Healthy Food And Nutrition: August 2013

'Bad' Picture Monday: Unflattering photos spur online movement

Courtesy of Sonya Renee Taylor

If memory serves her, Sonya Renee Taylor says this is the photo that started 'Bad' Picture Monday, an online movement that encourages people to defy our culture's beauty standards and post unflattering pictures of themselves to social media sites like Facebook.

Thinking of untagging that less-than-flattering Facebook photo your best friend (or frenemy) posted over the weekend?

You may want to make it your profile picture instead.

That's the argument of a movement called Bad Picture Monday, a meme launched two years ago by Bay area poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of the body empowerment project, The Body Is Not An Apology, a “one-stop shop for affirmation and reminders to love your rolls, your back hair, your calluses, the smooth skin where a left breast used to be.”

“It struck me one day as I went to untag an image on Facebook that it felt a bit hypocritical,” says Taylor. “I’d created this movement about body empowerment and embracing ourselves as we are today. I wondered what would happen if I decided to live with this picture in the world. It was really just an exercise in unplugging from that constant voice that says ‘Do you look good? Are you attractive enough? How does the world see me right now?’”

Courtesy of Marc Lorenz Photography

Here's Sonya Renee Taylor again, this time from a more flattering angle.

Taylor posted her unflattering pic and continued to do so every Monday afterward, encouraging other women (and men) to do the same. Two years later, The Body Is Not An Apology has nearly 17,000 Facebook fans and has garnered attention from publications like New York Magazine.

“When it first started, people were like ‘You’re crazy. I’m never going to post that picture,’” she says. “There was absolute resistance. But then you’d see one person put a toe in the water. And then another one and another one. After awhile, people just said, ‘I’m going to do this every week and practice being okay with myself – however I show up.”

For Taylor, posting “bad” pictures or “ugly selfies” on sites like Reddit is a way to take back power from a society that insists you look beautiful – no matter what the circumstances.

“People think you have to be attractive even if you’re in the middle of chemotherapy,” she says. “Some days, I’m not attractive. This expands the boundaries for what’s acceptable. It presses the boundaries of the beauty box.”

And that’s a very good thing, says West Hartford, Conn. clinical psychologist Margo Maine, author of "The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure to be Perfect."

“Facebook and the rest of the social media have elevated competition around appearance and body image exponentially,” she says. ”It used to be we competed with the women we saw every day or those we saw on the covers of magazines or on the screen. But every time we hold a smartphone in our hands or turn on a laptop or iPad, we’re immersed in a cyber universe that tells us we’re not good enough as is.”

As a result, we feel pressure to “craft” better images of ourselves, either through drastic means like plastic surgery or simpler “fixes” like putting on a pair of Spanx or Photoshopping our birthday party pics.

Embracing our everyday selves, though, is a much healthier way to go, says Maine.

“Anything we can do to help women become conscious of how they have automatically internalized these unreasonable expectations for the perfect body, perfect face, perfect wardrobe, perfect life is worth a try,” she says. “For most women, hearing about a movement like Bad Picture Monday will help them to gain a perspective on how their lives are affected by these cultural forces and will get them to question themselves, be less harsh in their self-assessment, to talk with friends and gain support to be more natural -- at least on Mondays.

“For some, it will change their world view and self-image in a more lasting way. I think it’s a wonderful and potentially empowering idea.”

Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Lombardo agrees, pointing to the huge impact pictures of celebs without makeup have on us.

“I remember a couple of years ago Oprah tweeted a picture of herself without makeup,” says Lombardo, author of A Happy You: Your Ultimate Prescription for Happiness. “People loved it. It was the same when TODAY's Kathie Lee and Hoda did their show without makeup. When women see that, it’s like this sigh of relief, like ‘Okay, I don’t have to pretend I’m something I’m not.’”

The concept of going “ugly” in public is nothing new, of course. Past celebrities like Lucille Ball and Phyllis Diller regularly played down their looks in order to get major laughs. Actress Charlize Theron even embraced her inner “Monster” and gained major respect -- and an Oscar.

Lombardo says she sees absolutely no down side to allowing ourselves to be seen by others when we’re not at our best.

“I don’t know how you could get a negative on this,” she says. “It’s taking off the filter. We tell our kids to be themselves but as we get older, we’re not ourselves. It’s encouraging people to enjoy life, to be silly, to erase the negative judgment in their mind. To just live.”

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All in the ADHD family: Diagnosis in kids can spotlight parents' own condition

By Linda Carroll, Kate Snow and Meghan Frank, NBC News

As a little girl, Bonnie Ihme had big plans. Bright and artistically talented, she dreamed of becoming an architect.

But the older she got, the more distant that dream seemed. By third grade, school had become a struggle. She felt easily distracted and found it impossible to focus in class. Eventually she abandoned her plan to be an architect. Ihme got married, had two kids and began cleaning houses and helping her husband with his business.

But even that simpler life felt impossibly difficult. The Michigan mom had trouble keeping track of all the threads of her life. She’d send her kids to school without sneakers on gym day. She’d forget to bring library books back. She felt more overwhelmed than ever before.

“I really would try hard to pull it all together,” Ihme told NBC’s Kate Snow in an interview airing on Rock Center Friday. “But when … you’re late for a Christmas concert that your daughter was really looking forward to going to and we get there and her class is walking back to the classroom and the tears in her eyes… you try harder.”

Ihme saw history repeating itself in her 10-year-old son, Jacob, who began struggling with school, just as she had. Jacob would spend hours doing his homework, only to forget to bring it to school the next morning. Ihme’s heart ached for her son.

Click here for more on ADHD symptoms

She decided to do something for him that no one had thought to do for her. She brought Jacob to a specialist in search of answers. After a battery of tests, the specialist diagnosed her son with ADHD – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He then told Ihme that the disorder was often inherited. That was when she began to wonder if ADHD had been her problem, too.

“I knew I was bright,” she told Snow. “And on some things that they were teaching I was higher than the rest of the class. But then I’d struggle with a lot of the other things and wonder what was wrong with me.”

Ihme went through the same testing her son did, and at age 42, was diagnosed with ADHD.

While many people think of ADHD as a childhood disorder -- something that kids eventually grow out of – long term studies have shown that ADHD sometimes lasts a lifetime. In fact, a report published in the April edition of Pediatrics found that nearly 30 percent of kids diagnosed with ADHD still suffered severe symptoms well into adulthood.

In the prospective study, researchers from the Boston Children’s Hospital and the Mayo Clinic tracked 5,718 children born between 1976 and 1982 for several decades. Among the children were 367 who’d been given a diagnosis of ADHD. Out of that number, 232 agreed to participate in the study.

As it turned out, life was a lot harder for ADHD sufferers than it was for their peers. They were at higher risk for death and suicide, with nearly 60 percent suffering from an additional psychiatric disorder.

In a similar longitudinal study, researchers from New York University started out following 207 boys who’d been diagnosed with ADHD between ages 6 and 12 and 178 boys without ADHD. By the time the boys had reached their 40s and 50s, there were big differences between the two groups, according to the report published in December in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Clinical psychologist Rachel Klein, lead author of the New York University study and a pioneer in the field of ADHD, put it this way.

“Compared to the kids without ADHD, these children had more often died,” said Klein, Director of the Anita Saltz Institute for Anxiety and Mood at the NYU Child Study Center. “Many more had been in jail. Many more had been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, mostly drug abuse.”

But the bad news didn’t stop there.

Almost a third of the ADHD boys had dropped out of high school and, on average, they made less money and experienced a higher divorce rate than their peers who didn’t have the disorder.

Much of that resonates with Frank South, who, at 49, discovered he had ADHD.

Professionally successful, South wrote for such hit TV shows as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, and Melrose Place. But over the years he’s struggled in his personal life. He’s been married three times and can find the details of daily life challenging.

In fact, he says he’s so easily distracted that a simple trip to pick up a 12-pack of paper towels for his daughter’s basketball team can turn into Mission Impossible.

“You end up in the Costco going through things that you’re not even going to buy and the time goes right by because you find it so interesting,” he told Snow.

From freeze-dried granola to flat screen TVs, anything and everything becomes so alluring that hours later, the basketball team is still without paper towels.

“It’s debilitating,” he told Snow. “But the thing is, before your diagnosis, before you understand these things, you think, ‘I’m a jerk.’ And you feel like, ‘I’m also not very bright if I can’t just go and get a 12 pack of paper towels and bring them to the basketball coach without being two hours late."

After years of berating himself for such mishaps, and drinking hard to shut out the negative thoughts, South, like Ihme, finally spoke with a psychiatrist after his son Harry was diagnosed with ADHD and he started thinking he too might have the disorder.

Going undiagnosed as an adult is not that unusual.

“I think … that there are still many people walking around who have ADHD who are being impaired by it, and they don’t even know it,” said study co-author Dr. Xavier Castellanos, director of the Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at the New York University Child Study Center.

Despite this, Castellanos acknowledges that some doctors may be over diagnosing ADHD. In fact, a New York Times story published last week concluded that over the last decade there’s been a 53 percent jump in the number of kids diagnosed with the disorder. Experts quoted in the story said they feared that the powerful stimulants used to treat ADHD might harm kids who don’t really need them.

But for those who do have ADHD, taking medication can be life changing.

South remembers when he first started taking medication for his ADHD.

“It was like a window, a big window, opening up on my brain,” he said. “You know, sunlight coming in and being able to breathe and be calm enough to understand. And the fear and the anxiety level went down.”

For those who still doubt that ADHD is a real brain disorder, Castellanos points to brain scans he’s done in some of the study volunteers. The scans of those who had been diagnosed with ADHD as children are thinner in areas that are known to control attention and govern emotion.

“These are differences of less than a tenth of a millimeter,” Castellanos explained. “And yet, a tenth of a millimeter is a lot of brain cells.”

Related stories:

ADHD seen in 11 percent of kids as diagnoses rise

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Robot hot among surgeons but FDA taking a new look

By LINDSEY TANNER , Associated Press

The biggest thing in operating rooms these days is a million-dollar, multi-armed robot named da Vinci, used in nearly 400,000 surgical procedures nationwide last year — triple the number just four years earlier.

But now the high-tech helper is under scrutiny over reports of problems, including several deaths that may be linked with it and the high cost of using the robotic system.

There also have been a few disturbing incidents: a robotic hand that wouldn't let go of tissue grasped during surgery and a robotic arm hitting a patient in the face as she lay on the operating table.

Is it time to curb the robot enthusiasm?

Some doctors say yes, concerned that the "wow" factor and heavy marketing have boosted use. They argue that there is not enough robust research showing that robotic surgery is at least as good or better than conventional surgery.

Many U.S. hospitals promote robotic surgery in patient brochures, online and even on highway billboards. Their aim is partly to attract business that helps pay for the costly robot.

The da Vinci is used for operations that include removing prostates, gallbladders and wombs, repairing heart valves, shrinking stomachs and transplanting organs. Its use has increased worldwide, but the system is most popular in the United States.

"We are at the tip of the iceberg. What we thought was impossible 10 years ago is now commonplace," said Dr. Michael Stifelman, robotic surgery chief at New York University's Langone Medical Center.

For surgeons, who control the robot while sitting at a computer screen rather than standing over the patient, these operations can be less tiring. Plus robot hands don't shake. Advocates say patients sometimes have less bleeding and often are sent home sooner than with conventional laparoscopic surgery and operations involving large incisions.

But the Food and Drug Administration is looking into a spike in reported problems during robotic procedures. Earlier this year, the FDA began a survey of surgeons using the robotic system. The agency conducts such surveys of devices routinely, but FDA spokeswoman Synim Rivers said the reason now "is the increase in number of reports received" about da Vinci.

Reports filed since early last year include at least five deaths.

Whether there truly are more problems recently is uncertain. Rivers said she couldn't quantify the increase and that it may simply reflect more awareness among doctors and hospitals about the need to report problems. Doctors aren't required to report such things; device makers and hospitals are.

It could also reflect wider use. Last year there were 367,000 robot operations versus 114,000 in 2008, according to da Vinci's maker, Intuitive Surgical Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif.

Da Vinci is the company's only product, and it's the only robotic system cleared for soft-tissue surgery by the FDA. There are other robotic devices approved for neurosurgery and orthopedics, among other things.

A search for the company's name in an FDA database of reported problems related to medical devices brings up 500 reports since Jan. 1, 2012. Many of those came from Intuitive Surgical. The reports include incidents that happened several years ago and some are duplicates. There's also no proof any of the problems were caused by the robot, and many didn't injure patients. Reports filed this year include:

— A woman who died during a 2012 hysterectomy when the surgeon-controlled robot accidentally nicked a blood vessel.

— A Chicago man who died in 2007 after spleen surgery.

— A New York man whose colon was allegedly perforated during prostate surgery. Da Vinci's maker filed that report after seeing a newspaper article about it and said the doctor's office declined to provide additional information.

— A robotic arm that wouldn't let go of tissue grasped during colorectal surgery on Jan. 14. "We had to do a total system shutdown to get the grasper to open its jaws," said the report filed by the hospital. The report said the patient was not injured.

— A robotic arm hit a patient in the face during a hysterectomy. The company filed that report, and said it is unknown if the patient was injured but that the surgeon decided to switch to an open, more invasive operation instead.

Intuitive Surgical filed all but one of those reports.

Complications can occur with any type of surgery, and so far it's unclear if they are more common in robotic operations, but that's part of what the FDA is trying to find out.

Intuitive Surgical disputes there's been a true increase in problems and says the rise reflects a change it made last year in the way it reports problems.

The da Vinci system "has an excellent safety record with over 1.5 million surgeries performed globally, and total adverse event rates have remained low and in line with historical trends," said company spokeswoman Angela Wonson.

But an upcoming research paper suggests that problems linked with robotic surgery are underreported. They include cases with "catastrophic complications," said Dr. Martin Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who co-authored the paper.

"The rapid adoption of robotic surgery ... has been done by and large without the proper evaluation," Makary said.

The da Vinci system, on the market since 2000, includes a three- or four-armed robot that surgeons operate with hand controls at a computer system located several feet away from the patient. They see inside the patient's body through a tiny video camera attached to one of the long robot arms. The other arms are tipped with tiny surgical instruments.

Robotic operations are similar to conventional laparoscopy, or "keyhole" surgery, which involves small incisions and camera-tipped instruments controlled by the surgeon's hands, not a robot.

Almost 1,400 U.S. hospitals — nearly 1 out of 4 — have at least one da Vinci system. Each one costs about $1.45 million, plus $100,000 or more a year in service agreements.

The most common robotic operations include prostate removal. Aabout 85 percent of these operations in the U.S. are done with the robot. Da Vinci also is often used for hysterectomies, Wonson said.

Makary says there's no justification for the skyrocketing increase in robotic surgery, which he attributes to aggressive advertising by the manufacturer and hospitals seeking more patients.

He led a study published in 2011 that found 4 in 10 U.S. hospitals promoted robotic surgery on their websites, often using wording provided by the manufacturer. Some of the claims exaggerated the benefits or had misleading, unproven claims, the study said.

Stifelman, the Langone surgeon, said it makes sense for hospitals to promote robotic surgery and other new technology to, but that it doesn't mean that it's the right option for all patients.

"It's going to be the responsibility of the surgeon ... to make sure the patient knows there are lots of options," and to discuss the risks and benefits, he said.

His hospital expects to do more than 1,200 robotic procedures this year, versus just 175 in 2008.

For a few select procedures that require operating in small, hard-to-reach areas, robotic surgery may offer advantages over conventional methods, Makary said. Those procedures include head and neck cancer surgery and rectal surgery.

Some surgeons say the robotic method also has advantages for weight-loss surgery on extremely obese patients, whose girth can make hands-on surgery challenging.

"At the console, the operation can be performed effectively and precisely, translating to superior quality," said Dr. Subhashini Ayloo, a surgeon at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System in Chicago.

Ayloo, who uses the da Vinci robot, began a study last year on the effectiveness of doing robotic obesity surgery in patients who need a kidney transplant. Some hospitals won't do transplants on obese patients with kidney failure because it can be risky. In the study, robotic stomach-shrinking surgery and kidney transplants are done simultaneously. Patients who get both will be compared with a control group getting only robotic kidney transplants.

"We don't know the results, but so far it's looking good," Ayloo said.

Aidee Diaz of Chicago was the first patient and was taken aback when told the dual operation would be done robotically.

"At first you would get scared. Everybody says, 'A robot?' But in the long run that robot does a lot of miracles," said Diaz, 36.

She has had no complications since her operation last July, has lost 100 pounds and says her new kidney is working well.

Lawsuits in cases that didn't turn out so well often cite inadequate surgeon training with the robot. These include a malpractice case that ended last year with a $7.5 million jury award for the family of Juan Fernandez, a Chicago man who died in 2007 after robotic spleen surgery. The lawsuit claimed Fernandez's surgeons accidentally punctured part of his intestines, leading to a fatal infection.

The surgeons argued that Fernandez had a health condition that caused the intestinal damage, but it was the first robot operation for one of the doctors and using the device was overkill for an ordinarily straightforward surgery, said Fernandez's attorney, Ted McNabola.

McNabola said an expert witness told him it was like "using an 18-wheeler to go the market to get a quart of milk."

Company spokesman Geoff Curtis said Intuitive Surgical has physician-educators and other trainers who teach surgeons how to use the robot. But they don't train them how to do specific procedures robotically, he said, and that it's up to hospitals and surgeons to decide "if and when a surgeon is ready to perform robotic cases."

A 2010 New England Journal of Medicine essay by a doctor and a health policy analyst said surgeons must do at least 150 procedures to become adept at using the robotic system. But there is no expert consensus on how much training is needed.

New Jersey banker Alexis Grattan did a lot of online research before her gallbladder was removed last month at Hackensack University Medical Center. She said the surgeon's many years of experience with robotic operations was an important factor. She also had heard that the surgeon was among the first to do the robotic operation with just one small incision in the belly button, instead of four cuts in conventional keyhole surgery.

"I'm 33, and for the rest of my life I'm going to be looking at those scars," she said.

The operation went smoothly. Grattan was back at work a week later.

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1 in 4 skin cancer survivors still tans, study finds

New research from Yale University indicates even after being diagnosed with skin cancer, some patients haven't been able to stay away from the sun, or make lifestyle changes that would protect them from the sun's rays. NBC's Brian Williams reports

Most patients who survive a cancer scare listen carefully to their doctor's advice and make changes to their lifestyle or diet to avoid a second brush with the killer disease.

But one startling study by the American Association for Cancer Research shows that one in four people who have had melanoma -- a cancer of the skin -- does not use sunscreen when outside for more than one hour.

The findings, announced on Monday at the AACR’s annual meeting in Washington, also showed that 2 percent of melanoma sufferers still use tanning beds – something that has been shown in several other studies to lead to skin cancers.

“We expected melanoma survivors to be extraordinarily protective since we know sunlight exposure and tanning increases the risk of a second melanoma,” said Dr. Anees Chagpar, the study’s author. “But what was interesting was that over one quarter said they didn’t use sunscreen. That blew my mind.”

The AACR study was based on the results of the 2010 National Health Interview Study, which asked a cross section of the U.S. population an array of health questions. Chagpar, who is an associate professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine and director of the breast center at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, said her team concentrated on 171 people who said they had a melanoma history, from the 27,120 respondents in the national survey.

Chagpur said she found that generally, skin cancer survivors did better at protecting their skin by using sunscreen, and wearing hats and long sleeves, than people who have never had a melanoma. But she was shocked that 15.4 percent of melanoma sufferers reported rarely or never staying in the shade, while 27.3 percent said they never used sunscreen. Among the general public, 35.4 percent reported never using sun protection.

The study showed 2.1 percent of melanoma survivors even said they had used a tanning bed in the previous year, compared to 5.5 percent of the general public.

According to the American Cancer Society, melanoma is the fifth leading killer of men and the seventh of women among cancers. The Skin Cancer Foundation said that from 1970 to 2009, the incidence of melanoma increased by 800 percent among young women and 400 percent among young men. An estimated 76,690 new cases of invasive melanoma will be diagnosed in the United States in 2013, it said, and an estimated 9,480 people will die of melanoma this year.

Dr. Jack Jacoub, medical oncologist at Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley, Calif., said he found the numbers surprising.

“They say something about American society and you wonder if patients have been properly counseled.”

But Jacoub also said: “There is a fairly large emphasis on beauty in this country…tanning is a reflection of good health, too -- the California lifestyle, you wonder if people know the dangers but choose to ignore them.”

Dr. David Fisher, head of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, said: “It is shattering to see the data, those are high numbers.”

He said, however, that studies show there might be an instinctive desire among humans to seek the sunlight as a source of vitamin D – a phenomenon that has increased in recent decades as the global population has become more mobile. Northern people with fair skin, which is more sensitive to ultra violet rays, have populated sunny places like Australia, Israel and California, where rates of melanoma are high.

Dr. Ali Hendi, a clinical assistant professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, said he sees seven or eight cases of skin cancers every day. “If they are caught early, they are essentially curable,” he said.

“(But) We need to do a better job of educating people, as there is still a public perception that there is such a thing as a healthy tan.

“Every commercial, especially those that want to attract young people, is usually set on a beach or around a pool.”

Hendi, who is also a spokesman for the Skin Cancer Foundation, said data show “people can be hooked on tanning. Sunshine can have a euphoric effect on the brain like other addictive substances.”

Chagpur, the study’s author, said a person with a melanoma was nine times more likely to develop a second skin cancer and she was at a loss to explain why skin cancer survivors would continue risky behavior after a diagnosis. “Maybe it is part of the phenomenon of addictive behavior,” she said, comparing it to lung cancer sufferers smoking. “I don’t have any scientific proof, but I bet there’s a proportion of lung cancer survivors who continue to smoke.”

Psychologists appeared divided on the reasons for such behavior. Dr Tony Farrenkopf, a clinical psychologist and chairman of psychology at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Ore., said it appeared to result from addiction to sun and also a popular culture in which a tanned look equals being healthy. “One of the parameters of addiction is engaging in high-risk behavior. Addicts try to rationalize their behavior, but they know it’s a lie.

“Another parameter (of addiction) is lack of control – a sense that ‘I gotta have it,’” said Farrenkopf, who grew up in Germany where sunbathing was part of a health culture. “It feels so good, and there was that George Hamilton look – tan was healthy,” he said, referring to the perpetually bronzed Hollywood star.

A third reason for melanoma sufferers to avoid warnings about sunlight might be a feeling of resignation. “They say: ‘I already got it, what other harm can it do?’ and that’s not true,” Farrenkopf said.

But Margaret Backman, a retired clinical psychologist and author, who specializes in health issues, did not believe recidivist skin cancer patients were necessarily hooked on the sun.

“Maybe with cigarettes, but tanning is not addictive,” she said. “It’s more denial…and fear of death.

“People minimize the seriousness of it. They think it’s not true, or that it’s not so bad.”

Related:

Tanning as addictive as drinking, study suggests

Many keep smoking after cancer diagnosis

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Tags : cancer finds still study survivors

Bioethicist: It's about time 'morning-after' pill available to all ages

Thank goodness for the courts. A federal judge has now done what the Obama administration had failed to do — make the “morning-after pill” available without prescription to all girls of reproductive age, including those younger than 17.

The emergency contraception pill works to prevent pregnancy up to 72 hours after sexual intercourse. The Food and Drug Administration, which had begun dragging its feet during the Bush administration over approval of this proven safe medicine, had finally cleared it for over the counter sale after a decade of hemming and hawing about nothing.

But, for reasons having everything to do with politics and nothing to do with science, public health or logic, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled FDA’s approval in December of 2011 and said it could not be sold to girls under the age of 17 without a prescription.

The court has now righted that grave wrong.

Sebelius' decision made no sense. The pill is safe and it works. It will reduce unwanted pregnancies and be of particular help to young women who are raped, abused or coerced into sex.

Critics have made two key arguments against the pill—that it is an abortion agent and that it will encourage sex. Neither claim holds a thimble-full of science or logic.

Scientifically, emergency contraception works by prohibiting ovulation or by prohibiting the implantation of an embryo into the lining of the uterus. If an embryo has not implanted it cannot be aborted since it never had a chance to become anything. Emergency contraception is only an abortion in the eyes of those blind to how reproduction works.

And as for encouraging sex, there is no reason to think that girls, some of whom are already sexually active, will be joined by hordes more who will feel free to fool around because there is a pill anymore than there is to think that condoms lead to more underage sex.

The battle over the "morning-after pill" has done nothing to solve the real problem about teenage sex -- the inability of this country to talk about sex. We don’t have enough sound sexual education in our schools, too many of our religious leaders are not effective or credible in spreading wisdom about virtue, responsibility and sex and, a lot of parents fail when it comes to engaging their kids about sex if for no reason other than what they were themselves doing at 14, 15 and 16.

As the judge noted, there is no reason whatsoever to hold this pill hostage to politicians’ whims. It is safe, it works, and it gives a woman who has no other choice, due to contraceptive failure, abuse or rape, a way to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. It ought to be stocked in every emergency room, pharmacy, and police station. And your politicians and clergy should try harder to figure out how to teach our children about sexuality and sexual responsibility without making fools of themselves over a pill.

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., is the head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Related stories:

Judge: Make 'morning-after pill' available to all girls without prescription

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1 in 4 skin cancer survivors skips sunscreen