If you’re not comatose, you’ve probably noticed that most young people spend much of their time with their noses buried in their cell phones. Go to any restaurant in your area and spend a moment observing families not speaking to one another because the children, and sometimes the parents, are looking at their cell phones rather than having a conversation. We’ve become accustomed to this behavior, but in our hearts we know it’s wrong.

Now someone has finally come out and told us what we know is true. Peggy Noonan, writing for The Wall Street Journal, tells us about a new book by Jonathan Haidt called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Noonan says Haidt’s book has broken through and is clearing the way for parents’ groups and individuals to move forward together on an established idea – doing something about this widespread problem. Mr. Haidt is a widely admired social psychologist who teaches at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He has spent his career studying emotion, culture and morality, turning along the way to child development and adolescent mental health.

Noonan says, “What we all know is that there’s a mental-health crisis among the young, that they seem to have become addicted to social media and gaming, and that these two facts seem obviously connected. Mr. Haidt says, and shows, that the latter is a cause of the former.”

He tells the story of what happened to Generation Z, which he defines as those born after 1995. (They followed the millennials, born 1981-95.) Older members of Gen Z entered puberty while four technological trends were converging. One was the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, another the continuing spread of broadband internet. The third, starting in 2009, was “the new age of hyper-viralized social media,” with likes, retweets and shares. In 2010 came the front-facing camera on smartphones, which “greatly expanded the number of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for their peers and strangers not just to see, but to judge.” This became “the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable and . . . unsuitable for children and adolescents.”

Pew Research reports that, in 2011, 23% of teens had a smartphone. That meant they had only limited access to social media—they had to use the family computer. By 2016 one survey showed 79% of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28% of children 8 to 12. Soon teens were reporting they spent an average of almost seven hours a day on screens. “One out of every four teens said that they were online ‘almost constantly,’” Mr. Haidt writes. Girls moved their social lives onto social media. Boys burrowed into immersive video games, Reddit, YouTube and pornography.

The tidal wave came to these children during puberty, when the human brain is experiencing its greatest reconfiguring since early childhood. In puberty, as brain researchers say, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” What you do at that time “will cause lasting structural changes in the brain,” Mr. Haidt writes. Suddenly children “spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching or even making eye contact with their friends and families.” They withdrew from “embodied social behaviors” essential for successful human development. It left them not noticing the world.

You don’t have to be a doctor to understand all this leads to mental illness. Rates of mental illness among the young went up dramatically in many Western countries between 2010 and 2015. Between 2010 and 2024 major depression among teens went up 145% among girls, 161% among boys. There was a rise in disorders related to anxiety as well. Haidt says “The rate of self-harm for. . . young adolescent girls nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020.”

Naturally, parents had to make choices about how to respond to this situation. Haidt says parents over the past few decades made two big choices about how to keep children safe, and both were wrong. “We decided the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision, even though the risks to children from crime, violence, drunk drivers, and most other sources have dropped steeply since the 1990s. At the same time, it seemed like too much of a bother to design and require age-appropriate guardrails for kids online, so we left children free to wander through the Wild West of the virtual world, where threats to children abounded.”

Mr. Haidt suggests four reforms:

• No smartphones before high school, only basic phones with no internet capability.
• No social media before 16. Let their brains develop first.
• All schools from elementary through high school should be phone-free zones—students can store their devices in lockers.
• Bring back unsupervised play. Only in that way will kids naturally develop social skills and become self-governing.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is already taking action along these lines to address this problem. On March 25^th he signed new legislation which prohibits children under the age of 14 from becoming social media account holders and allows 14 and 15-year-olds to become account holders with parental consent. “Social media harms children in a variety of ways,” said the governor. “HB 3 gives parents a greater ability to protect their children.”

Who is to blame for this situation?

Near the end of the book, Haidt quotes Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, on the inner thinking of the Silicon Valley pioneers who created this new world. In a 2017 interview Mr. Parker said they wished to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.” The “social validation feedback loop” they created exploits “a vulnerability in human psychology.” The apps need to “give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you . . . more likes and comments.” He said that he, Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram, “understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” He added: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” Now we all know.

“The chatbot will see you now.” When the nurse tells you that as you sit in the doctor’s waiting room, perhaps it’s time for you to run.

Artificial intelligence is getting lots of attention lately in many walks of life. It may be useful in writing term papers and preparing speeches. It may be helpful in designing new cars and other forms of mechanical equipment. But I’m not sure it’s ready to replace your doctor.

A recent study was reported at the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons meeting in San Francisco by Branden Rafael Sosa and colleagues at the Weill Cornell Medical School. They analyzed the validity and accuracy of the information for orthopedic procedures that large language model chatbots provided to patients. They also assess how the chatbots explained basic orthopedic concepts, integrated clinical information into decision-making and addressed patient queries.

They concluded that large language model chatbots may provide misinformation and inaccurate musculoskeletal health information to patients.

In the study, Sosa and colleagues prompted OpenAI ChatGPT 4.0, Google Bard and BingAI chatbots to each answer 45 orthopedic-related questions in the categories of “bone physiology,” “referring physician” and “patient query.” Two independent, masked reviewers scored responses on a scale of zero to four, assessing accuracy, completeness, and useability.

Researchers analyzed the responses for strengths and limitations within categories and among the chatbots. They found that when prompted with orthopedic questions, OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Bard and BingAI provided correct answers that covered the most critical points in 77%, 33% and 17% of queries, respectively. When providing clinical management suggestions, all chatbots displayed significant limitations by deviating from the standard of care and omitting critical steps in workup, such as ordering antibiotics before cultures or neglecting to include key studies in diagnostic workup.

“I think clinical context is one of the things that they struggled with most and particularly when coming up with an assessment or a plan for a patient who presents with infection. Oftentimes, they forgot to get cultures before initiating antibiotics, forgetting to order radiographs and the workup of a patient with hip osteoarthritis, or to the point of seminal papers that highlight changes in the way that treatment is delivered,” Sosa told Healio/Orthopedics Today.

“I would say that in certain applications, AI chatbots, in particular ChatGPT, performed pretty well. It was able to give clinically useful information in the majority of cases, broadly speaking. But that generally good performance carries with it some significant risks as well,” said Matthew B. Greenblatt, M.D., PhD, an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, and co-author of the study.

Greenblatt said results of this study highlight the importance of oversight by subject matter experts in using large language model chatbots in clinical contexts. “It could potentially be a timesaver or helpful in summarizing information. When all of that is overseen and checked by someone who is truly an expert, one can be well aware of where the chatbot led astray,” Greenblatt said.

Personally, I don’t want to go to a doctor who at best is only correct 77% of the time. I believe there is still a place for good old human physicians and human intelligence in this world of increasing technology and artificial intelligence.

Ever since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, in the Dobbs decision, pro-abortion liberals have been pretending that abortion is unavailable in the U.S. In truth, there is no evidence the number of abortions has declined. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary.

The Guttmacher Institute recently released data showing in the first 10 months of 2023, there were an estimated 878,000 abortions in the U.S. health care system, 94% as many abortions as were provided in 2020 (930,000). At that rate, 2023 would easily eclipse the number of abortions done in 2020.

They state “The actual increase in abortions is likely even larger than these numbers suggest because these counts do not include abortions occurring outside the formal health care system, which are likely to have increased substantially following the implementation of state bans and restrictions.”

They go on to say many factors have contributed to more abortions in 2023, including the following:

• Abortions were already increasing in many US states prior to theDobbs decision, as reported in Guttmacher’s 2020 Abortion Provider Census: Abortions increased by 8% from 2017 to 2020, reversing 30 years of a declining abortion rate.
• Interstate travel for abortion care has increased, largely facilitated by practical support networks(like abortion funds) that have helped patients navigate financial and logistical barriers.
• Access to abortion has increased instates that passed protective abortion policies following the fall of Roe v. Wade. 
• Abortion provided via telehealth has become increasingly available.

All this information from an institute that promotes abortion.

Which begs the question, why are liberals lying about the availability of abortion? The most recent propaganda is the U.S. has a “pregnancy crisis” due to supposedly soaring maternal mortality, not to declining fertility.

Allysia Finley, writing for The Wall Street Journal, reports that the American Medical Association claims the U.S. stands out among high-income nations for its alarming incidence of maternal deaths despite substantial health care spending. These liberal activists invoke U.S. maternal mortality to advocate expanded government welfare programs and abortion access.

“Evidence and experience show us conclusively that the risk of death during or after childbirth is approximately 14 times greater than the risk of death from abortion-related complications,” the AMA says. Democratic states echo this claim in a friend-of-the-court brief in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which the Supreme Court will hear Tuesday. Justices who were about to overturn Roe v. Wade would have “blood on their hands,” the medical journal Lancet warned in a May 12, 2022, editorial.

Finley explains, as with the Covid pandemic, experts are using bad data to drive a political agenda. A new study this month in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology shows that oft-cited U.S. maternal-mortality statistics are inflated owing to discrepancies in how pregnancy deaths are recorded.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System reports that maternal-mortality rates in the U.S. have roughly tripled since 2001, to 32.9 per 100,000 live births in 2021. This is nearly three times as high as rates in other developed countries—but, as the study concludes, it’s largely a statistical artifact.

Deaths among pregnant women or new mothers are often classified as “maternal” even if they owe to other causes, such as cancer or pre-existing conditions. The culprit is a check box that states added to death certificates in 2003 to identify women who had died while pregnant or between 42 days and a year of when their pregnancy ended.

As the study explains, this check box “led to a rapid increase in reported maternal mortality rates” and “some egregious errors,” including hundreds of women over 70 “being certified as pregnant at the time of death or in the year before death” largely because of administrative errors.

 Researchers reanalyzed mortality data to identify only deaths that occurred during pregnancy or postpartum that had at least one mention of pregnancy among the causes of death on the certificate. The authors found that the maternal mortality rate remained essentially flat between 1999 and 2002 (10.2 per 100,000 live births) and 2018 and 2021 (10.4). This would put the U.S. on par with other developed countries.

Lest you think the AMA is a credible source of information, you should know that only about 12% of all U.S. physicians are members of the AMA. Personally, I dropped my AMA membership about 30 years ago as soon as I realized they were promoting abortion back then. It seems nothing has changed since then.