Ira R. Allen's blog
No matter how low the job approval rating of Congress goes - it is now a healthy 16 percent - people still say their own representative is pretty good. It's those partisan hacks, thieves and pederasts from other districts who are no good. The same phenomenon seems to be true in health care as well: The system is rotten and the prices are too high but "my doctor is good and damned if I won't pay for the best possible care."
Just when you started to think evidence can help you make a sound medical decision, consider the long-running debate about the value of mammography.
We know how to live healthier and longer, but if we choose not to, is the answer to enrich the drug companies? Apparently.
Health providers know what they expect of the patient -- show up on time, fill your prescription, take the pills at certain times, look for second opinions, copy your medical records etc. But patients don't usually know that, and they don't think enough about what their expectations ought to be of the health care system.
Having a mental illness, especially one caused by war, is no longer the shame it was when General Patton slapped a shell-shocked soldier. Awareness and reporting of syndromes like post-traumatic stress disorder are also much higher than in the past. Even so, a secret government study about the degree to which the "global war on terror" has affected the personalities of recent veterans is, well, mind-blowing.
If you're dead because of errors that could have been prevented by e-medicine, you can treasure your privacy for a long time.
You used to be able to leave your heart in San Francisco. Now, according to the New York Times, you may be required to leave your gall bladder in Bangalore.
Another nail in the coffin of the coffin-nail defenders in the cigarette and booze industries. Smoking bans have immediate medical effects.
Sure, the U.S. wins lots of Nobel Prizes in medicine, but why should it cost and arm and a leg to keep us healthy?
A new study from the British Economic and Social Research Council and reported today in the Washington Post finds that fear and guilt are actually poor motivators when it comes to getting people to change unhealthy habits. The idea seems to be that fear and guilt may do nothing more than produce more fear and guilt — and, worse, defeatism. A far more effective approach, the researchers say, is to give people concrete suggestions on how to change their behavior and confidence that they can do things like quit smoking or start a daily exercise program.
What if you had ADD 40 years ago but didn't know it because the disease hadn't been invented yet? Would you still be bouncing off the cubicle walls at work? Would you forget where you parked the car? Forget to deposit your paycheck? The answers may have to wait till we refocus.
To say that the fruits of medical science are too expensive for most people to afford ignores the question of what's really important.
Day after day examples pile up of a government gone wild with incompetence and fraud -- from drug safety, to voting machines, to using political hacks to set up democracy in Iraq. Well, if you want to destroy government, first you have to make people lose confidence in it. It's working.
It is always a good idea to catch disease early, but by recommending that everyone get tested for AIDS, is the CDC inflicting an unnecessarily huge cost on the health care system?
The United States is first in a lot of things, like the cost of health care, but not so good compared to other industrialized countries on actual health.
