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A sad but uniquely American happening: 

The teen likely killed his sister sometime after 8 a.m., when his parents left to go grocery shopping in Fort Smith, about 40 miles away, Boen said. The boy turned himself in at the sheriff’s department about an hour and a half later.

And:

Guns were confiscated from the family’s home and vehicle, the sheriff said. Authorities were trying to determine which weapon was used in the shooting.

Medicynical Note:  More than two lives ruined.  If you must have guns, please keep them locked up.

It’s alleged that this man shot several people in Washington State this weekend. 

What’s the rationale for these weapons in a civil society? None seem appropriate for hunting; they don’t even seem reasonable, correct me if I’m wrong, for personal security.  Only in America.

More evidence that children need supervision in the sandbox.  Despite yeoman’s work by Heritage Foundation and the republican party to obfuscate the causes of the financial meltdown—and blame government.  It’s emerging that companies without supervision, when money is involved, do foolish sometimes cynical things.  Take this for example:

Nearly four years ago, we first reported on allegations that Countrywide Financial, the failed lender that was bought by Bank of America after it collapsed, had their system set up so that non-white loan applicants were steered toward subprime loans, even if they could have qualified for a standard mortgage. Well, the wheels of justice turn remarkably slowly in Washington, DC, but today the Justice Dept. finally announced a settlement with BofA for $335 million over these allegations.

Medicynical Note:  The problem was not regulation but rather greed.  And as we’ve noted previously similar issues abound in the medical sphere.  Consider the escalating prices of drugs for people with serious life threatening illnesses; salaries of health related companies executives; the costs of our health care non-system (the highest per capita in the world). 

Sadly, unfettered capitalism opens the door to an empty room.

More on conflicts of interest: and here too:

Economic ties that could bias drug trials and patient care might remain hidden due to tangled disclosure rules at medical journals, a new study reveals.

Researchers found that of 131 cancer journals, only 112 had policies requiring researchers to state conflicts of interest, such as drugmaker stock ownership or speaker fees. And among journals that did have such policies, the rules were all over the map.

“Journals can’t even agree on what a conflict of interest means,” said Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim of the Harvard Medical School in Boston. “It is certainly confusing to authors and to readers.”

Scores of studies have shown that when researchers have a financial stake in their work, their reports are more likely to promote drugs and downplay side effects.

Medicynical note: It’s hard not to be a little cynical. There’s nothing new here. We’ve the perfect system to make money not to deliver effective health care. In our country big money trumps reason.

Fine editorial by a bioethicist James Drane: 

Those opposed to any change in the present U.S. health-care system claim that it is already the best in the world, therefore why change it. In fact, an assessment of all health-care systems by the World Health Organization ranks the U.S. system at 37th in the world, right ahead of Slovenia. Five different performance standards were used to measure health systems.

And:

Although the term public welfare is not used in public discussion of health-care here in the U.S., it does belong, and it is not socialism. Public welfare, in fact, is a term found in the first sentence of the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1788. “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” One purpose of government, stated in the Constitution, is to promote the general welfare. It refers to the goods that all people need to be free and to enjoy prosperity.

And concludes:

In democracies, citizens are responsible for choosing the moral values of their societies. Voters create good societies through good laws and humane policies. When a large percentage of the population lives in abject poverty, when children die unnecessarily, when elderly persons suffer in isolation, when 46 million people have no health care, the common good is not being achieved and the general welfare is not being provided.

Medicynical Note:  Our democracy’ s approach to health care has it’s grotesque aspects;

• Political parties (and politicians) selling themselves to highest bidder, an action sanctioned by the Supreme Court
• Sanctioning “free” ER use as an alternative to a health care access for all citizens
• Actually, over 50 million are uninsured (and rapidly rising)
• Health Insurers who don’t want to insure those needing health care
• Pharmaceutical suppliers gouging the sickest and most helpless in our culture

And so on. 

Our health care non-system is already viewed with incredulity in other industrialized nations.  They are amazed that the “leading nation of the world” would tolerate such an abomination.

To Obama’s great credit he’s taken the first faltering steps in leading towards a more rational humane universal health care system.  The question is whether we’ll evolve further into an efficient coherent economical system or de-evolve into a health disaster and a dead end.

Substantial reduction in transmission of HIV virus with early treatment:

Men and women infected with HIV reduced the risk of transmitting the virus to their sexual partners by taking oral antiretroviral medicines when their immune systems were relatively healthy, according to findings from a large-scale clinical study sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Medicynical Note: The study was done in a population that was 97% heterosexual but it is likely the same benefit would accrue in gay couples.