In response to this morning's post about mandated choice in organ donation progams, Contrarian reader JB points out this TED talk by Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, about counter-intuitive aspects of human decision making. The discussion of organ donation starts at the five minute mark, but the whole talk is fascinating....

02 November, 2009

Britain's 500-year-old Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons has thrown its weight behind a new approach to the shortage of organs for lifesaving transplants: make people decide whether they want to be donors. Health professionals involved in organ and tissue donation have long been aware of a maddening statistic: Although about 90 percent of adults express willingness to be organ and tissue donors, only about half get around to signing the consent form (which appears on on the health card renewal application in Nova Scotia). Without a signed card, it's harder to get distraught relatives to agree to donation in the...

02 November, 2009

British scientists are up in arms about the Labour government's sacking of Dr. David Nutt as head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after he refused to toe the government's strident line against marijuana and ecstasy. On Friday, Home Secretary Alan Johnson dismissed Nutt, head of the Psychopharmacology Unit in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Bristol, after the Centre for Crime and Justice at King’s College London published a paper containing criticisms he had made of the Brown government’s drug policies in a lecture last July. In the talk, Nutt said ecstasy...

01 November, 2009

For a process that has (or should have) undergone intensive preparation for months, the Cape Breton District Health Authority's first public H1N1 vaccination clinic, Wednesday in Baddeck, was an organizational disaster. Here's how one Contrarian reader described it: I gathered the kids after school and navigated our way through the car-lined streets to the Masonic Hall. We grabbed a spot at the end of the line, several car-lengths back from the corner of Queen & Grant streets. It was typical Cape Breton gathering—lots of chatting and laughing between neighbours, and new friends made with unfamiliar faces. Many of us who arrived after...

29 October, 2009