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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up More: According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the government was misled by these companies, which failed to report manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was "relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were overly rosy." If, in fact, there's a political parable here, it's about Big Government's sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the public health: Let the private insurance companies manage health financing; let profit-making hospital chains deliver health care; let Big Pharma provide safe and affordable medications. As it happens, though, all these entities have a priority that regularly overrides the public's health, and that is, of course, profit…
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POPSBig (but healthy) baby denied health insurance We as a culture have gone completely insane on the issue of obesity. See my recent clips about how research shows obesity has NO EFFECT on longevity. What does? Being fit and active . It doesn't matter if you're shaped like an apple, a pear, or a string bean - get yourself moving!
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POPSThe "Vision Chart Effect" in health reporting
If a person is overweight, often that's the only thing a doctor will focus on. Your knees hurt? It's because you're fat! Your skin is breaking out? It's because you're fat! You have a cavity in a tooth? It's because you're fat! You're getting headaches? It's because you're fat! For many people, this eventually discourages them from going to see the doctor, even when they have a possibly-serious health problem. Like my mother. She'd spent a lifetime being told by doctors that all her problems were because she was fat. So when she felt a lump in her breast, she latched on to the (false) conventional wisdom that "if it hurts, it's not malignant." By the time she saw a doctor about it, it was stage 4 and had metastasized to her lymph nodes. She died at age 53. She was the smartest, funniest, most loving, toughest, most dynamic woman I've ever known. I miss her terribly every day. And she died as a result of fat prejudice. Yeah, I take this personally.
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POPSWe need national health care because lack of insurance kills people More: Want to know something even better? The constitution we shoved down the throat of Iraq, requires healthcare for everyone . Pretty good inn't? George Bush, and his neo-con cabal (the folks who believed the parades would last, even after the random raids and the abuductions started) insisted that First: Every citizen has the right to health care. The State shall maintain public health and provide the means of prevention and treatment by building different types of hospitals and health institutions. Second: Individuals and entities have the right to build hospitals, clinics,or private health care centers under the supervision of the State, and this shall be regulated by law. But here, in the wealthiest nation on the planet, with (we are assured) the "best healthcare in the world,"people die from the flu, because they can
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POPSTo Err is Human: Institute of Medicine report on reducing preventable medical errors Sadly, it's now 10 years after its release, and most of its recommendations have not been heeded. More: To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health care--it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocates--as well as patients themselves.
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POPSWhy we SHOULD give illegal immigrants health care coverage What's more important? Posturing over "no coverage for illegals!!!" or actually saving money and improving health care for all? More: What's more, employers currently have a clear economic incentive to hire undocumented immigrants: they don't require coverage. A plan that mandates insurance for native workers but not their illegal counterparts actually makes life harder on the blue-collar Americans competing for jobs (and railing against immigrants) because it means that hiring them will cost more than hiring a recent transplant from Mexico City…. But despite the potential economic upside, the right shouldn't stress: America won't insure its illegal immigrants any time soon. "The hard thing here is that the current state of perception on immigration is eroding our sense of social solidarity… People simply don't want money going to people on the other side of the tracks."
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POPSNew website shows low-income Californians how to reduce medical costs More: Since the country’s first Hospital Fair Pricing Act took effect more than two years ago—Assembly Bill 774––California hospitals are required to offer fee discounts and are also capped on what they charge patients who typically face their highest fees: the uninsured.… many hospitals have complied with California law—“Some are doing it well, some are not”—but two nagging problems continue. First, rural hospitals, or those not affiliated with large chains, frequently don’t mention the mandated discounts. Second, obtaining the discounts can be difficult. The Web site was created “not to bash hospitals,” but to offer patients their options under the law.… For patients, medical bills are causing rising debt loads and even medical bankruptcy. Consumers who buy catastrophic health-insurance plans and limited “junk” insurance often find that their plans have strict limitations, which often saddle them with enormous debt….
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POPSLowering health care costs not tied to tort reform More: the second travesty is that the $17.7 million — which he could surely use over the many remaining years of his life — was cut by more than half by Texas law. The award included $6.72 million in economic damages and $11 million for pain and suffering. But the $11 million immediately was reduced to $250,000. Because that’s all Texas law says he can have. Did I mention that health care costs in Texas keep going up, anyway? At age 53, Mr. Fitzgerald can expect another 21 years of life . $250,000 divided by 21 years equals a little less than $12,000 a year. Anyone want to volunteer to have BOTH arms and BOTH legs amputated as the result of somebody else's carelessness and incompentence, in exchange for $12,000 a year? Anyone consider that a reasonable trade-off? Didn't think so...
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POPSRepublican senator: Health care bill is bad enough we don't need to lie about it More: Murkowski said the nation's health care system needs reform to control costs and improve access to care, but bad legislation will only make it worse. Last month, she voted against a health reform measure that emerged from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. "I'll be honest with you," Murkowski said. "There are things that are in this bill that are bad enough that we don't need to be making things up."
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POPSA preliminary debunking of the Hoover Digest claims about US healthcare You may have seen or seen reference to an article in the Hoover Digest that claims that "Despite serious challenges, such as escalating costs and care for the uninsured, the U.S. health care system compares favorably to those in other developed countries." Here's a preliminary debunking of some of its claims. The † footnote marker in the original points to the following note: † Is health care another piece of "defense of marriage?"
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POPSHow should news organization cover health care reform? More: The media should not only stop giving airtime and column inches to liars and the lies they tell, they should affirmatively and aggressively report the truth. And they need to do so over and over again. Once is not enough. (To those who would respond that repetition is, by definition, not "news": Are you really prepared to argue that newscasts and newspapers don't repeat the same ideas over and over again? Really? )
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POPSWhy we must ration healthcare More: we should remind ourselves that the U.S. system also results in people going without life-saving treatment — it just does so less visibly. Pharmaceutical manufacturers often charge much more for drugs in the United States than they charge for the same drugs in Britain, where they know that a higher price would put the drug outside the cost-effectiveness limits set by NICE. American patients, even if they are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, often cannot afford the copayments for drugs. That’s rationing too, by ability to pay. Dr. Art Kellermann, associate dean…at Emory School of Medicine…wrote of a woman who came into his emergency room in critical condition because a blood vessel had burst in her brain. She was uninsured and had chosen to buy food for her children instead of spending money on her blood-pressure medicine. In the emergency room, she received excellent high-tech medical care, but by the time she got there, it was too late to save her.
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POPScartoon: Darkness "Tallguywrites is a student mental health nurse. Tallguywrites is also a photographer, writer and cartoonist."
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POPSMedical bills cause most bankruptcies More: The study data, published online Thursday in The American Journal of Medicine, likely understate the full scope of the problem because the data were collected before the current economic crisis. In 2007, medical problems contributed to 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies. Between 2001 and 2007, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by about 50 percent. “The U.S. health care financing system is broken, and not only for the poor and uninsured,” the study authors wrote. “Middle-class families frequently collapse under the strain of a health care system that treats physical wounds, but often inflicts fiscal ones.” The data on medical bankruptcy, compiled by researchers at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University, is based on a survey of 2,314 randomly selected bankruptcy filers during early 2007.
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POPSHealth care reform: "The patient MUST be the one calling the shots" I was particularly interested in what he says about "compliance" and "noncompliance". Health care has made a lot of progress away from the former paternalistic, doctor-knows-best model. However, you start talking about "compliance" and the orientation inevitably shifts to one where the patient is stupid or lazy and is working against the (noble, knowledgeable) doctor's best efforts to heal them. If a patient is non-compliant, ask "Why?" More: I think “noncompliance” is a control word, a power word, and we need a slightly different one. “Compliance” means I order and you either do it or not; you obey. Patients live in their bodies and may know more than the person who prescribes or does their procedure. They may know better about what is going on in their body and about the optimization of their own life. I think people who aren’t taking their own medicine are telling us valuable information about their medications and their life, and we need to listen to them.
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POPSThe epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic? Yet despite all of the moral connotations ascribed to weight gain, we have little idea exactly why people weigh somewhat more now than they did a generation ago…. So what if the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ is largely an illusion? What if higher than average weight turns out to have neither much medical nor moral significance? The answer to these questions, all of which we believe are strongly suggested by the epidemiological literature, go far beyond the issues of body mass and health. The current scientific evidence should prompt health professionals and policy makers to consider whether it makes sense to treat body weight as a barometer of public health. It should also make us pause to consider how propagating the idea of an ‘obesity epidemic’ furthers the political and economic interests of certain groups, while doing immense damage to those whom it blames and stigmatizes.
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POPSVermont law makes drug company gifts to doctors matter of public record To reduce the perception of undue industry influence, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America or PhRMA, a trade association, instituted a voluntary code in January that prohibits noneducational gifts to doctors and restricts meals. About 50 manufacturers the code. With such a code, Vermont’s new reporting requirements seem redundant, said Marjorie E. Powell, a senior lawyer for PhRMA. “We think this is unnecessary, and it is not going to improve patient care,” Ms. Powell said. “It makes it onerous not only for the company but also for the physician in Vermont, because this is going to be on a Web site.” In other words, "Well, yes, we did grotesquely abuse the lack of regulation previously, but we put a voluntary self-reported rule in place (which we won't let you audit or monitor) and now we won't do it any more! Trust us!" Bah.
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POPSSplenda causes weight gain, impairs digestion, and affects chemotherapy & other drugs More: As of 2006, only six human trials have been published on Splenda. Of these six trials, only two of the trials were completed and published before the FDA approved sucralose for human consumption, and the two published trials had a grand total of 36 total human subjects. 36 people sure doesn’t sound like many, but wait, it gets worse: only 23 total were actually given sucralose for testing, and here is the real kicker — The longest trial at this time had lasted only four days, and looked at sucralose in relation to tooth decay, not human tolerance. Even more shocking, the absorption of Splenda into the human body was studied on a grand total of six men! Based on that one human study, the FDA allowed the findings to be generalized as being representative of the entire human population. Including women, children, the elderly, and those with any chronic illness — none of whom were ever examined.
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POPSWhere There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook - full text available online! WTIND is an unbelievably useful basic diagnosis, treatment, and prevention handbook for common health care issues. More (not enough room to add the links, so click through): # Chapter 20: Family Planning- Having the Number of Children You Want # Chapter 21: Health and Sicknesses of Children # Chapter 22: Health and Sicknesses of Older People # Chapter 23: The Medicine Kit # The Green Pages: The Uses, Dosage, and Precautions for Medicines # The Blue Pages: New Information # Vocabulary: Explaining Difficult Words # Information: Addresses for Teaching Materials, Dosage Blanks, Patient Report, Information on Vital Signs, Abbreviations, Weight, Volume # Index
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POPSGood books on holistic & naturopathic cat health When you're looking for nonfiction reference books, it's useful to have a test question or concept to look for. Basically, "if it includes x , it's probably got decent information; if it includes y , it's no good." (For dictionaries, I like the word "chthonic".) One such test for cat care books for me is the question of vaccinations. If a book says "revaccinate annually" and doesn't even mention that there are questions about whether that's safe, much less necessary, it's giving dangerous and outdated advice.
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POPSInactivity is ACTIVELY HARMFUL to your health "We used to think that it is healthy to be physically active, but this study shows that it is dangerous to be inactive for just a couple of weeks," said Bente Klarlund Pedersen, co-author and lead investigator of the study and professor of internal medicine and director of Centre of Inflammation and Metabolism at the University of Copenhagen. "After 14 days of reduced stepping, subjects experienced accumulation of the dangerous abdominal fat, while also developing elevated blood-lipids, a sign of -pre-diabetes and cardiovascular disease. If you choose the passive mode of transport and abstain from exercise, than your risk of chronic disease is likely to increase markedly." "When the doctor says to go and exercise, they are not just telling patients to do that to improve their health; increasing daily stepping could actually reverse a cause of chronic disease," Booth said.
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POPSThe Role of Light on Human Health Rea envisions "real-time light prescriptions" to help people receive or avoid light at the appropriate times. Simple measures to control when and how much circadian light we receive could help nightshift workers stay alert on the job and sleep more effectively during the day, help cure jet lag, decrease depression, and generally help everyone get a proper night's sleep. The ability to modify circadian rhythm could potentially mitigate the negative health effects that some researchers believe are brought on by disruptions to the light-dark cycle. Recent studies have found a link between health and changes in the natural circadian rhythm. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute published a series of articles, for example, that showed night shift workers had a higher incidence of breast cancer; and, last year, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer cited night work as a potential breast cancer risk factor.
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