Ethics for healthcare data is obsessed with risk – not public benefits. How many times a year do we tick a website or phone app’s box saying “read and approved” – without having read the Terms of Service at all? While a user’s tick of the box is sufficient to allow businesses offering web services and smartphone apps to use “anonymised” customer data for their own purposes, the same doesn’t apply to most health research.
Consider the difference between creating that tick-box by cutting and pasting a standard legal disclaimer and writing a 40-page research ethics submission that rigorously undergoes a dozen revisions. Ethics has a bad image among many scientists and, for some, it raises images of finger wagging and obstacles to research projects. Health researchers working with human participants – or their identifiable information – need to jump through lots of ethical and bureaucratic hoops. Facebook and Google hold voluminous and fine-grained datasets on people. Unintended consequences Power imbalance How do we get there? Camp DASH: How a Purdue Child Nutrition Study Went Very, Very Wrong.
On July 18, an adolescent girl participating in a camp-like nutrition study at Purdue University went to the bathroom at the school’s Tarkington Hall dormitory to take a shower. Soon after, her peers told her there was a video of that shower on social media. The events that followed eventually shut down an $8.8 million research study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and left one of the nation’s top research institutions circling the wagons as it scrambled to investigate what had gone wrong. “The Purdue study and the internal investigation raise several issues about the role of the IRB.”
The girl was one of 78 participants in a study called Camp DASH — short for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension — which was being led by Purdue’s Department of Nutrition Science. Researchers, assessing the effects of a low sodium diet on 11- to 15-year-old boys and girls with elevated blood pressure, were set to host the children in campus housing for seven weeks over the summer. Dr. Doctors Swear to 'Do No Harm.' Why Don’t Data Scientists? | Immodest proposal. Two researchers from Stanford University recently claimed to have constructed a machine learning algorithm that predicted sexual orientation from facial pictures. The researchers recognized the dangers in this themselves, observing that “in some cases, losing the privacy of one’s sexual orientation can be life-threatening.”
The original study, a good example of the risks involved in data science research, is now under ethical review. We live in an age where data is described as the new oil. Large amounts of information are collected and stored, and increasingly complicated techniques like machine learning are used to derive insights from it. But with such great insight comes great risk, not to mention tremendous power to influence people’s lives. Toon Borré, who heads the data department of consultancy firm TriFinance, remembers refusing a request to determine when it would be financially cheaper for a hospital to let someone die on the operating table. CIA Torture Psychologists Settle Lawsuit. Court Rejects CIA Torture Psychologists’ Final Bid to Avoid Standing Trial. How often does psychotherapy make people feel worse? – Research Digest.
We hear a lot about the unwelcome side-effects of psychiatric drugs, but not so much about the fact that therapy can also leave people feeling worse than they did already. Data is thin on the ground, but best estimates suggest that between 5 to 10 per cent of therapy clients experience a worsening of their symptoms. Now a study in The British Journal of Psychiatry has provided further evidence, from the clients’ perspective, about the prevalence of harmful therapy outcomes, with around 1 in 20 of thousands of participants saying that they had experienced “lasting bad effects” from therapy.
Mike Crawford and his colleagues surveyed nearly 15,000 people who were currently receiving, or had recently ended, out-patient therapy for depression or anxiety via the National Health Service in England and Wales. The most common form of therapy was CBT but other therapies the participants had received included psychodynamic therapy, counselling and solution-focused therapy. Related In "CBT" Anti-torture reforms opposed within psychology group after damning report | US news.
Opposition is building to intended anti-torture reforms within the largest professional organization of psychologists in the US, which faces a crossroads over what a recent report described as its past support for brutal military and CIA interrogations. Before the American Psychological Association (APA) meets in Toronto next Thursday for what all expect will be a fraught convention that reckons with an independent review that last month found the APA complicit in torture, former military voices within the profession are urging the organization not to participate in what they describe as a witch hunt.
Reformers consider the pushback to represent entrenched opposition to cleaving the APA from a decade’s worth of professional cooperation with controversial detentions and interrogations. The APA listserv has become a key debating forum, with tempers rising on both sides. Williams did not return an email seeking comment. Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later. Photo WASHINGTON — The shooting looked bad. But that is when the professor is at his best. A black motorist, pulled to the side of the road for a turn-signal violation, had stuffed his hand into his pocket.
The white officer yelled for him to take it out. The driver was unarmed. Taking the stand at a public inquest, William J. “In simple terms,” the district attorney in Portland, Ore., asked, “if I see the gun, I’m dead?” “In simple terms, that’s it,” Dr. When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, Dr. His conclusions are consistent: The officer acted appropriately, even when shooting an unarmed person. He has appeared as an expert witness in criminal trials, civil cases and disciplinary hearings, and before grand juries, where such testimony is given in secret and goes unchallenged. “We’re telling officers, ‘Look for cover and then read the threat,’ ” he told a class of Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs recently.
Many policing experts are for hire, but Dr. Dr. Psychologists met in secret with Bush officials to help justify torture – report | US news. The leading American professional group for psychologists secretly worked with the Bush administration to help justify the post-9/11 US detainee torture program, according to a watchdog analysis released on Thursday.
The report, written by six leading health professionals and human rights activists, is the first to examine the alleged complicity of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the “enhanced interrogation” program. Based on an analysis of more than 600 newly disclosed emails, the report found that the APA coordinated with Bush-era government officials – namely in the CIA, White House and Department of Defense – to help ethically justify the interrogation policy in 2004 and 2005, when the program came under increased scrutiny for prisoner abuse by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The APA is the largest organization representing psychologists in the US, with more than 122,500 members. Informed-consent forms should be shortened, simplified, Johns Hopkins bioethicists confirm.
An in-depth review of consent forms provided to volunteers for HIV/AIDS research in the United States and abroad about study procedures, risks and benefits has found that the forms were extremely long and used wording that may have been complex enough to hinder full understanding, according to bioethicists at The Johns Hopkins University. A systematic analysis of 124 informed-consent documents for U.S. government-sponsored, multinational HIV/AIDS research conducted in 2006 revealed that the forms spanned more than 20 pages, says the study's lead investigator, Nancy Kass, Sc.D., deputy director for public health at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. "While we were familiar with many fairly long consent forms for several different types of studies," Kass says, "we were honestly surprised to see that the median length was 22 pages, and the median length for adult forms was a full 27 pages. " Randomization is one of science's most trusted tools for minimizing biases in studies.
Medical records rules broken, NHS admits.