The Goal of Prevention

The goal of prevention is... nothing. Not to have a terrorist attack; not to have a heart attack; not to have a problem. So how do we know if prevention strategies work? Maybe time alone accomplished the goal?

Laboratory experiments control for the "time alone" factor by having waiting lists of people who receive no intervention. They also randomize the sample population in order to ensure that the results apply to as many different people as possible. Finally, the best experiments use a "double-blind" procedure whereby even the experimenters do not know who is receiving treatment and who is not.

Real life, however, is not the lab. We want to treat as many people as possible to alleviate and prevent suffering. We do not randomize our treatments but rather treat all of the candidates who seek help. We do not know for sure if our intervention is what caused the improvement or prevented future pain. We leave that question to the scientists.

Instead we look at life as a series of opportunities. When someone steps forward there is an opportunity to make a change. If they're falling, we can help pick them up; if they're going too fast, we can help them slow down. There are many possible ways that we can act to make a difference in someone's life.

With G-d's help, we will not see what we saw at the beginning.

Hazards of Divorce

We all know the price that children pay when parents are divorced. They may act out in anger, become apathetic or unmotivated in school, and blame themselves or show signs of depression. A new study highlights another aspect of the fallout.

According to a Canadian study at the University of Alberta, divorce can be a predictor of subsequent methylphenidate (ritalin) use by children of broken families. In this study, comprised of 4,700 children from 1994-2000, 6% of children whose parents divorced took ritalin versus only 3% of children whose parents remained married.

Divorce has been called "the modern plague." We need to do all that we can to prevent and ameliorate the forces that lead to it.