A systematic review of the evidence-based psychosocial risk factors for understanding of borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious personality disorder characterized by affective instability, impulsivity and interpersonal disturbance. Currently, intensive research is being conducted concerning the aetiology of BPD, including research on neurobiological, temperamental, psychosocial and cultural risk factors. This study focuses on psychosocial risk factors while other risk factors are taken into account in the discussion of the development of BPD. To our knowledge, no systematic review of the evidence-based medicine literature concerning this theme has been made thus far. However, understanding psychosocial risk factors of BPD is important in order to develop psychotherapeutic treatment models and methods. We provide a systematic review of the literature focusing on psychosocial risk factors for BPD. Utilizing this knowledge, we discuss how these data may be used when studying the development of borderline personality disorder and the treatment of borderline personality disorder.     

GLOBAL BIOETHICS: TRANSNATIONAL EXPERIENCES AND ISLAMIC BIOETHICS

In the 1970s “bioethics” emerged as a new interdisciplinary discourse on medicine, health care, and medical technologies, primarily in Western, developed countries. The main focus was on how individual patients could be empowered to cope with the challenges of science and technology. Since the 1990s, the main source of bioethical problems is the process of globalization, particularly neo‐liberal market ideology. Faced with new challenges such as poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, hunger, pandemics, and organ trafficking the bioethical discourse of empowering individuals is no longer sufficient. Global bioethics nowadays is concerned with applying and implementing a universal ethical framework. Islamic bioethics has contributed to creating such framework (exemplified in the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights) while at the same time it is continuously articulating and interpreting this framework in specific settings and contexts.     

The Successful Treatment of Diurnal and Nocturnal Enuresis and Encopresis

Two children, a boy aged six and a girl aged five-and-one half, were treated for diurnal enuresis. The boy was also treated for bedwetting and the girl for encopresis. The treatment program was conducted by the children's parents and featured daily, weekly, and monthly rewards, a feedback "star chart" and nonexclusionary timeout for accidents. The girl's daytime wetting and soiling were treated simultaneously with soiling being eliminated first. After the boy's daytime wetting had been eliminated, he was given dry-bed training (Azrin, Sneed, & Foxx, 1974) with equal success. Long term follow-ups revealed that all forms of toileting accidents had been eliminated.     

Family Functioning in Pediatric Trichotillomania

Little is known about how pediatric trichotillomania (TTM), a clinically significant and functionally impairing disorder, is impacted by, and impacts, family functioning. We explored dimensions of family functioning and parental attitudes in a sample of children and adolescents who participated in an Internet-based survey and satisfied conservative diagnostic criteria for TTM (ages 10–17, n = 133). Analyses reveal trends toward higher levels of dysfunction in families of TTM youth relative to normative samples, although no differences achieved statistical significance. However, scores on the Family Assessment Measure and the Attitudes Toward My Child scales were similar to those in clinical samples of youth with cystic fibrosis, an eating disorder, or an anxiety disorder. While these results indicate that family functioning and parental attitudes in TTM were not generally or extremely problematic, family issues may nevertheless warrant particular clinical evaluation and attention in more severe TTM cases.     

Combined Individual Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Parent Training for Childhood Depression: 2- to 3-Year Follow-Up

Fourteen children with significant depressive symptoms from an open clinical trial of Primary and Secondary Control Enhancement Training augmented with Caregiver–Child Relationship Enhancement Training, participated in a 2- to 3-year follow-up assessment. The results suggested that the significant decreases in depressive symptoms observed at posttreatment were maintained at 2- to 3-year follow-up. Mothers' reports of significant improvement of child psychosocial functioning were also maintained, providing social validation of the effects. Pretreatment child-rated mother-child relations predicted depressive symptoms at 2- to 3-year follow-up. These long-term data support the use of the combined intervention and suggest the need for further research on caregiver involvement in treatment.     

Nonwork orientations relative to career: A multidimensional measure

Although scholars typically assess an individual's nonwork role orientation relative to career as a unitary construct, we argue that a person's orientation toward nonwork roles is multi-dimensional. Drawing on a literature review demonstrating the need for improved constructs capturing changing relationships between career and multi-faceted nonwork orientations, and empirical data from three studies with samples at different career stages (early and mid-career), we use factor analysis and data from qualitative and longitudinal studies to develop three unique scales to assess a person's nonwork priorities relative to career orientations: family, personal life, and community service. There were generally positive relationships between the protean career scales and the new nonwork role orientation measures. Future research should move beyond a binary work–life or work–family models and include multi-dimensional measures of nonwork orientations relative to career.     

Tabloid Brand Medicine Chests: Selling Health and Hygiene for the British Tropical Colonies

During the late Victorian and early Edwardian period a surge of commodities went on display and were advertised throughout the empire. One such commodity was the Burroughs Wellcome & Co. (BWC) Tabloid brand medicine chest. The marketing of the chest was intimately related to BWC's economic and political interests in empire, contributing to a discourse of tropicality and belief in western progress and white European superiority in Britain's tropical colonies. BWC used their scientific and medical authority to further differentiate and fix western culture and the identity of white Europeans, in opposition to the tropics and their inhabitants. Despite BWC's claims to the medical and scientific superiority of these chests, the majority of their contents were in use for hundreds, if not thousands of years, often deriving from the very contexts white Europeans were supposedly civilising with their aid. BWC's advertisement and promotion of their chests, in this case, reveals processes of hybridisation between supposedly distinct cultures. The selling of Tabloid brand medicine chests contributed to a belief in western and white European superiority, but closer investigation of their contents demonstrates how such claims were, in the end, inherently problematic and unstable. Such an analysis shows that the ultimate medical value of the chests did not derive from unbiased and empirical processes, but from academic, state and industrial authority in relation to Britain's imperial ambitions.     

肿瘤是限铁机制的体现,其功能是防卫细菌——解读肿瘤之谜

通过哲学思辨质疑肿瘤是异己的判断.列举肿瘤的特征,探索肿瘤的实质.通过对限铁机制和铁致癌机理的研究,对铁致癌以及铁是癌细胞营养素的假设提出质疑.经过辩证思考推断,肿瘤是对坏血酸遗传缺陷的代偿性补救措施,是限铁机制的体现,是进化适应的特征,它的功能是聚集游离铁,不让细菌获得铁,以降低细菌感染的风险.同时提供证据,证明肿瘤确有降低细菌感染风险的功效.继而提出细胞癌变的可能机理,并据此解释肿瘤何以转移,何以避免免疫摧毁.最后提出对肿瘤发病机制的定义,并提出预防肿瘤的关键措施.     

D.H. Lawrence's The daughter-in-law: Transforming a family system

Abstract

D.H. Lawrence's play The daughter-in-law, written in 1912, explores underlying, implicit conflict within a family. Set in a small mining town in England, the family consists of Mrs. Gascoyne, her sons Luther and Joe, and her daughter-in-law, Minnie, Luther's wife. The central conflict is between Mrs. Gascoyne and Minnie, who challenges her mother-in-law's control over her sons, who also compete with each other for the love and recognition of their mother. Joe, the youngest son, perturbs the family system and acts as a mediator, functioning as a family therapist. He sets a process in motion through which the rigid family alliances are challenged and ultimately realigned. Mrs. Gascoyne's self-image as a perfect, self-sacrificing, self-righteous mother ultimately is transformed, and she accepts Minnie as a family member. Brandchaft's concept of “pathological accommodation” explicates how enmeshed family members can collide, and thereby stultify their personal development. As Joe plays his role of “family therapist,” the family dynamic changes. Through the process of rupture and repair, each family member begins to recognize the needs of the other, and thereby a path for differentiation, individuation, and autonomy becomes possible for them.     

Why do people use different forms of complementary medicine? Multivariate associations between treatment and illness beliefs and complementary medicine use

This study investigated associations between complementary medicine use and treatment and illness beliefs. Previously validated questionnaire measures of treatment beliefs, illness beliefs, and complementary medicine use were presented and advertised online. Completed questionnaires were received from 247 participants. Logistic regression analysis showed that demographic characteristics, treatment beliefs, and illness beliefs accounted for approximately 36% of the variance in complementary medicine use. Separate analyses were conducted to predict use of different types of complementary medicine. The strength of associations between beliefs and complementary medicine use was related to the type of complementary medicine used. The results suggest that people use complementary medicine because they are attracted to it rather than because they are disillusioned with orthodox medicine, and that both treatment and illness beliefs have an important role in explaining why people use complementary medicine.