I want to know what you think.

Eight states are considering passing legislation that would require random drug testing for people to receive food stamps, unemployment benefits or welfare.

Click here to read the article, “States Consider Drug Tests for Welfare Recipients”

Supporters of this legislation feel that it’s necessary in response to an ever-growing population of Americans applying for government-funded aid as a result of the economic downturn. These lawmakers feel it would help to identify the potential health risks and the probability of those receiving aid getting back on their feet when the economy turns around — and that it would also send a clear message: In America, you don’t get something for nothing.

Why not get tested? Millions of Americans are drug tested at random for their jobs every day — the same Americans whose taxes are funding government assistance programs like food stamps, unemployment and welfare. And as American citizens, we need to take responsibility for our own well-being and that of our families.

Now, I’m not getting down on the millions of Americans who may be down on their luck, or for whatever reason, must rely on government aid to help them through tough times while they try their best to get back on their feet. But then if that’s the case, a random drug test should not be a problem, right?

But there are two sides to every argument — and there may be a couple of questions worth asking when considering this proposal …

What about the unintentional effects that limiting aid to a family — especially one with children — may have in failing to provide them with necessities as basic as food on their plates? We don’t want to punish the children for their parents’ actions. But then, in some cases, with severely drug-addicted parents, how can we be sure that the money is going to support the children, rather than to support the habit?

Just last year, a contest in southern California called “There Ought to Be a Law,” yielded a disabled 16-year-old winner whose life challenges inspired his proposal of legislation to mandate random drug testing for all pregnant women on welfare. R.J. Feild was born weighing just 2 pounds, 2 ounces with traces of heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine, alcohol and cocaine in his system due to his mother’s drug use while she was pregnant.  And while the “R.J.’s Law” never made it into legislation, it brought to light an important issue.

But then what happens to people who test positive for drugs while on public assistance? Would the states flat-out refuse help forever, or would they help them get into a rehabilitation center to kick the habit? Right now, most states can’t even meet their Medicaid requirements for people to get routine health care. Perhaps a better plan might be to pump the government aid they would normally receive directly into rehabilitating them.

So I’d like to know what you think, because at the end of the day, we’re the ones funding these programs.

Hey ladies! If you’re going for a dental cleaning with your friendly, neighborhood dentist, and he starts fondling your breasts, trust me, this is no medical therapy!

Yet this is the excuse that Dr. Mark Anderson has given for his actions in the felony charges that he is facing in the state of California. He is charged with 19 felony charges for skin-to-skin contact and one misdemeanor for allegedly touching a patient’s breasts over her clothing. So far, fourteen women have come forward.

The attorney for the defendant told jurors that his client massaged women’s chests as part of a medical treatment. I wonder what kind of “treatment” calls for that?!

Let’s face it ― this is just another example of negligent behavior on the part of a medical professional. It is important for patients to understand that if they feel uncomfortable during a physical examination they should speak out and ask questions.

I also truly believe that a chaperone should always be present during a physical examination so that both the patient and the doctor are protected from unsubstantiated allegations.

I’m going to be following this trial because I can’t wait to see how the defending attorney is going to prove that his client’s actions were part of a medical treatment. But you know lawyers, they will give the jury “an act with lots of flash in it, and the reaction will be passionate.”

The more I hear about Dr. Michael Kamrava, who practices some facsimile of reproductive medicine in California, the more outraged I become.

From what I’ve been reading, I am already convinced that he should probably be considered for malpractice based on the Nadya Suleman case because of a departure from standard medical practice. Consider that the American Society for Reproductive Medicine suggests one or two embryo transfers maximum for a woman of Nadya’s age (33), and she received six embryos. Consider that in vitro fertilization, a billion dollar industry which has doubled in terms of procedures to 135,000 with 50,000 live births over the past decade, has also been policed increasingly by the ASRM and that multiple births (triplets or more) have decreased from 7 percent to 2 percent over this period of time. We don’t have proper laws in the U.S. to police medical criminals like Octodoc, but we do have standards of care.

A malpractice claim is unlikely though, because the patient, Nadya Suleman, doesn’t seem inclined to bring a suit. But even if she signed a consent for the embryo transfer, it also seems likely that she is suffering from a psychiatric disorder and was not correctly informed about the risks. Does Nadya know that the risk of postpartum depression in a normal woman, even without her social and financial difficulties, is close to 25 percent?

I was getting ready to blog about the need for the state of California to go after Octodoc’s license on ethical grounds (each state has a medical ethics committee which governs licensure), when I heard about the second case. A 49-year-old woman was apparently impregnated by seven donor eggs (from a woman in her twenties which increases their chance of being viable substantially). She is now carrying quadruplets.

The ASRM suggests no more than five embryos for a woman in her 40s, and if you add to that the fact that the woman herself reportedly only wanted one child, and at her age is at risk for medical complications including high blood pressure and stroke, the handling of her case appears to be another abomination.

Octodoc’s low success rate at successful births is no excuse for tawdry practices. I’m glad to hear that ASRM is investigating him. The state of California should stop him in his tracks.

Dr. Marc Siegel is an internist and associate professor of medicine at the NYU School of Medicine. He is a FOX News medical contributor and writes a health column for LA Times, where he examines TV and movies for medical accuracy. Dr. Siegel is the author of “False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear“ and “Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About the Next Pandemic.”  Read more at www.doctorsiegel.com

Do no harm. That’s one of the oaths doctors have to take and should always practice under – but as more facts come out about this woman in California who just gave birth to octuplets, I’m beginning to wonder whether that oath was forgotten.

I’m still not clear as to how this mother ended up with eight children, but what we do know, is that she had some sort of fertility treatments. This story leaves me with many questions.

First: Did she have a need for fertility treatments? Here’s someone that already had six children under the age of eight. When you advise a woman to undergo fertility treatments, you have to take her previous obstetrical history into consideration, and whether any treatments are going to put her life or the life of the potential newborn(s) in danger.

Second: What kinds of fertility treatments are available? Well, for the most part, you either have in vitro fertilization (IVF) or ovarian stimulation. If it was indeed IVF, I don’t know any physician in his or her right mind that would place eight embryos inside a woman’s womb in 2009 — especially knowing all the potential risk that an octuplet pregnancy can bring on. In many countries around the world, IVF implantation is limited to one or two embryos.

With hyperstimulation on the other hand, physicians are able to recognize a situation where significant stimulation of follicles has occurred, and most likely, they will decide not proceed with the completion of the cycle due to the potential dangers associated with large multiple births.

In either case, ending up with eight fetuses is not something that is medically indicated, but rather an accident —or better yet — lack of proper medical care.

Now I know the challenges that physicians and their staffs face when dealing with infertility issues in patients that deeply desire to have a child. But choosing the right technique, and psychologically evaluating the person that you’re about to treat, is part of that oath of doing no harm.

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Nadya Suleman, who recently gave birth to octuplets in California with the help of fertility treatments, supposedly loves children.  That’s what her own mother, Angela, says, according to the “New York Post.”

The Post also quotes Suleman’s friend, Allison Frickert, as saying, “Her whole life, she couldn’t wait to be a mom.  That was her No. 1 goal.”

Suleman, 33, already had six children, which were conceived with the help of fertility treatment.  So now she has 14 children and reportedly an undergraduate degree in child and adolescent development and is pursuing a master’s degree in counseling. 

Nadya, here’s a look inside the mind of a single woman with six children, living in her parents’ 1,550 square-foot bungalow, who decides to have eight more children.  Since you aren’t going to class anymore, feel free to listen.

This isn’t about loving children.  This is about being completely and utterly lost in your own psychological drama that has absolutely nothing to do with truly nurturing the human beings you are creating.  These children, each of whom I pray overcomes the odds and becomes competent and empathetic human beings, are the expression of your own unresolved psychological troubles.  I wouldn’t presume to make a formal diagnosis, but they may be the product of obsessive-compulsive thinking—an irrational idea that “one more daughter will make me complete” or something as mundane as the idea that “the number six isn’t lucky for me.”  Even more likely, they are a distraction from core, unresolved emotional issues you are hell-bent on not addressing.  With enough children and enough chaos, after all, you won’t have to wonder if you yourself were well-enough-loved or well-enough-nurtured as a child or whether you developed into the person you had hoped to become. 

Using 14 kids to avoid your own thoughts and feelings isn’t much different for you than using alcohol or heroin to bury your emotions.  The big difference is for the fourteen kids who will grow up trying to make sense out of the absurd circumstances into which they were born—not as products of a loving relationship, but as products of you trying to use motherhood as a drug to distance yourself from your own internal suffering.

Now, your suffering has been multiplied.  Your suffering has eight new names to add to the six that already existed.  Your pain now has fourteen faces.  And all this, rather than looking at your own face in the mirror, into your own eyes and your own heart to find out what was missing, what had been injured, what needed real understanding and real repair, not real reproducing.

How could your fertility doctors have missed the barren psychological landscape from which they were extracting new human beings?  How could medical ethics not have caught up with medical technology, to the extent that a single mother can decide to have fourteen children with the help of a small army of health care personnel?  Will the doctors line up to pay for the clothing and childcare and education the children will need?  Will they volunteer their time to play with the kids and give them the quiet time and undivided attention that will allow them to feel secure expressing their thoughts and feelings?  Will they be there at bedtime to read them each their favorite stories?  No. 

This delivery of octuplets isn’t about the octuplets at all.  It isn’t about loving or mothering or doctoring.  It’s about doing what each person in this strange drama wanted to do—for herself or himself.  It’s about not thinking and not feeling, and fertilizing fourteen young lives with the unpaid debt of that emotional blindness.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com or e-mail him at info@keithablow.com.

Congratulations mom, on the birth of your eight beautiful children! Being the resident obstetrician here at FOX News, my staff has been asking me all day today “Oh, Dr. Manny did you hear about the lady who had octuplets in California? Isn’t that amazing?”

And yet, despite the fact that I’m very happy for these parents, and I’m very proud of the physicians and nurses that took care of this patient, I also realize that this was a very high-risk pregnancy that could have easily ended up with significant problems. That’s the topic I want to talk about.

Many times we tend to focus on these medical miracles, and we often do not realize all the potential complications that could arise when facing challenging clinical scenarios.

Take, for instance, the story that we did a couple of years ago about the woman who had twins at the age of 60 — after that story ran, I started getting phone calls from women all over the world, asking how they too could have children after the age of 55.

I assisted in that delivery, and what many people don’t know is that that there were many issues we had to deal with having a patient over the age of 60 delivering twins. The same thing is true for anybody that has a multiple pregnancy because a woman’s womb was generally made to birth only one child at a time. When we artificially enhance that number by 3, 4, 5 or 6, we are playing Russian roulette.

The most common complication for multiple pregnancies is prematurity. A premature infant has a significant risk of developmental delays, visual problems and hearing problems.

There are also a number of maternal complications that can arise from multiple pregnancies like high blood pressure, diabetes and significant post-partum bleeding.

So the take-away is this: Medicine has a beginning and an end. But somehow, many people tend to forget the middle part – and that is the part that must be clearly understood by the patient and physician for the miracle to take place.

Monday evening, 500 or so residents of Covina, California gathered at the Royal Oak Intermediate School to discuss the horrific Christmas Eve slayings committed by Bruce Pardo.  Pardo, dressed as Santa Claus, walked into a family gathering at his ex-in-laws’ home, shooting a 9-year-old girl in the face and then killing nine other people.  Before escaping and committing suicide himself, he burned the house to the ground.

According to police, Pardo had hoped to kill other people, too, including his mother, his wife’s divorce attorney and the attorney’s family.  They believe he had been planning the carnage since June — perhaps even earlier.

Because of Pardo, 13 young people are orphans.  Still others are without one of their parents.

What makes a man, who appeared to others to be quirky, but friendly, commit such an atrocity?  How is it possible that the same person who had participated in a seemingly rational way in divorce proceedings could have done so with mayhem on his mind?  How could he have wished the owner of his favorite coffee shop—the Montrose Bakery and Café—a merry Christmas just several hours before the slayings?

We know some of the stresses Pardo was facing.  He had lost his job.  His marriage had dissolved in the wake of his wife having learned he had abandoned a son she knew nothing about, a son left brain-damaged by nearly drowning while Pardo was to be watching him.  Perhaps Pardo felt lingering guilt and grief over that tragedy.

Yet, in my 16 years as a psychiatrist, I have met hundreds of men and women who have shouldered equal or greater psychological burdens without their circumstances triggering violence of any kind.  I have been privileged to see many of them face the loss of children, homes, marriages or their own health by looking inside themselves for strength — and finding it.

Pardo apparently had no such reserves of character upon which to draw, no hope for the future, no empathy left for others.  He seems to fit into that category of men I have met in my work as a forensic psychiatrist who, faced with painful changes over which they lacked control, came to see their life stories — including the people in them — as ending, done with … over.  It is as if they were collecting scripts from actors in a play that was going badly and being shut down.  Then the curtain fell.

For Bruce Pardo, I can theorize (even without interviewing him), there had to be a deep-seeded belief — perhaps an unconscious one — that loss of control or perceived abandonment had always meant chaos and terror.  There may have been unavoidable suffering in his own life as a child, suffering he could do nothing to prevent, suffering that left him, long into his adult life, with a child’s intense brand of terror at being powerless.  There can be no consoling such a “man” when events — even those of his own making — seem to be rendering him isolated, subject to forces (like job loss and divorce decrees) he cannot bend to his infantile will, impotent.

Those feelings of impotence, I believe, may have been the ones turned upside-down and inside-out in the months leading to the Christmas Eve carnage in Covina.  They may have been the ones that became fuel for a pathological and sinister plot that, in his own twisted mind, turned Bruce Pardo, for one terrible night, into the strongest man on earth, wielding the power of life and death over others, as though the frailties in his own psyche could somehow be camouflaged, even beyond his own recognition, by a storm of bullets and shield of flame.

When Suzanne Penney was diagnosed with leukemia after she battled breast cancer, she decided to undergo an injection of umbilical stem cells – and the procedure saved her life, KNSD-TV reported Thursday.

Penney, who lives in Carlsbad, Calif., contracted leukemia as a result of the aggressive chemotherapy she received for her breast cancer.

“When information about stem cells first came out I was against it,” Penney told KNSD-TV. “I always thought, ‘don’t mess with Mother Nature, and there’s going to be a bunch of cloned people walking around.’”

But, today, as Penney recovers in the hospital, doctors tell her that her leukemia is in remission.  

Illegal cheese being imported from Mexico has been blamed for sickening a number of Hispanic immigrants, including many children, in Southern California, ktla.com is reporting.

The unpasteurized cheese, which is tainted with a rare form of tuberculosis called Mycobacterium bovis, is common in Mexico and often made at home by immigrant families, health officials say.

Mycobacterium bovis is the bacteria responsible for causing TB in cattle and is related to M. tuberculosis, which causes TB in humans. Mycobacterium bovis is able to jump species and cause TB in humans. It causes less than 1 percent of tuberculosis cases in humans in the U.S., according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Symptoms of the disease include fever, night sweats, and weight loss. It is treated with a combination of antibiotics.

In San Diego County, the number of cases is on the rise among children who are believed to have consumed the tainted cheese, which is called queso fresco cheese or bathtub cheese, ktla is reporting.