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I wore about Robert Latimer’s bail hearing a few months ago. Recent news is that the December decision was overturned on appeal, and he has now been granted day parole. Good news! I actually send an e-mail to the parole board criticising their earlier decision; I don’t know if that letter (and I’m sure many similar ones) had any effect.

The globe and mail article points out an interesting fact I did not know about before – Latimer’s first trial was thrown out due to jury interference by the Crown. *shakes head*

The Globe and Mail has an article on Robert Latimer, the man who in 1993 exposed his severely disabled daughter to toxic fumes in order to end her suffering. He has spent the last seven years in jail, and was just recently denied day parole. I remember studying this case in my undergrad bioethics course… a real ethical dillema (although clearly not a legal one – active euthanasia is illegal in Canada).

As many people point out, the parole board must have a big fat stick up their nether regions. Their job was to assess the risk of Latimer re-offending. While they have no problems letting gangsters and sex offenders back on the street, they deny this man parole when it is very clear he would be extremely unlikely to commit second-degree murder (or any similar offence) ever again. They seem to have punished Latimer not because he was a threat to re-offend, but because he was an offence to their view of the world. Had he lied to the board and faked remorse, he probably would have been let out — but because he stood by his principles and answered honestly, willing to pay the personal price, he is sent back to jail. (via Dawg’s Blog)

Along with the recent tazer death of Robert Dziekanski (which is not an isolated incident), I am beginning to lose my faith in the Canadian justice system.

Well, other than routinely flexing my rights, and being careful who I vote for, I’m out of ideas. Send them my way if you’ve got them (no, I don’t want to start a commune in the bush somewhere with you, go away!)

… it may be all your porn. Or personal documents.

Whenever we brought our computer in to get fixed when I was younger (before I was the uber-geek I am now and could fix them myself), my dad was always — in my mind — obsessively paranoid about deleting anything personal from the hard drive before handing it over. I guess he was right (not that he had any porn).

The article has some good suggestions — throw all your files onto a TrueCrypt partition and noone without the passkey can get to it. Safe and not too inconvenient.

I really should do the same, in case of say theft of my machine(s). Also I need to figure out how to do this and then sync the file to an off-site backup with my webhost without too much overhead. Ah, the myriad of things on my todo list…

(via BoingBoing)

I posted about a study before that showed male, religious physicians are likely to refuse to provide treatment they don’t believe in — which generally means refusing contraceptive methods including abortion to young, vulnerable women. An article in MSNBC today tells the same tale with a bit more of a personal twist — but not even over abortion, but emergency contraception. For rape victims. (via Kevin, M.D.)

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There were a couple of mentions of circumcision in the blogosphere today, and it seems the commenters have come out of the woodwork on this issue. Tantalus Prime posts about a child who died after a routine circumcision gone wrong (eek, here in Ontario, too), and uses that as a springboard to lament the high rates of circumcision despite underwhelming medical indications. (via Pharyngula). On the other hand, #1 Dinosaur just ranted about how terrible it is that circumcision rates are falling in the US. (hat tip to Kevin, M.D.)

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Both PZ Myers and Orac post about a digusting event planned to celebrate a terrorist’s murder of a physician:

On July 29th, 1994, Paul Hill boldly defended 31 babies from unspeakable violence by killing a paid assassin and his bodyguard. He was arrested, given a sham trial, and executed as a martyr. On the 13th anniversary of Paul Hill’s act of love and mercy, memorial events will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to honor him as God’s man and our hero.

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The Bioethics Discussion blog revisits a 2-year old post on “I hate Doctors”, which has a heated yet eye-opening discussion on patients’ feelings about their health care providers.

I certainly try and be empathic, and listen to my patients. I have to agree with some of the physician posts in the discussion — the biggest problem tends to be patient expectations. We don’t have miracle cures for everything. We usually can’t see you within 15 minutes of your phone call. A lot of the time we don’t have a 100% certainty with our diagnosis. And if we’ve recommended two or three treatment options and you’ve refused to even try any of them… well I’m not sure what else to say or do to help you, especially within the context of time limitations.

(via Clinical Cases and Images)

Today I left my usual haunts in Hamilton and ventured back to my alma mater for an infertility conference given by Mount Sinai hospital in Toronto. Overall the day was interesting, although at the end of it I am left wondering what (other than the MAINPRO credits) I gained from it that I couldn’t have learned by 30 minutes of reading. Maybe I’m just too close to having done all of this in medical school / through Ob/Gyn electives… *shrug*

The part that most struck me though was the invasion of CAM into what was otherwise a very scientific and evidence-based talk. They asked Noel Wright, an acupuncturist, to give a little talk on acupuncture and how it could help with infertility.
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