Cancer Survivors’ Spiritual Well-Being and Use of Complementary Methods: A Report from the American Cancer Society’s Studies of Cancer Survivors

We examined associations between spiritual well-being and CAM use among 4,139 cancer survivors. We also explored the classification of religious/spiritual practices (R/S) as CAMs and alternative subscale structures of the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy—Spiritual Well-being (FACIT-Sp). We evaluated three aspects of spirituality, Faith, Peace, and Meaning, and use of 19 CAMs in 5 domains. Mind–body methods were subdivided into R/S and non-R/S. All FACIT-Sp factors were associated with CAM use, but in different directions: Meaning and Faith were positively associated; Peace was negatively associated. Peace was negatively associated with R/S CAMs, but not non-R/S CAMs. The prevalence of CAM use dropped from 79.3 to 64.8% when R/S items were excluded. These findings confirm an association between spiritual well-being and CAM use, including some non-R/S CAMs, and provide evidence of the benefits of using the three-factor FACIT-Sp solution and treating R/S CAMs as a separate category.     

Religion and Health: Making Sense of a Disheveled Literature

A growing body of research suggests that religion may exert a beneficial effect on both physical and mental health. Unfortunately, the rapid growth of this literature has made it difficult to get a clear picture of what has been accomplished. This issue is addressed by presenting a conceptual model that focuses on the needs that are satisfied by religion. In the process, an effort is made to show how this conceptual scheme can be used to add greater coherence to the field.     

Reliability of self-reported attachment style in patients with severe psychopathology

Little is known about whether severe psychopathology influences the assessment of self-reported attachment style. Fifty-eight randomly selected adult psychiatric inpatients completed the Experiences in Close Relationship questionnaire (ECR; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998) and were administered the 24-item Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS; Ventura et al., 1993) and the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS; Hamilton, 1960) at both admission and discharge. The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID-I; First, Spitzer, Gibbon, & Williams, 1996) was used to establish Axis I diagnoses. The ECR scales showed good internal consistency and absolute stability both in patients with (n = 24) and without (n = 34) a psychotic disorder. Relative stability was only fair among patients with psychotic disorders but good among patients without psychotic disorders. Neither higher BPRS or HDRS scores, nor the presence of a psychotic disorder, significantly reduced the retest reliability of the ECR scales. These findings suggest that self-report measures might provide a reliable assessment of attachment style in patients with severe psychopathology, except for the most severely impaired patients.     

Gray Matters: A Deployed Physician’s Perspective on Combat Medicine in Iraq

A female physician who was serving as a first-year medicine resident in Manhattan in September 2001 writes this paper. It details her experience of signing up for military service as a result of the September 11th attack on the United States. She lays out the surroundings, atmosphere, and reactions of those around her during the attack and details her own personal motivations for joining the military, her need to take control and help those in need heal while also trying to heal herself. Grateful, yet haunted by her experience, she provides an intimate glimpse into her time serving as a combat physician at a trauma hospital in Balad, Iraq during the 2007 military surge. A trained geriatrician and palliative care physician she recounts the stories of several patients that have forever shaped her life and explores the contradictions and ethical challenges she faced while caring for them ultimately struggling with the uncertainty of whether what she was truly doing was good for those she served or herself.     

Inquisitive Logic

This paper investigates a generalized version of inquisitive semantics. A complete axiomatization of the associated logic is established, the connection with intuitionistic logic and several intermediate logics is explored, and the generalized version of inquisitive semantics is argued to have certain advantages over the system that was originally proposed by Groenendijk (2009) and Mascarenhas (2009).     

How to Precisify Quantifiers

I here argue that Ted Sider's indeterminacy argument against vagueness in quantifiers fails. Sider claims that vagueness entails precisifications, but holds that precisifications of quantifiers cannot be coherently described: they will either deliver the wrong logical form to quantified sentences, or involve a presupposition that contradicts the claim that the quantifier is vague. Assuming (as does Sider) that the “connectedness” of objects can be precisely defined, I present a counter-example to Sider's contention, consisting of a partial, implicit definition of the existential quantifier that in effect sets a given degree of connectedness among the putative parts of an object as a condition upon there being something (in the sense in question) with those parts. I then argue that such an implicit definition, taken together with an “auxiliary logic” (e.g., introduction and elimination rules), proves to function as a precisification in just the same way as paradigmatic precisifications of, e.g., “red”. I also argue that with a quantifier that is stipulated as maximally tolerant as to what mereological sums there are, precisifications can be given in the form of truth-conditions of quantified sentences, rather than by implicit definition.