C.A.W.

I always enjoy reading strange and interesting news – anything that isn’t immediately depressing is a good start! Apparently Samoa is going to jump its time forward by an entire day to try and boost its economy and trade prospects. At the moment it is almost a day behind nearby countries such as Australia making it difficult to trade (although I’m not sure why). It’s now going to move itself forward a day to be three hours in front of Australia. It can do this by switching sides on the international date line.

The main reason – according to Samoa – is that they are losing a day’s trading because by the time its Friday in Samoa the countries they trade most with are already on their weekend. This makes sense I suppose – although it does seem like a bit of a drastic measure.

I wonder how the Samoan people are going to react when they lose a day? I tried to imagine how I’d feel about it if it happened here, and ended up deciding that I probably wouldn’t care that much! A day isn’t going to change anything really, although I don’t know how it would actually work when they decide to switch it. The logistics of it (think of all the computer systems etc) are going to be a nightmare I’d imagine!

If you use Twitter then you’ve probably heard about all the super injunction news going on at the moment. If you haven’t, then a short summary would be that a lot of celebrities have got super injunctions preventing the media from releasing certain negative news stories about them. This has lead to twitter accounts being setup to release information about the celebrities so that the injunction becomes almost useless.

There’s no way I’m going to talk about any of the people mentioned on Twitter here – I don’t think that just because someone is using Twitter that they are immune from prosecution. I don’t really understand the law behind it – but surely if there is an injunction then Twitter is just a different type of mass media and still under the same law?

I do understand that people are very worried about the fact that the media seems to be being controlled by people who’re rich – no one without a lot of money would be able to afford a super injunction – but I’m going to be closely following what happens with this case. It’ll be interesting to see whether any of the people on Twitter re charged.

The other problem is can you really trust someone on Twitter who comes out with a story? I bet if I went onto Twitter now an used the right hashtag to make up a story then it would be around the internet in minutes and accepted as fact. You can’t trust the newspapers that much, but they have more to lose from lying than some guy on a new twitter account.

I was reading an article earlier today about how doctors are likely to change their treatment if they were the patient. In the US, a team did a survey of doctors and asked them what their treatment would be for various different medical situations. They then asked the doctors what their treatment would be if they were the patient and the answers were noticeably different.

What I thought was interesting was that the doctors were more likely to recommend dangerous treatments (but with a higher chance of a good outcome) if they were the patient. In contrast, for regular patients they were more likely to advise the safer options that had less risk but were also less likely to result in a symptom free life for the patient.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the doctors are treating themselves better though – in fact it seems as though the doctors were more likely to make the right choice for other people than themselves.

I think this could be for a number of factors. The obvious one is that doctors obviously feel a great responsibility for their patients and would feel very guilty if something went wrong. This means that many are more likely go for safer options to avoid the potential guilt of making the wrong choice.

Even so, I think it’s important that patients are given the chance to choose between the various treatments. A doctor should outline all the potential issues with each treatment and then let the patient decide what level of risk is acceptable for a potentially symptom free life.