Jewish medical ethics in the care of the cancer patient

The care of the patient with cancer requires the development not only of a medical plan, but an ethical plan as well. This plan should integrate the physician's and the patient's perceptions of medical and ethical propriety. Jewish biomedical ethical principles are based on the teaching of the Old Testament and its various interpretations. In this paper, I discuss how these principles can be used to help guide the physician caring for the patient with cancer. Other ethical systems could be applied in a similar fashion.     

The precaution adoption process

This article presents a critique of current models of preventive behavior. It discusses a variety of factors that are usually overlooked-including the appearance of costs and benefits over time, the role of cues to action, the problem of competing life demands, and the ways that actual decision behavior differs from the rational ideal implicit in expectancy-value and utility theories. Such considerations suggest that the adoption of new precautions should be viewed as a dynamic process with many determinants. The framework of a model that is able to accommodate these additional factors is described. This alternative model portrays the precaution adoption process as an orderly sequence of qualitatively different cognitive stages. Data illustrating a few of the suggestions made in the article are presented, and implications for prevention programs are discussed.     

Recognition and recall of invisible objects

Three experiments examined recognition and recall of items that people imagined as being invisible. When one item hid another, the hidden item suffered in recognition, but so did the one that remained visible; the demand to imagine items invisibly made both items less recognizable than in control conditions. Cued recall did not depend on whether the visible item or the invisible item was the cue, but it did depend on whether the initial task required relational processing of the items. When both items were invisible in a dark imaginary scene, there was a general loss in all measures of memory, including memory for the scene. None of the results requires recourse to the “out of sight, out of mind” principle that memory depends on the visual characteristics of images. The results attest, instead, to the importance of the informational characteristics of memorial records.     

A maturation effect in response inhibition in the rat

The finding that there are maturational differences between the ability to learn and to perform a task requiring young Wistar rats to inhibit a response was examined. Using an operant task, different from that employed in the previous studies, it was established that the finding was not task specific. The relative contribution of different periods in the early training stage to later savings in learning was also examined. It was confirmed that there is an early performance deficit by weanling rats on tasks requiring them to inhibit a previously learned response in the presence of a discriminative cue. Rats given early training on the task during this period of performance deficit nevertheless showed significant savings in later learning of the task, indicating that they had learned as much in that stage as they would have if given the same training at an age when performance is at the adult level. It was revealed that despite age-related differences in performance it was not so much the age at which early training took place as the amount of training given that affected later savings. The results are discussed in light of evidence of similar differences between the learning and performance of discrimination tasks exhibited by young children.     

Modulation of male mouse genital sniff, attack, and mount behaviors by urogenital substances from estrous females

The modulation of attacks, genital sniffs, and mounts in male SJL/J mice by ovarian-dependent urogenital substances in the urine voided by estrous females was examined. Urogenital substances were applied onto the external urogenital areas of ovariectomized mice. When compared with urine voided by estrous females, which stimulated genital sniffing, mounting, and reduced aggression, bladder urine was ineffective. Genital sniffing and mounting was stimulated by estradiol-17 beta, vaginal fluids, and preputial extract. Aggression was reduced by estradiol-17 beta, urethral catheterized urine, and vaginal fluids. Preputialectomy reduced, but did not eliminate, urinary stimulation of genital sniffing and mounting. Preputial extract stimulated aggression. Urogenital substances from ovariectomized females were ineffective in reducing attacks and stimulating genital sniffs and mounts. It was concluded that the ovarian-dependent chemosignals in the urine voided by estrous females are contributed by the urethra, vagina, and preputial gland, perhaps in part through the excretion of unconjugated estrogens.