meehawl

Some treat him with contempt and disgust, usually the ones who have been directly involved in antiabortion activities. They hate all abortion except for their special case. One even said they should all be killed. Only fourteen, she came with her mother. What brings you here? he asked. I have to have an abortion. Why? I’m not old enough to have a baby. But you told the counselor we should all be killed? Yes, you should all be killed. Why? Because you do abortions. Me too? Yes, you should be killed too. Do you want me killed before or after I do your abortion? Before.

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Tags: Warren Hern, abortion, fascism, fertility, medicine // Add Comment »

Every time I find myself the recipient of one of these late night phone calls, tramping through some back alley behind another dark abandoned warehouse… Stuttering another secret password… Entering another hastily constructed operating room… Scalpel in hand, performing another indescribable procedure… I see another pair of eyes… By now in the hundreds… Staring… Whenever I try to sleep… Another member of an unenviable audience… Asking a painfully simple question for which I have no answer… Why… I can no longer bear their judgment. I leave them here… On the table… As I scribble my signature on the confidentiality agreement, I leave them to their fate… I say goodbye…

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Tags: alien, horror, surgery, video // Add Comment »

Half of the [United States] insured population uses virtually no health care at all. The 80th percentile uses only $3,000 [the 95th percentile has] only $11,487 in costs. It’s the 99th percentile, the people with over $35,000 of medical costs, who represent fully 22% of the entire nation’s medical costs … An individual adult insurance plan is roughly $7,000 … It should be fairly clear that the people who do not file insurance claims do not face rescission. The insurance companies will happily deposit their checks. Indeed, even for someone in the 95th percentile, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the insurance company to take the nuclear option of blowing up the policy. $11,487 in claims is less than two years’ premium … If the top 5% is the absolute largest population for whom rescission would make sense, the probability of having your policy cancelled given that you have filed a claim is fully 10% … If, as I suspect, rescission is targeted toward the truly bankrupting cases – the top 1%, the folks with over $35,000 of annual claims who could never be profitable for the carrier – then the probability of having your policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two. You have three times better odds playing Russian Roulette.

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Tags: Russian Roulette, health insurance, health policy, medicine, probability // Add Comment »

In the early summer of 1956, an epidemic of poliomyelitis broke out in the city of Cork. It was not unexpected. The Irish medical authorities had noted the two-year gap between previous outbreaks, and were ready for 1956 to be a polio year. ‘Ready’ rather overstates it. Some hospitals had been designated as polio reception centres, but no attempt was made to import and use the newly released Salk vaccine, which was soon to obliterate the disease in the Western world … The death toll seems to have been relatively low, as it usually is with polio: the damage is reckoned in the spoiled bodies of the young rather than in mass graves. Nearly 550 patients, most of them children, were brought into hospital presenting fever and paralysis within less than four months … ‘The epidemic in Cork was a strange prelude to the years in which Ireland became a modern and developed country, whose success is studied by other countries emerging from the Third World.’ It was strange in two ways. In the first place, the epidemic is something that Cork people are deeply reluctant to remember, mostly because they associate epidemics with poverty, dirt and underdevelopment – the conditions that ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland has so astonishingly left behind in the last twenty years. But strange, secondly, because the significance of the Cork plague was really just the opposite. Historians today can read it as early but clear evidence that Irish society had already begun to emerge from poverty into something like the basic living standards of Western Europe.

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Tags: Cork, Ireland, Polio, epidemiology, hygiene, medicine, poverty // Add Comment »

I started my rotation today doing an elective in UCSD’s Poison Control unit (”Toxicology”), which the Governator planned to eliminate to avoid increasing the car registration fees he slashed as part of his quid pro quo during the recall election. Anyway, discussion highlights today included poisonous box jellyfish, weird fish, when is a “spider bite” really a spider bite (”almost never”), and how dodgy is it to eat fish bought in the afternoon rather than the morning (”very”).

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Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, California, medicine, poison, rotations, toxicology // Add Comment »

El Paso County, eight hundred miles up the border, has essentially the same demographics … Yet in 2006 Medicare expenditures … in El Paso were $7,504 per enrollee—half as much as in McAllen … Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse visits. The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine.

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Tags: Atul Gawande, El Paso, McAllen, Medicare, Texas, The New Yorker, health care, health policy, medicine // Add Comment »

Michael Jackson Dead - Tour Tickets Available!

NME never one to miss a sales opportunity.

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Tags: Michael Jackson, NME, celebrity, fail // Add Comment »

The AMA may be regressive when it comes to health care reform, but it does sometimes display an impressive ability to change. Or maybe not. At its annual meeting, the AMA voted to recommend white coats be banned in hospitals to prevent nosocomial infection spread. Then it decided to reconsider the recommendation (for anti-infection dress codes) until there’s more evidence they work. Or something. It’s as if scrubs didn’t exist. Shades of Semmelweis. It seems that sometimes scientific/clinical skepticism can lead people to disbelieve that improvement could really be that simple.

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Tags: AMA, American Medical Association, Ignaz Semmelweis, hospitals, infection, medicine, sepsis, white coat // Add Comment »

Buried on Page 31 of the [US Senate Finance Committee's policy reform document] was a proposal to “Modify the Requirements for Tax-Exempt Hospitals,” which would require nonprofit hospitals to maintain minimal levels of charitable activity, limit aggressive collections, and restrict charges to the uninsured and indigent. The proposed penalties for noncompliance are severe: Hospitals that can’t prove their “community benefit” will lose the tax benefits associated with nonprofit status … $93.5 billion in federal subsidies are provided every year in the form of tax breaks. But research shows that nonprofit hospitals behave no differently from for-profit ones.

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Tags: charity, corporate welfare, health policy, hospitals, medicine // Add Comment »

Most settlers take out long-term mortgages on units in multistory apartment buildings. Detached, single-family homes are hard to find in the densely populated settlements. Low-price rentals are often available directly from the state, sometimes for less than $150 per month … according to an Israeli report, many settlements were developed on land owned privately by Palestinians with neither compensation nor consent.

A young newlywed couple is walking to the bus stop: 21-year-old Aharon and his 19-year-old wife, Elisheva. They speak nearly perfect Hebrew despite having grown up in the United States and having settled permanently in Israel just a few months ago, after Aharon completed his army service in the ultra-Orthodox Nahal unit … The couple pay their rent, NIS 550 a month, to the settlement secretariat … Aharon doesn’t look upset when he hears that his trailer sits on private land. It doesn’t really interest him. “I don’t care what the state says, the Torah says that the entire Land of Israel is ours.”

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Tags: Baruch Spiegel, Eretz Yisrael Hashlemah, Israel, Nahal, Palestine, colonisation, ha-Aretz ha-Muvtachat, occupation, settlement, ארץ ישראל השלמה, הארץ המובטחת // Add Comment »