Eating Disorders a New Front in Insurance Fight

By ANDREW POLLACK

Published: October 13, 2011

     People with eating disorders like anorexia have opened up a new battleground in the insurance wars, testing the boundaries of laws mandating equivalent coverage for mental illnesses. 

     Through claims and court cases, those with severe cases of anorexia or bulimia are fighting insurers to pay for stays in residential treatment centers, arguing that the centers offer around-the-clock monitoring so that patients do not forgo eating or purge their meals.

     But in the last few years, some insurance companies have re-emphasized that they do not cover residential treatment for eating disorders or other mental or emotional conditions. The insurers consider residential treatments not only costly — sometimes reaching more than $1,000 a day — but unproven and more akin to education than to medicine. Even some doctors who treat eating disorders concede there are few studies proving that residential care is effective, although they believe it has value. 

(Disponível em: <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/business/ruling-offers-hope-to-eating-disorder-sufferers.html?hp>. Acesso em: 5 out. 2011).

THE DAYS AFTER HAITI'S EARTHQUAKE brought joyous reunions for some families. Others faced the grim reality that they'd been suddenly robbed of parents or offspring. But for Haiti's 225,000 restaveks, or indentured children, the quake brought only an uncertain future.

Slavery-which ended with independence in 1804-is illegal in Haiti. And technically, restaveks are not slaves. The institution has its roots in the Caribbean tradition of child lending between families (usually relatives) to pitch in with extra work, care for the elderly or sick, or to provide opportunity to a child from a poor family. Generally, rural parents send their children to live with wealthier families in the cities. In exchange for domestic labor, the children are supposed to receive lodging, food, clothing, medicine, and-most importantly-education. In as many as half of the cases, they do (though classifying treatment in private homes is notoriously difficult). The unlucky ones, called restaveks-from the French rester avec, or "to stay with" -are loaned through normal channels but denied schooling and subject to abuse and degradation. This phenomenon has spiked in modern Haiti, as more and more children end up with equally impoverished families in the slums.

Before the quake, up to 22 percent of Haitian homes contained restaveks, according to a study funded by USAID. Keeping restaveks is illegal, but child loans are not and, given the extent of Haiti's governmental dysfunction, it's hard to tell which cases are which. Now that the quake has thrown family networks into disarray, the flimsy social ties supporting restaveks are likely to break down. "For families struggling in the wake of a catastrophe, restavek kids are the first to go; says Glenn Smucker, an anthropologist who specializes in development work in Haiti. "Their parents are not there to watch out for them, so they're far more vulnerable" to desertion and trafficking. 

But even as the numbers of abandoned restaveks swell, the demand for their services is likely to decrease. A mass exodus of residents from Port-au-Prince is reversing decades of migratory trends. If the shift sticks, it means there will be less need for restaveks in the city. But it's also possible that families suffering from the quake's economic aftershocks will feel extra pressure to lend out their children, even as it becomes more likely they'll end up as restaveks. Which, combined with a spike in new orphans, means Haiti will likely see a rise in the number of its street children in the years to come.

(By Katie Paul - Newsweek)

     So a scientist walks into a shopping mall to watch people laugh. There’s no punchline. Laughter is a serious scientific subject, one that researchers are still trying to figure out. Laughing is primal, our first way of communicating. Apes laugh. So do dogs and rats. Babies laugh long before they speak. No one teaches you how to laugh. You just do. And often you laugh involuntarily, in a specific rhythm and in certain spots in conversation.
    You may laugh at a prank on April Fools’ Day. But surprisingly,  only 10 to 15 percent of laughter is the result of someone making a joke, said Baltimore neuroscientist Robert Provine, who has studied laughter for decades. Laughter is mostly about social responses rather than reaction to a joke. “Laughter above all else is a social thing,’’ Provine said. “The requirement for laughter is another person.’’  
    Over the years, Provine, a professor with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, has boiled laughter down to its basics. “All language groups laugh ‘ha-ha-ha’ basically the same way,’’ he said. “Whether you speak Mandarin, French or English, everyone will understand laughter. ... There’s a pattern generator in our brain that produces this sound.’’
    Each “ha’’ is about one-15th of a second, repeated every fifth of a second, he said. Laugh faster or slower than that and it sounds more like panting or something else. Deaf people laugh without hearing, and people on cell phones laugh without seeing, illustrating that laughter isn’t dependent on a single sense but on social interactions, said Provine, author of the book “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.’’   
    “It’s joy, it’s positive engagement with life,’’ said Jaak Panksepp, a Bowling Green University psychology professor. “It’s deeply social.’’ And it’s not just a people thing either. Chimps tickle each other and even laugh when another chimp pretends to tickle them. By studying rats, Panksepp and other scientists can figure out what’s going on in the brain during laughter. And it holds promise for human ills.
    Northwestern biomedical engineering professor Jeffrey Burgdorf has found that laughter in rats produces an insulin-like growth factor chemical that acts as an antidepressant and anxietyreducer. He thinks the same thing probably happens in humans, too. This would give doctors a new chemical target in the brain in their effort to develop drugs that fight depression and anxiety in people. Even so, laughter itself hasn’t been proven to be the best medicine, experts said.

By Peter Kornbluh

“For the better part of two years, a group of editors, journalism students, and human rights lawyers in Santiago, Chile, have been gathering evidence against their country’s leading media mogul, Agustín Edwards, to, at minimum, have him expelled from the press guild, the Academy of Chilean Journalists. The editor of the leftist magazine Puncto Final, Manuel Cabieses, has filed a formal petition accusing Edwards of violating the academy’s code of ethics by conspiring with the Nixon White House and the CIA between 1970 and 1973 to foment the military coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, thirty years ago this month. ‘Doonie’, as Edwards is known to his closest friends, is the patriarch of the press – a Chilean Rupert Murdoch. His media empire encompasses Chile’s renowned national newspaper, El Mercurio, a second national paper, Ultimas Noticias, and Santiago’s leading afternoon paper, La Segunda, along with a dozen smaller regional journals. In September 1970, when Chileans narrowly elected Allende, a Socialist, to the presidency, Edwards was widely considered to be the richest man in Chile – and the individual with the most to lose financially from Allende’s election.

The ethics charges against Edwards are likely to receive a boost from a careful analysis of formerly secret U.S. documents that shed considerable new light on CIA covert media operations in Chile. Since 1975, when a special congressional committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church issued its report, Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973, it has been no secret that the CIA provided significant funding to El Mercurio, put reporters and editors on its payroll, and used the paper, in the committee’s words, as ‘the most important channel for anti-Allende propaganda.’ But with the declassification of thousands of CIA and White House records at the end of Clinton administration, the history of the ‘El Mercurio Project’ emerges in far greater detail. Among the key revelations in the documents:

• Even before Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile, Edwards came to Washington and discussed with the CIA the ‘timing for possible military action’ to prevent Allende from taking office. • President Nixon directly authorized massive funding in the newspaper. The White House approve close to $2 million dollars – a significant sum when turned into Chilean currency on the black market.

• Secret CIA cables from mid-1973 identified El Mercurio as among the ‘most militant parts of the opposition’ pushing for military intervention to overthrow Allende.

• In the aftermath of the coup, the CIA continued to covertly finance media operations in order to influence Chilean public opinion in favor of the new military regime, despite General Pinochet’s brutal repression.”

From: KORNBLUH, Peter. “The El Mercurio File”. Columbia Journalism Review. New York, p.14-15, September/October 2007.