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Poor Birth Outcomes Increased By Lower Legal Drinking Age, Study Finds
Amid renewed calls to consider reducing the legal drinking age, a new University of Georgia study finds that lower drinking ages increase unplanned pregnancies and pre-term births among young people.
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You're More Likely A Conservative If You Are Easily Grossed Out, Suggests Cornell Psychologist
Are you someone who squirms when confronted with slime, shudders at stickiness or gets grossed out by gore? Do crawly insects make you cringe or dead bodies make you blanch?
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Classifying Antiabortion-Rights Crimes As 'Terrorism' Unnecessary, USA Today Opinion Piece States
Scott Roeder, who is charged with the murder of abortion provider George Tiller, and James von Brunn, who is charged with last week"s shooting death of a Holocaust Memorial Museum guard, "appear to be murderers, not terrorists," Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, writes in a USA Today opinion piece. Although "liberals denounced" the tendency of conservatives to call "every possible crime an act of terrorism" while former President George W. Bush was in office, now that there are antiabortion-rights and anti-Semetic suspects, "there is an insistence that these crimes must be treated as terrorism -- as if to call them "murder" or "hate crimes" would diminish their significance," Turley states. Many people who "kill strangers out of hate for their race or religion or some other association" are "loners or rogue operators who seek to satisfy a blood lust against different groups," Turley contends, noting that classifying a crime as an act of terrorism allows for a different types of prosecution, investigation and punishment. According to Turley, the "term "terrorism" once had a clear meaning before it was used as a point of emphasis to evaluate or distinguish certain crimes." The Bush administration"s broadening of the definition to include "any prosecution that disrupts a "potential" terrorism threat" served to further divert the term from its historical definition, he adds. Now, "many want to see terrorism investigations targeting antiabortion activists and other groups that use violent speech," Turley writes."We do not advance our efforts by classifying every hate crime as terrorism," Turley continues, adding that it would be "the terrorists who will benefit from our lack of focus" in the definition. According to Turley, the "fact is that even an authoritarian nation can do little to stop a determined rogue operator from walking into a church and killing someone like Dr. Tiller." Referring to "someone such as Roeder as a murderer does not diminish the crime or the victim" because "we do not have to call murder "terrorism" to take the crime or its causes seriously," Turley writes (Turley, USA Today, 6/17).
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Do Electronic Health Records Help Or Hinder Medical Education?

Many countries worldwide are digitizing patients" medical records. In the US, for example, the recent economic stimulus package signed into law by President Obama includes $US17 billion in incentives for health providers to switch to electronic health records (EHRs) and $US2 billion for the development of EHR standards and best-practice guidelines. What impact will the rise of EHRs have upon medical education? A debate in this week"s PLoS Medicine examines both the threats and opportunities. Discussing the threats, Jonathan U. Peled (a medical student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, USA) and Oren Sagher (Associate Professor and Residency Program Director at the Department of Neurosurgery, University of Michigan Health System, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA) argue that the EHR could have a harmful impact upon medical education. The effects of implementing EHRs on patient care have not been uniformly positive, say Peled and Sagher, and a number of reports of risk have already been published. "Our experiences have led us to believe that the potential risk of EHRs to medical teaching may be just as significant and, if not addressed, could erode the education of an entire generation of physicians." Laying out the opportunities, Jay Morrow and Alison E. Dobbie (Faculty Assistant and Professor at the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, USA), argue that the EHR can enhance medical education in three ways. First, they say, "use of an EHR can enhance history taking and physical exam skills." Second, they believe that the EHR can enhance physician-patient communication if it is incorporated into the doctor-patient encounter. Finally, Morrow and Dobbie have found that the EHR "can be an impressive clinical teaching tool." Funding: No funding was received for this work. Link to related paper PLoS Medicine


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