Doctor's Orders?

A couple of quasi-medical links worth noting...Karen Houppert in Salon considers the factors that may have led to a schizophrenic woman, Otty Sanchez, to not only kill but consume parts of her newborn baby. In accounting for why Sanchez reportedly was off of her meds (and according to the article claimed to have been hearing voices telling her to do the deed), Houppert suggested that a doctor probably told her to stop taking them due to breastfeeding. Say what?

It is not for me to comment on Sanchez's specific case beyond saying generally that it is overwhelmingly more likely that she was off of her meds because, in the case of schizophrenia and other severe and persistent mental illnesses, non-compliance is more the rule than the exception. When one considers that the disorders in question often involve poor self-insight, and that the medications are often extremely expensive and have significant side effects, non-compliance ceases to be surprising. I have no idea whether she was even in active treatment around the time of her pregnancy or delivery, but by the time the baby was born the only potentially life-saving intervention would have been social services intervention to ascertain her mental status and fitness for motherhood at the time.

Houppert commendably offers a view of "killer moms" as desperate and hopeless women rather than as amoral monsters. However, in our contemporary glorification of maternal instinct it is easy to overlook the fact that infanticide, far from being unnatural, has in fact been a routine practice in numerous "primitive" cultures in various times and places. While the practice seems to make no evolutionary sense at first blush, it actually does inasmuch as infanticide usually happens when a mother (often a particularly young one with poor social and financial support) feels overwhelmed and unable to raise the baby safely. In that case, it makes evolutionary sense for the mother to punt, so to speak, and preserve her own well-being as she can live on to reproduce again. This is obviously not to condone a heinous deed (murder and rape are "natural" as well), but it is to argue that it is not inherently psychologically puzzling.

In another vein of risky behavior, a local story looks at the persistent popularity of tanning beds despite new data suggesting that they dramatically increase the lifetime risk of skin cancer. However, a 78-year-old woman in the article justifies her habit (I have never had the pleasure of visiting a tanning salon, but I never would have expected to encounter the 70-and-over crowd there).

The reasons for this practice are interesting. Some just thumb their nose at medical recommendations, which is a useful reminder that there are values in life apart from cautious self-preservation. Tanning salon operators (who might be said to be biased) maintain that their services are actually healthful inasmuch as they provide vitamin D in a controlled fashion (according to the article some folks actually arrive with doctors' notes advising them to get more vitamin D).

There is also the fact that while skin cancer is common, and undoubtedly more common with tanning bed use, it is also an eminently treatable cancer in most cases when caught early. I don't mean to trivialize it, but apart from the rare melanoma, your average skin cancer is not, say, pancreatic or ovarian cancer.

In an overview of biotechnology's effects on the human body, William Saletan in the New York Times points out that many current and developing medical interventions seek to compensate for risky behaviors, from overeating to running on bad knees. So my inference is that advances in the diagnosis and treatment of skin cancer may have the eventual paradoxical effect of boosting tanning salon profits.