Man Sues Doctors After Penis Amputated

By Kate Cornell/WLKY

POSTED: 5:32 pm EDT September 24, 2008

UPDATED: 6:05 pm EDT September 24, 2008

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A Shelby County man and his wife said two doctors amputated the man's penis without his consent, and have filed a lawsuit.Watch The Story

According to the lawsuit, Philip Seaton went to have a circumcision last October. Seaton said when he woke up from the procedure, he realized his penis had been amputated.

Seaton has suffered mental anguish, pain, and has lost the enjoyment of life, according to the lawsuit.The lawsuit was filed in Shelby County court last week against Dr. John Patterson, who performed the procedure, Dr. Oliver James, who administered anesthesia, and Commonwealth Urology, PSC.The lawsuit states that Patterson received consent to perform a circumcision and only a circumcision, and that Seaton did not consent to his penis being removed.Kevin George, the plaintiff's attorney, said Patterson amputated the organ after finding cancer, but he only had consent to remove the foreskin."Sometimes you have an emergency and you have to do this, but he could very easily closed him up and said, 'Here are your options. You have cancer,' and the family would have said, 'We want a second opinion. This is a big deal,'" George said.The lawsuit also claims the plaintiff did not consent to general anesthesia.WLKY attempted to contact the doctors, but have not been able to reach them.The Seatons are seeking punitive damages against both doctors and the medical practice. Attorneys for the defendants will now have a chance to respond to the suit.

Study: Facebook profiles can be used to detect narcissism

see original article here.

A new University of Georgia study suggests that online social networking sites such as Facebook might be useful tools for detecting whether someone is a narcissist.

"We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," said lead author Laura Buffardi, a doctoral student in psychology who co-authored the study with associate professor W. Keith Campbell.

The researchers, whose results appear in the October issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, gave personality questionnaires to nearly 130 Facebook users, analyzed the content of the pages and had untrained strangers view the pages and rate their impression of the owner's narcissism.

The researchers found that the number of Facebook friends and wallposts that individuals have on their profile pages correlates with narcissism. Buffardi said this is consistent with how narcissists behave in the real-world, with numerous yet shallow relationships. Narcissists are also more likely to choose glamorous, self-promoting pictures for their main profile photos, she said, while others are more likely to use snapshots.

Untrained observers were able to detect narcissism, too. The researchers found that the observers used three characteristics – quantity of social interaction, attractiveness of the individual and the degree of self promotion in the main photo – to form an impression of the individual's personality. "People aren't perfect in their assessments," Buffardi said, "but our results show they're somewhat accurate in their judgments."

Narcissism is a trait of particular interest, Campbell said, because it hampers the ability form healthy, long-term relationships. "Narcissists might initially be seen as charming, but they end up using people for their own advantage," Campbell said. "They hurt the people around them and they hurt themselves in the long run."

The tremendous growth of social networking sites – Facebook now has 100 million users, for example – has led psychologists to explore how personality traits are expressed online. Buffardi and Campbell chose Facebook because it's the most popular networking site among college students and because it has a fixed format that makes it easier for researchers to compare user pages.

Some researchers in the past have found that personal Web pages are more popular among narcissists, but Campbell said there's no evidence that Facebook users are more narcissistic than others.

"Nearly all of our students use Facebook, and it seems to be a normal part of people's social interactions," Campbell said. "It just turns out that narcissists are using Facebook the same way they use their other relationships – for self promotion with an emphasis on quantity of over quality."

Still, he points out that because narcissists tend to have more contacts on Facebook, any given Facebook user is likely to have an online friend population with a higher proportion of narcissists than in the real world. Right now it's too early to predict if or how the norms of online self-promotion will change, Campbell said, since the study of social networking sites is still in its infancy.

"We've undergone a social change in the last four or five years and now almost every student manages their relationships through Facebook – something that few older people do," Campbell said. "It's a completely new social world that we're just beginning to understand."

Source: University of Georgia