From BBC News

Lords rule on Lotto rapist victim

A victim of millionaire rapist Iorworth Hoare is due to find out whether she has won her 20-year fight for compensation from her attacker.

Previously lawyers for the woman, known as Mrs A, said they were optimistic the House of Lords would make a landmark ruling in favour of her appeal.

Hoare, 53, was jailed for life in May 1989 for the attempted rape of Mrs A in Roundhay Park, Leeds.

That's the first thing that's not fair: people who are jailed for life should stay in jail until they are dead. For some crimes (such as murder, repeated rape offences etc) rehabilitation and release are not appropriate. It shouldn't matter whether a person is later judged to be no longer a danger to society, because the crimes they have committed in the past are so bad that they require ongoing punishment (lack of liberty) as a deterrent to others and as a reassurance to the rest of society that life and personal safety are of value. If life meant life, the capital punishment lobby would be deprived of one of its arguments. Of course, the crappy government might have to build more prisons...

He won £7m when he bought a lottery ticket while on day release from jail.

Hoare was also jailed several times for a string of sex attacks, including rape, two attempted rapes and three indecent assaults, during the 1970s and 1980s.

He now lives in a £700,000 mansion in Ponteland, Northumberland.

Historic claims

In 2005, a High Court judge ruled that a compensation claim by Mrs A was outside the legal six-year limit. The Appeal Court upheld that decision.

The Law Lords have been examining whether it is fair to preclude claims six years after an attack, or, in child abuse cases, more than six years after the victim reaches 18.

A ruling in favour of Mrs A could pave the way for thousands of actions by victims of sex abuse to make historic claims against their attackers, some dating back many years.

Mrs A was awarded £5,000 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board after she was attacked by Hoare in 1988.

She was ordered to pay his legal fees after unsuccessful attempts to bring a case for compensation in the High Court and Court of Appeal.

This doesn't sound very fair either. This case is of importance to the whole legal system and our democracy, so it's pretty rough on her that she's supposed to then give money to her millionaire near-rapist.

However, the whole idea of being able to claim at any time isn't a good one, I think. Again, if life meant life, maybe Mrs A wouldn't be looking for compensation, since she says in The Times:

“I decided to take this claim forward in order to fight for justice for myself but, far more importantly, for others who will also face similar injustice in the face of an unfair and out-of-date legal statute.”

Although it seems odd that Mrs A only decided to seek compensation when she heard of his lottery win. The Times goes on to say:

Mrs A still suffers nightmares. Now in her late 70s, Mrs A has said that the brutality of the attack destroyed her confidence and left her with lasting psychiatric injury.

A time limit on compensation claims is good for the victim as well as the perpetrator. I don't see how money can bring closure to anyone. Yes, it must be gutting for Mrs A to see the scum who attacked her luxuriating in his mansion, but how will any amount of money change what happened to her? How can money make her feel better?

It's like we tell children: life isn't fair. Holding on to the past is no way to have a happy future. Money isn't the be-all and end-all, and it's certainly no substitute for real justice: which would be Hoare in jail until he's dead, and Mrs A moving on with her life and not letting him affect it any longer.

So finally the 'scientific' community is admitting what we knew all along - from Medscape

Study Identifies Bias in Favor of Publishing Positive Antidepressant Trials
Marlene Busko

January 17, 2008
A study of Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–registered clinical trials of 12 antidepressants found a bias toward publication of positive results. Almost all studies viewed by the FDA as positive were published. The clinical trials that the FDA deemed negative or questionable were largely not published or, in some cases, were published as positive outcomes.

For each of the 12 drugs, at least 1 study was not published or was reported in the literature as positive despite a conflicting judgment by the FDA.

The overall effect size of the antidepressants (vs placebo) that was reported in the published literature was nearly one-third larger than the effect size for these agents that was derived from FDA data.

"Selective reporting of clinical-trial results may have adverse consequences for researchers, study participants, healthcare professionals, and patients," they conclude.

These findings are published in the January 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.[snip]

'Evidence Based Medicine' is currently the be-all and end-all of clinical practice. This is problematical anyway in that whilst it is fine to accept that spending money on unproven treatments, it isn't accpetable to throw the baby out with the bathwater by refusing to fund treatments which are poorly or un- researched. Something like physiotherapy intervention is especially difficult to research, because so much of it is down to choosing the right treatment for the right patient, which is something that comes with practice. Evidence based medicine doesn't allow for any status to be given to treatments which are based on clinical experience.

As an example we can look at the application of heat treatment in low back pain. This is something that physiotherapists and others often do, yet there is very little evidence that it works (or doesn't work), according to the Cochrane Collaboration. Looking at the papers they have used to conclude this, we find that they are deemed poor quality because they are not all the 'gold standard' of randomised (patients randomly assigned to the intervention or control group) controlled (treatment group versus placebo) trials. Yet in clinical practice, my experience has been that it is pointless using heat therapy in anyone other than frail elderly ladies with a history of previous back pain and previous successful heat therapy, in which case it is more effective than anything else. But who will fund a randomised controlled trial of heat therapy on such people? How long would it take to find a suitable amount of patients to make a meaningful sample? Who would care about the results?

This is why treatment efficacy is usually decided on mass samples of lots of different people, thus hiding any efficacy for particular groups of people, or indeed for individuals. As physiotherapists, we are always urged to treat people holistically, to consider them as whole people. In practice this doesn't happen in the NHS, where taking a 'social history' usually means asking if the patient has stairs. Could it be that evidence based practice is making professionals even less likely to treat patients as individuals by leading them to disregard their own clinical experience?

I'm all for evidence based practice (strangely in psychiatry the evidence base is ignored when it comes to choosing between drugs or other treatments): but the evidence base has to be unbiased (which the above would seem to suggest isn't the case), and clinical experience shouldn't be discounted as evidence too.

The Nightwatch by Sarah Waters

This book is set in 1940s London and follows the entwining stories of Kay, Julia and Helen, Viv and Reggie, and Viv's brother Duncan. Their stories are told in the three chunks of the book, which work backwards in time, so that we learn how the characters reached the positions they are in at the beginning of the book, in 1947.

It's an easy book to read, and kept me engaged thorughout, although the final, 1940, chunk came as a slight let-down compared to the drama of the 1944 section. And somehow Duncan's story never feels part of the rest of the book.

The characters are alive, although Helen and Duncan are the weakest. 1940s London is vividly described, but unobtrusively so: there is no description for the sake of it, none of the 'I've done my research and I'm gonna use it' feel that ruins so many other period books (Maria McCann and the execrable 'As Meat For Salt' for instance).

This was my first Waters book, and I'll definitely be reading more.
(84/100)

The Virago Book of Ghost Stories by Richard Dalby (ed)

This is a really good book for Christmas reading. The tales are spooky and atmospheric rather than scary, but if you like ghost stories, particularly MR James or EF Banson, you'll enjoy these.
(73/100)

So this means that according to my scoring my book of 2007 was The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer, although in retrospect the book I think I liked the best and am most likely to read again is Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.