This week’s think like a doctor column in the NYT is great. It asks the question, if a woman goes to a chiropractor, gets her neck manipulated, and within hours and for the succeeding four years she’s had symptoms of severe headaches and a pulsatile sound in her ears, what is the diagnosis?
You can guess what mine is…
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All this excitement about Levi Johnston in Playgirl Magazine is pretty interesting. We have the forthcoming tell-all book about Sarah Palin and fam, and the author posing naked.
And who reads Playgirl anyway? It occurred to me this morning that we could get some idea from looking at the magazine’s datacard, which at least would tell us something about subscribers.
So, not that many subscribers. Not much of a surprise. And over 30% male…not much of a surprise. And only 230 from Canada! Could you imagine having a dinner party for the Canadian subscribers to Playgirl magazine? That might be an interesting crowd.
We’re closing in on the final moments. All the med students have gathered in the old med school auditorium at UVA. Per tradition, we all carry a dollar bill for a pool, with the last person to receive their envelope getting the pot (we get called randomly).
Results around 12, I’ll keep updating this post.
11:35 NBC 29 is here for their yearly match coverage. And the room is full of babies! A family event except for the covert drinking.
11:40 The dean is here with a sack of letters. Progress…. He says we’re the best class ever! Take that all you alumni!
11:45 One of our administrators is singing “matchmaker” to us. Ha!
11:50 I have envelope, received to polite clapping.
12:00 And the winner is… Wait… Crap they’re missing a letter. This will be a minute. Ok were good. General Surgery at Maryland!
Who cares about moral hazard anymore! AEI, Cato, where are you when we need you?
It goes something like this: A group of companies that chose to put lead in children’s toys, or to offshore their operations to countries with poor manufacturing controls in order to save money, are now upset that their schemes are going to cost them money. The government has the audacity to do something about this crisis, and guess what, it costs the industry money! Maybe they should have incorporated the costs of lead when they decided to offshore!
Joseph Pereira of the Journal reports:
Makers of children’s products and charities that run second-hand shops are stuck with more than $1 billion of inventory they can’t sell because of a new federal product-safety law, according to surveys by trade groups and the charities.
They’re stuck with this inventory because of a new federal product safety law? What a way to shift the blame! If the industry as a whole maintained quality controls, we wouldn’t be in a toxic toy crisis, and then the federal safety law would not have been passed. Consumer protection laws do not just pass out of the blue; they are motivated by serious, overwhelmingly problematic situations. Trust me on this, there are 100 lobbyists against any consumer protection matter for each advocate in favor of it. They only pass when agencies and Congress have no option but to side with the single advocate.
The Toy Industry Association estimates that more than $600 million in toys made illegal by the law are sitting in manufacturers’ warehouses or have already been shipped to retailers. A trade group for small apparel makers in New York called the Coalition for Safe and Affordable Childrenswear says its members have a $500 million problem. And the California Fashion Association, which represents many Western clothes makers, puts their troubled inventories at $200 million.
The trade groups were reluctant to disclose the names of the companies affected or provide documentation in support of their estimates.
Yep. Sounds like they’ll be next in line for a bailout.
For those artistic evilutionists out there, Burning Man, the yearly festival celebrating freedom, expression, and self-reliance, is sponsoring art based on this year’s theme of Evolution. The details for getting a grant to support your artwork are here.
So, come up with some ideas for interactive, creative expressions of what evolution means, where humans have come from or where are we going, and submit them for entry into the festival!
This week’s PalCast is still in production, so your patience is appreciated.
Previous episodes are here.
…and I’m just itchin’ for a fight. The medical “De-lightenment”, that movement to marginalize the role of science in medicine, has just made a strategic error. Like other weak movements, they’ve formed unwise alliances. Orac reports that so-called mainstream altmed folks like Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra have now made friends with the more obviously wacko altmed gurus, such as Gary Null.
Perhaps “friends” is pushing it, but these supposedly educated physicians are actually citing HIV-denialist Null as a reliable source for health information. I’m tempted to coin a new internet Law here, perhaps The Chopra Blunder:
As an educated physician, I have the ability to comb the medical literature with tools such as Ovid or PubMed. Hell, even Google Scholar isn’t half bad. If I have to resort to quoting a charismatic TV health guru with a fake PhD who thinks that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, perhaps my argument wasn’t that great to start with.
Anyone who works with the mentally ill knows that they smoke more than other people. In fact, people with mental illness (hereafter, MI, not to be confused with myocardial infarction) are about twice as likely to smoke as people without mental illness, with smoking rates of 60-90%. One of my favorite stats is that “44% of the cigarettes smoked in the United States are by individuals with a psychiatric or substance-abuse disorder.” People with MI are also heavier smokers, and may even be better at extracting nicotine from the cigs that they smoke.
Studies have shown that people with MI can in fact quit, but from a front line perspective, this is really, really tough. In fact, quit rates aren’t all that great for people without the added burden of mental illness, so any barriers to quitting are formidable ones.
The reasons for high smoking rates in schizophrenics and others with serious mental illness are both socio-psychological and physiologic, with nicotine acting on CNS nicotine receptors and dopamine pathways. Smoking is sometimes viewed as a form of “self-medication”, but it can be difficult to differentiate the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal from symptoms attributable to the pre-existing mental illness.
I made a mistake. First, I got a little worked up during last night’s debate because, when discussing health problems, both candidates gave shout-outs to relatively rare conditions rather than to the big killers. My second mistake was more grievous. I read something in HuffPo written by Deirdre Imus.
No one brings the stupid quite like Deirdre. When she talks about health, it’s like a 12th century peasant talking about quantum mechanics—-most of the time, she’s not even wrong.
Deirdre’s upset. She’s upset that the candidates haven’t addressed children’s healt issues. That’s reasonable.
Anticipating the lack of attention always given to children, last April I sent a questionnaire to both Senators McCain and Obama in order to elicit their positions and strategies “to address children’s health issues.”
Despite numerous calls to both campaign offices, neither has had the courtesy to respond to a few specific questions that are critically important to millions of parents and could garner millions of votes.
Perhaps the candidates don’t care about kids. Or perhaps the candidates strategically feel that these issues won’t get them the votes.
Or maybe they just think Imus is a crackpot.
She was upset about not hearing back from the candidates, so she posted her questionnaire online. After reading it, I’m pretty sure I understand why it was ignored.
I’m liveblogging and leaving an open thread…go to it.