Category Archives: Uncategorized

The non-news of the day. This issue was generated by anti-abortion types who started what can only be called a rumor about an association of cancer and pregnancy termination. The issue is difficult to analyze because of the high rate of 1st term abortion (spontaneous and other) and the long lag time between supposed events and disease development. This appears to be a definitive study on the subject–there is no risk of breast cancer from pregnancy termination.

However, what has been long known known about breast cancer and sexual activity is that nuns have a higher rate of the disease.

Bad week for Hormone Replacement therapy–here and here. What does this say about all the studies in the past showing little risk–almost all drug company sponsored.

Do you think this financial disparity has anything to do with our ineffective health care system?

“According to the U.S. Census, black households in 2005 had a median income of $30,858, compared with $50,784 for non-Hispanic white households. The black poverty rate was 24.9 percent. The white poverty rate was 8.3 percent.”

The answer is obvious as is the need for a systematic approach to health insurance.

We lack value in our medical establishment. This $11,000 fractured rib is one extreme.

An article about insurers denying claims of long term care beneficiaries. Should we be surprised given that insurers are in business and their first priority is their profit, not the well being of their clients?

It’s also instructive that this appears in the business section of the International Herald Tribune and the NYT, rather than the health section.

The equivalent of forty 747’s crashing each year is the reported death toll from our lack of a national health insurance scheme.

“Across the United States, the ranks of the uninsured have swollen from 40 million to 47 million since 2000 for an increase of nearly 18 percent, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation focused on health care. The same report indicated that the working population aged 18 to 64 makes up rising numbers of the uninsured as insurance premiums soar and companies cut back on coverage.”

“The consequences are increasingly well known: inequities in access to care, avoidable mortality and poor quality care, financial burdens on people who are uninsured or under insured, and lost economic productivity,” Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis wrote in a report. “The U.S. spends twice as much on health care as the median industrialized nation but does not systematically achieve the best quality care.”

“Gaps in health-care coverage lead to an estimated 18,000 deaths and as much as $130 billion in lost economic productivity annually, according to Commonwealth.” (bold emphasis is Medicynic’s)

In India, we’re just back from a visit, cab and rickshaw wallahs receive commissions from emporiums and other shopping outlets for bringing customers. As a result, when you are with a cab driver they recommend only those places which gives them commissions.

Cab drivers are thus not reliable sources of information about shopping and may even resist your attempts to get to the places you really want to visit. The situation is complicated by the fact that in India shops’ names are often near duplicates of each other and every store will claim to be that government emporium your guide book recommended.

Sound familiar? While on a different monetary scale, the situation is similar to the corroding effect of drug company’s gifts, consultant fees, salaries, “fourth phase” research funds etc, on physicians in the U.S. We’re talking thousands to millions of dollars here. At the most basic level, these funds, commissions if you will, are designed to encourage physicians to bring their clients to the pharmaceutical company’s products. These payments at a minimum give the impression that physicians are not objective sources of information about treatment and may have an actual conflict of interest. In the U.S. we’ve more fully developed the system so that the agents of the pharmaceutical companies (detail people) can actually check with pharmacies and confirm that their physician wallahs are recommending their product and if necessary provide more effective incentives to influence them.

This timely article explains, in part, how it works.

What the hell has happened to my profession!

Article in Archives of Internal Medicine debunks the myth.

The scientists, led by Dr Christopher Gardner at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, California, tested raw garlic and two well known garlic supplements in adults with moderately elevated levels of LDL or “bad” cholesterol.

They found that despite the widespread claims, none of the three forms of garlic lowered cholesterol.

Americans like to believe in magic. Garlic, while wonderful, is not magic. Eat your heart out Larry King!!

“Bush administration officials say they are worried about the growing costs of the effort (ed: to fund care for children in the U.S.), which gives about $5 billion in grants to states yearly. The president announced this month that the program should be shrunk”

This from the Congressional Budget Office on the cost of war:

“In addition to funding for defense activities, lawmakers since 2001 have appropriated just over $34 billion for diplomatic operations and foreign aid to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries that are assisting the United States in the war on terrorism. Including the $5 billion provided in 2004 to the State Department for Iraqi security forces, funding since 2001 for activities related to international affairs totals about $40 billion. About half of that amount, $21 billion, was appropriated for the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund. “

More on the cost of this war?

“The $151.1 billion spent by the U.S. government on the war could have cut world hunger in half and covered HIV/AIDS medicine, childhood immunization and clean water and sanitation needs of the developing world for more than two years.”

This from Rashi Fein (the entire piece is worth reading):

“Put simply, the administration believes we are millions and millions of individuals not bound together into a society. But medical care is just another good or service that we purchase as we will in the marketplace subject to normal market forces. The proposal is the antithesis of a point of view that states that we are a society of individuals who are in it together; who assist each other through an instrument called government, and who look to government in fields like education and health care that we feel should be available to all. “Sharing” is not what this administration is about and sharing risk (don’t think alone of health insurance or Social Security; think of risks and sacrifices associated with Iraq) is not one of its goals. Rather, it seeks to take apart many of the societal protections that were erected by earlier administrations and respected by Presidents of both parties.”

“The pity is that there are real problems with our health care sector: real people without insurance, real issues of access and of quality, real problems of chronic illness and long-term care, real fiscal issues for Medicare. Those are the problems that need to be addressed and that are best addressed on a comprehensive basis. Yet, the President has elected not to devote his energy and some of his remaining political capital to those real and pressing issues. One hopes we will not be deflected from those issues into a time and energy consuming debate around a proposal whose merits are few and whose deficiencies are many.”