Free Republic

Given the vested interests lurking all over the current medical landscape, it is no wonder that the scientific method is so often mauled a little in transit. Cases of data ignored or manipulated to serve an agenda are like muggings in a bad neighborhood: you hear about them all the time, but in fact relatively few are ever openly examined. And so even readers with no personal or professional connection to the sexual abuse of children may be edified by “The Trauma Myth,” a short tale of one such particularly fraught episode. For a graduate research project at Harvard in...

San Francisco (AP) -- Researchers could be liable for damages if they obtain private information through false pretenses, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday. The case, which attracted widespread attention by media groups who urged the court to dismiss it, concerns a University of California, Irvine, psychologist who published an article about a Solano County girl, who at 17 allegedly remembered she was sexually abused by her mother as a child. The psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus, set out to investigate an article written by another scholar who suggested the anonymous girl had repressed memory. Through court records, Loftus learned the girl's...

<p>The sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church has raised the specter of a new round of emotional debates on repressed memories, which some people claimed to have "recovered" when making abuse charges.</p> <p>One of the members of the U.S. bishops panel to police the abuse problem is a well-known critic of therapists who claim to have evoked recovered memories, suggesting the bishops are preparing for this debate.</p>

<p>If prosecutors' evidence against the Rev. Paul Shanley comes largely from the account of a man who says he blocked out the alleged abuse for years, their case could hinge on the legally problematic issue of whether ''recovered'' memories can be admitted as evidence at trial.</p>