World Autism Awareness Day

Today, April 2nd, is World Autism Awareness Day as declared by the United Nations after the UN ambassador from Qatar introduced the resolution last November. On the occasion of the very first Annual World Autism Awareness Day, this is a good time to take a look at some of the issues associated with this increasingly prevalent malady.

Autism is a complex brain disorder that inhibits the ability to communicate or develop normal social relationships, and often comes with behavioral problems that can be extreme. There is a range of autistic disorders from fairly mild to completely debilitating, so doctors call this the “Autism spectrum disorders.” It is currently being diagnosed in 1 of every 150 children in the U.S., with four times as many boys suffering the disorder than girls. That diagnosis rate has increased tenfold over the last ten years, and there is some dispute about why the rate is rising so fast.

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10 Ways to Make Mom Buy

Moms spend much more money that Dads do. More than 2 trillion (with a ‘T’) dollars a year! That’s a darned lucrative market, so it’s one with a hefty amount of psychologizing put into it by Madison Avenue when they’re designing ad campaigns.

Now, there are people out there who will insist that the target audience for all this marketing is children, and many psychologists insist that advertising targeting children is unethical. Not that ethics counts for very much when there’s trillions of dollars on the table, of course. Deal is, children don’t work for a living, thus have little money to spend on all those expensive, questionably useful consumer items they’re being sold. The person who is REALLY being targeted is Mom. The marketers are just adding to the marketing appeal by enlisting children to do their work for them!

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Filed under Research, Marketing to Kids, Nutrition, Relational Stress, Family Life, Child-Parent Relationships | Comment (0)

Medical ‘Old Wives Tales’

…and the Doctors Who Believe Them

Newsweek Magazine published an article on its web page last week entitled Top Seven Health Myths, citing a study that demonstrated even doctors often fall prey to common medical misconceptions. And they do, too, sometimes for the basest of self-interested reasons.

I recall sitting at the breakfast table with my Mother-in-Law one morning back in the early 1980s, reading the daily newspaper. I came across an article about a formal position statement from the American Medical Association’s annual enclave, which stated as clearly and simply as possible that…

There Is No Evidence That Diet Is Related To Health.

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Filed under Research, Science, Medicine, History, Nutrition, Old Wives' Tales | Comments (2)