MSM finally notices threats against politicians (sort of) *UPDATED*

From the moment Gov. Walker squared off against the public sector unions in Wisconsin, conservatives noticed something interesting:  The mainstream media, which was all aflutter about politician safety after a paranoid schizophrenic aimed a gun at a Democratic Senator, wounding her and killing a heroic Republican judge), showed remarkable restraint in reporting about threats against a Republican governor and Republican senators.  Indeed, the MSM’s restraint was so great, it failed to do any reporting at all.

The overwhelming silence got to Lee Stranahan — a self-identified Progressive — who felt compelled in all decency to call out the MSM for its hypocrisy:

Three questions for you.

1. Do you think of Republicans and the Tea Party as dangerous, violent extremists?
2. Do you think the Wisconsin protests over GOP Governor Scott Walker’s move to strip public sector employees of collective bargaining were peaceful?
3. Do you scoff at the right wing notion that mainstream media like the New York Times, the TV networks and NPR have a liberal media bias against the conservatives?

If you answered ‘yes’ to all three of those questions, then let me ask you one more…

Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the death threats against Republican politicians in Wisconsin?

[snip]

Burying the death threat story is a clear example of intellectual dishonesty and journalistic bias.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Look into the story of death threats in Wisconsin yourself and see who has been covering the story and who hasn’t. Try for a moment to see this story from the perspective of those who you may disagree with on policy and ask yourself how this looks to them. Can you blame them for feeling that way? Then take a few seconds and read those questions I asked you at the beginning of this article.

And then ask why progressives shouldn’t expect more from our media — and ourselves — than we expect from our political adversaries.

I don’t respect Stranahan’s political beliefs, which are antithetical to mine, but I certainly respect his personal integrity and his honesty.

I’m happy to report that one news reporter, perhaps influenced by Stranahan’s post, finally realized the error of her ways and focused on the threats to conservative politicians.  So it is that, today, the SF Chronicle has a front page story entitled “Threats directed at any state GOP.”

Isn’t that great?  The Chron is reporting about threats against California conservatives.

Okay, I confess.  I’m leading you down the primrose path.  What the headline really says is “Threats directed at any state GOP ‘turncoats.’”  In other words, the other threats against the GOP that the Chron seems willing to acknowledge are those coming from other members of the GOP.

But should California’s Republican politicians start barricading themselves in their houses and traveling with guards to protect themselves from their fellow party members?  Are they having their outlines drawn in chalk on the sidewalk, their home addresses published, their children threatened?  Well, not really.  What’s actually happening is that California state GOP people are hearing from the grassroots that, if they don’t pay attention to calls for true conservatism, they won’t be reelected!  How’s that for a front-page-worthy threat?  Those crazy Tea Partiers know how to play mean and dirty.

I’m beginning to understand the threat algorithm in the MSM:  Eight years of vile threats and imaginings against George Bush — ignore.  Insane shoots Senator he’s been stalking for four years — blame Tea Partiers.  Progressives and public union members threaten Wisconsin conservatives with death — ignore.  Tea Partiers warn that they won’t reelect wobbly GOP members — phrase so vaguely on newspaper front page that it looks to the casual reader as if Tea Partiers are ready to kill their own.

Being a member of the Progressive MSM means you never actually have to think.  How relaxing.

UPDATE:  Deroy Murdock compiled, verbatim, some of the Wisconsin death threats that the media yawns about.

UPDATE II:  When I wrote the above, I said that the SF Chron article was written to imply that Tea Party activists were actually violent.  At the time, I didn’t have proof.  Now I do.  As reliably as a stopped clock, one of my liberal facebook friends wrote that the California GOP was made up of “thugs” who “beat the crap” out of people.

The difference between withholding brutal treatment and killing someone

In the old days, medical treatment was more likely to kill than to cure.  For example, one can make a good argument that George Washington died because his physicians bled him to death.

It’s scarcely strange, then, that homeopathy was such a hit when it first appeared on the scene.  The principle, as I understand it, is that one puts a drop of something medicinal (or, often, poisonous) into a container filled with pure water.  Then, one takes one drop of that mixture and adds it to another container filled with pure water.  And then, one repeats that process again (and, perhaps, again).  The end result is a container filled with pure water.

People who practice homeopathy believe that the water has the essence of the medicine, and therefore has a curative effect.  Whether that is true or not, a patient in 1820 who was given pure water to drink was likely to suffer less, and perhaps heal better, than the patient who was bled, cupped, given mercury, and subject to other horrific pre-modern medical treatments.

Nowadays, medicine is much more effective, although some of the side effects can be every bit as nasty and even fatal as the old medicines.  Speaking personally, while I know Vicodin is an effective painkiller, I’d rather take the pain that the extreme vomiting reaction it induces in me.  Still, if Vicodin doesn’t work, there’s usually something else out there that will, if not as well, at least enough to be worthwhile.

The whole equation changes when people are at the end of the road with terminal illnesses.  At that point, curative medicines and treatments have ceased to cure, leaving the patient with the side effects, but no benefits.  Socialized medicine holds that, at this point, the State gets to call the shots, determining that the person with the illness should no longer get the treatment.  The only problem is that people don’t slot themselves into neat little charts.  Some are dying, but want to live; some are living, but want to die; some are told they will die, but their bodies refuse to listen to the message and insist on getting better.  Allowing individual decisions in an open marketplace is the scenario most likely to allow people to fulfill their biological destiny, whether it’s a swift death, or a slow one, a longed-for death, or one that the person fights against bitterly.  Leaving the process to the government ensures only that more will die regardless.

I actually blogged on this topic almost two years ago during the ObamaCare debate.  I focused on people I knew who had insisted, when healthier, that they wanted to die but who had discovered, when death came calling, that they wanted to live.  In a pre-ObamaCare world, both of these people were allowed to try for life.  Both ultimately died, but they were around longer than they would have been if the government had announced that they were unsalvageable.

Today, Zombie touches on the other side of that equation:  someone who, like my dad and my friend, thought he wanted death but who, unlike them, was denied the opportunity to change his mind.  What makes Zombie’s story especially horrific is that this was not a situation in which his relative simply had treatment withheld.  As I noted at the start of the post, when treatment becomes useless and onerous, withholding it may be a wise and humane decision.  Instead, it’s a story of a battle between caregivers, with some wanting to care for the body, and others intent upon hastening death.

After you’ve read Zombie’s post, please come back to me and share your thoughts.  If I had to summarize my view it would be this:  If I come to a point in my life when treatment is only painful, and offers no hope, I don’t think I’ll want treatment any more.  Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean I want my doctor or my government to hasten my death.  Instead, I want to be made comfortable.  I want to be fed, hydrated and medicated so that my body (and my soul, if I have one), can make the journey as nature (or God, if he exists) intended.

Of flight surgeons and physicals

When we met the Blues, one of the people we met was the team’s flight surgeon, who struck me as a lovely young woman:  warm, dedicated and intelligent.  I’m sure Neptunus Lex wasn’t talking about her when he wrote this hysterically funny post a few years ago.  (And no, I didn’t go hunting that post down.  NL conveniently linked to it as part of another post about the fact that General Petraeus has been successfully treated for early stage prostate cancer. )

Also, if you’re already at NL’s site, check out this post about the increase in violent crime in Chicago.  Every point is excellent.

Two stories about British dental care sound a tocsin about government involvement in health care

This is a matched set of stories from the London Times, both about British dental care, and both warning of the travails when the government both controls much (not all, but much) of the market.  The first story involves the horrible teeth British children enjoy under national dental care.  You’ll note that the culprits aren’t only diet and culture (which are, of course, very real concerns), but are also rationing’ the system’s past inability to entice people into being dentists, a problem offset now by enticements unrelated to the marketplace; and, significantly, the absence of a true free market to control the type of treatments dentists provide:

Children have had nearly one million teeth pulled out in a year as sugary diets and poor dental care took its toll. The number of tooth extractions carried out on children aged under 18 has risen by 12 per cent in five years, the NHS Information Centre said.

The figures support recent warnings that thousands of children are ending up in hospital because of their teeth, with many requiring a general anaesthetic. The latest data — the first to compare clinical activity before and after the Government’s recent overhaul of NHS dentistry — also showed that there were two million extractions carried out on adults in 2008-09, a rise of 220,000 on 2003-04.

Bad diets, poor brushing and shortfalls in the provision of dental care have all been blamed for the sharp rise in teeth pulling brought on by dental caries. The figures raise questions about the Government’s efforts to improve access to preventive dental care, including regular check-ups and fluoride treatments.

An overhaul of dental contracts was introduced three years ago to boost the number of NHS dentists and to end the “drill and fill” culture in which dentists were paid for the number of treatments carried out. The new contract was designed to allow dentists to spend more time on preventative work by paying them a flat salary.

An average dentist’s take-home pay is about £90,000 and many earn more than £200,000. They receive this wage regardless of whether they carry out simple or complex treatment.The figures revealed a sharp drop in more difficult procedures, such as crowns, bridges and root canal work. Crowns fell by nearly 50 per cent between 2004 and 2009 to 750,000, while the number of root canals fell by 40 per cent over the same period.

[I snipped here the competing statements about dental care from liberal and conservative politicians. I’ll wrap up with the article’s concluding fact.]

Earlier this year ministers agreed to a further overhaul of NHS dentistry after it emerged that it had led to even fewer patients accessing care. A review led by Professor Jimmy Steele of Newcastle University recommended that income should be determined by patient list size, quality of care and the number of courses of treatment.

The second story involves the bizarre system that has developed in Scotland, once again a landscape that doesn’t have entirely Communist health care (that is, only government controlled care), but that tries to provide a weird amalgam of public and private care in a government controlled environment (emphasis mine):

When Alfred Huynen was preparing to open a new dental practice he was forced to rip up the rulebook on marketing. Instead of advertising the service that he intended to provide, he concealed it, fearing that his acceptance of NHS patients would prompt huge queues.

Mr Huynen’s practice in Cove, Aberdeen, opened three weeks ago, spurning private patients in favour of those who are subsidised by the health service. During the five months that it took to build the surgery he kept the function of the building secret in an attempt to prevent long queues from forming outside. He even let some neighbouring businesses think that it was a takeaway. Now that word has leaked out, the practice has registered 3,000 people in three weeks.

Scots have long had a problem with accessing NHS dentists as practitioners often choose to go private instead of carrying out less lucrative health service work. The SNP government has worked hard to address the shortage by boosting the salary of NHS dentists, who can now earn up to £65,000. The poor provision means that surgeries who accept health service patients can look forward to lots of work.

[snip]

Mr Huynen said that people were travelling hundreds of miles because they were so desperate for an NHS dentist. “I can’t believe the distances people are coming from,” he said.

You’ll note from the last story that, when people have a choice, they don’t want government provided care.  They’re willing to pay twice — once by way of taxes that are taken from them by government coercion and once again by way of exercising their choice in the marketplace.  All that the government option does is suck money out of the marketplace without actually increasing patient care.

The bottom line on Obama Care

Karl Rove nicely articulates the bottom line facts driving Obama’s fear-mongering game to force through immediate and irrevocable changes to America’s health care system:

Mr. Obama’s problem is that nine out of 10 Americans would likely get worse health care if ObamaCare goes through. Of those who do not have insurance—and who therefore might be better off—approximately one-fifth are illegal aliens, nearly three-fifths make $50,000 or more a year and can afford insurance, and just under a third are probably eligible for Medicaid or other government programs already.

For the slice of the uninsured that is left—perhaps about 2% of all American citizens—Team Obama would dismantle the world’s greatest health-care system. That’s a losing proposition, which is why Mr. Obama is increasingly resorting to fear and misleading claims. It’s all the candidate of hope has left.

And while we’re on the subject of rationed health care

Faced with an epidemic, England is already planning on rationing:

Thousands of patients could be denied NHS treatment and left to die under ‘worst-case’ emergency plans for a swine-flu epidemic.

The blueprint would force doctors to ‘play God’ and prioritise intensive-care treatment for those most likely to benefit  –  ruling out patients with problems such as advanced cancer.

The ‘scoring’ system would be introduced if half the population became infected with flu.

[snip]

The scale of their concern is highlighted in the Department of Health’s report: Pandemic Flu – Managing Demand and Capacity in Health Care Organisations.

Detailing plans to ration hospital treatment, the report warns that if half the population were infected, 6,600 patients per week would be competing for just under 4,000 intensive-care beds.

Around 85 per cent of those beds could already be full with day-to-day emergencies.

To allocate ventilators, beds and intensive-care equipment doctors would have to ‘score’ patients on their health and prognosis as well as seriousness of their conditions.

Those who failed to respond to treatment would be subject to ‘reverse triage’ – in which they were taken off ventilators and left in NHS ‘dying rooms’ with only painkillers to ease their suffering.

Patients with underlying illness such as advanced cancer or the last stage of heart, lung or liver failure  –  and those unlikely to survive even if they were given treatment  –  would not be given an intensive-care bed.

Definitely what we want over here — right, folks?

Actually, I’ll freely concede that we probably would do precisely the same if we had an epidemic.  In an epidemic situation, rationing is inevitable, because an overwhelmed system cannot cope.  What I’d like to think, though, is that our system will be less overwhelmed than the creaking National Health Service, which already does rationing to cope with its inefficiencies.

Herding seniors to the abattoire *UPDATED*

Don Parker nails both the costs and hypocrisy behind the mandate in the new health care bill that seniors be gently steered towards a cheap death.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Old Flyer for reminding me of this, which fits in so perfectly with the new plan:

UPDATE II:  A story from my dad’s old joke book.

In long ago Japan or China (or amongst the Eskimos, or something else), a young boy came across his father carry a large basket on his back.  In the basket was the boy’s grandfather.

He asked, “Father, where are you taking grandfather?”

“Shh,” said the father.  “Grandfather is old and sick.  He eats, but he does not earn.  I’m taking him to the river, where I will leave him to die.  It will be better for all of us.”

“Oh, father,” said the boy.  “That is an excellent idea.  But be sure to bring the basket home, so that I can use it for you one day.”

All cultures living on the margin of survival have used abandonment as a way of culling the herd so that the strong can survive.  The Hansel and Gretel story is a perfect example of this.  With too many mouths to feed, the children were left in the wilderness.

My question, of course, is whether we, in America, have come to that marginal existence?  The Left thinks we have.  I don’t — or, at least, I hope we haven’t.

The high US infant mortality canard

Another chapter in the “lies, damn lies and statistics” is the repeated claim from proponents of European-style socialized medicine that the US has the highest infant mortality rate of any first world country.  This is a scathing indictment, implicating American poverty, racism, prenatal and post-natal care.  The only problem is that it’s completely false, and is based on the fact that Europe, when it does its infant mortality statistics, ignores fragile infants that were doomed from their live births:

Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and a single-payer system is supposed to be better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus.

As she points out, in the U.S., low birth-weight babies are still babies. In Canada, Germany and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 grams is not considered a living child and is not counted in such statistics. They’re considered “unsalvageable” and therefore never alive.

Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world — until you factor in weight at birth, and then its rate is no better than in the U.S.

In other countries babies that survive less than 24 hours are also excluded and are classified as “stillborn.” In the U.S. any infant that shows any sign of life for any length of time is considered a live birth.

A child born in Hong Kong or Japan that lives less than a day is reported as a “miscarriage” and not counted. In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby is not counted as a baby if it is less than 30 centimeters in length.

Soviet-style healthcare for thee but not for me

Here is absolutely everything you need to know about the proposed Obama/Democratic health care plan:

The president is barnstorming the nation, urging swift approval of legislation that is taking shape in Congress. This legislation — the Affordable Health Choices Act that’s being drafted by Sen. Edward Kennedy’s staff and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — will push Americans into stingy insurance plans with tight, HMO-style controls. It specifically exempts members of Congress (along with federal employees; the exemptions are in section 3116).

I think that one bit of information should tip off Americans to the real nature of this plan.

Deconstructing the Obama health care plan

Okay, it’s actually called the Kennedy bill, but it’s the realization of Obama’s insistence on the federal government forcing and funding mandatory health insurance.  Keith Hennessey, in addition to giving links for you to read the bill yourself, explains the substantive parts of the bill, as well as the probable practical and economic effects the bill will have.  As to the latter, here are just a few things Hennessey gives us to worry about:

• The government would mandate not only that you must buy health insurance, but what health insurance counts as “qualifying.”
• Health insurance premiums would rise as a result of the law, meaning lower wages.
• A government-appointed board would determine what items and services are “essential benefits” that your qualifying plan must cover.

[snip]

• Those who keep themselves healthy would be subsidizing premiums for those with risky or unhealthy behaviors.

[snip]

• The Secretaries of Treasury and HHS would have unlimited discretion to impose new taxes on individuals and employers who do not comply with the new mandates.

[snip]

And while Hennessey points out the flaws in the bill, the Wall Street Journal explains all the false data and unsupported assumptions that drive the bill.

I have a different question.  In 1994, when the Clinton’s first tried to created government health care, conservatives launched the brilliant Harry and Louise ad campaign.  (To the extent Harry and Louise have returned, they’re now demanding nationalized health care, which is beyond scary.)  Why haven’t I heard about a single ad initiative aimed at the average American to help him or her understand that there is a disaster in the making here?  Is it because, with DVRs, people no longer watch commercials?  If that’s the case, how in the world do we circumvent the Obama media and get solid information out to ordinary people?

Lucky Obama

October 2008:  McCain finally looks poised to lead in the polls, the market collapses and cool, calm, collected, Ivy League educated Obama vaults forward to victory.  April 2009:  It starts to look as if both the American public and Congress may be getting leery about Obama’s proposal to nationalize healthcare (i.e., have the government take control of America’s medical system) and the swine flu hits.  Obama has a plan:  “Hey, kids!  Let’s nationalize healthcare!”

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1155201977

Medieval dental care under Britain’s NHS

When I was growing up, my father was a teacher with a lousy salary and lousy benefits.  The only good thing he had was his dental plan.  It was a wonderful dental plan.  Provided that we got our teeth cleaned and checked twice a year, it would pay the total cost of any dental work needed.  (And, unsurprisingly given the careful maintenance our teeth got, we never needed fancy dental work.)  One of the side benefits of the plan was that it got me in the habit of making regular visits to my dentist to keep my teeth up to par.

Going to England for my junior year abroad didn’t change that habit.  About half way through the year, I decided that I absotively, posolutely needed to get my teeth cleaned, even if I had to pay out of pocket for the experience.  While visiting a friend in Surrey, I managed to get an appointment with her dentist.

The tooth cleaning I got was, to this spoiled American, surprising.  First, the dentist did it himself, as opposed to a technician.  He explained that, since people didn’t get their teeth cleaned, technicians weren’t trained in the task.  He had been trained at dental skill, he said, but his skills were rusty.

And rusty they were.  If you’re like me, you’re used to a very thorough cleaning:  gum measurements (to check for recession); a careful scraping of every surface; sonic assistance on the scraping, if need be; a gentle scrub with that polisher doo-hicky and some abrasive paste; and finally a good flossing.  When I leave the dentist, my teeth are so clean you can eat off of them.

In England, all I got was a less than gentle scrub with that polisher doo-hicky and some abrasive paste.  That was it.  That was what past for dental hygiene.  It became apparent to me why British teeth have been a long-standing American joke.

Despite (or perhaps because of) Britain’s national health care system, British dentistry apparently continues to be a century or two behind America’s.  Today’s British news informs us that Britain’s dentists pretty much treat tooth problems as they’ve been treated for thousands of years:  they pull the tooth. Indeed, it seems that, when it comes to dental care, the only difference between British dental care today and British dental care in the 1850s, 1750s, 1550s, and ever further back in time, is the anesthetic:

Thousands of Britons are having teeth needlessly pulled out, it was claimed yesterday.

The number of extractions has soared by 30 per cent in four years, according to figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats.

The party claims this demonstrates how much dental care has deteriorated under Labour, leaving thousands missing out on treatment that could save their teeth. More than 175,000 Britons had their teeth extracted under general anaesthetic in 2007/08, up 40,000 on the 2003/04 figure, a parliamentary answer revealed.

Figures show thousands of people are having their teeth pulled out needlessly when they could have been saved

Of these, 44,300 were aged between six and 18 and 14,200 were under five years old. LibDem health spokesman Norman Lamb said: ‘The extraordinary number of people needing their teeth extracted under general anaesthetic could well be the result of the appalling access to NHS dentistry.’

He pointed the finger at the general difficulty in finding a Health Service dentist since the Government introduced a ‘botched’ contract in April 2006.

Designed to increase access to NHS dentistry, the deal actually saw hundreds of dentists leave the NHS.

The number of patients seeing a dentist fell by 1.2million, leaving thousands without the treatment that could have stopped their teeth getting so bad that they had to be pulled out.

But dentists’ salaries have soared by 11 per cent since the change – to an average of more than £96,000.

Mr Lamb added: ‘The dental contract was supposedly designed to improve the situation, but the staggering rise in tooth extractions proves the massive failures of thisbotched initiative. The crisis in NHS dentistry is one of this Government’s most shameful legacies.’

Although the rate of extractions increased throughout the four-year period following April 2003, it gathered pace after the new contract for NHS dentists was introduced.

You can read the rest here.

As I read it, aside from Britain’s generally laughable dental standards, a huge government error has doomed millions of Britain’s to medieval care. That’s what happens when you have one provider, and the provider screws up. There are no alternatives. There is no marketplace to adapt and provide. Everything simply collapses.

Patient safety is not a focus when the government calls the shots

For three years, a single British hospital that was obsessed with following government health care mandates to the letter, succeeded only in killing 1,200 patients unnecessarily:

Twelve NHS trusts are being investigated following a damning report which today slammed ‘appalling’ care at a single hospital.

Hundreds of patients may have died after bosses at Staffordshire General focused on Government targets rather than safety, the Healthcare Commission said.

A ‘shocking’ catalogue of failures over a three-year period were disclosed after an investigation found hospital managers had sought to save millions by adopting foundation status.

[snip]

Among the findings of yesterday’s report were:

● receptionists carrying out initial checks on emergency patients

● too few consultants, with junior doctors left in charge overnight

● two clinical decision units used as ‘dumping grounds’ for A&E patients to avoid breaching four-hour waiting targets, one of which had no staff

● nurses so ill-trained they turned off heart monitors because they didn’t understand them

● delays in operations, with some patients having surgery cancelled four days in a row and left without food, drink or medication

● vital equipment missing or not working

● doubling of life-threatening C diff infection rates, which were kept from the hospital board and the public

● a target of £10 million savings which was met at the expense of 150 posts, including nurses

● more debate by the board about becoming a foundation trust than about patient safety

[snip]

Investigators were inundated with complaints from patients and relatives, the most it had ever received, including Julie Bailey, 47, who set up a campaign group following the death of her mother in November 2007 at the hospital in Stafford.

She was so concerned about her 86-year-old mother Bella that she and her relatives slept in a chair at her hospital bedside for eight weeks.

‘What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives’ she said.

Thirsty patients drank out of flower vases, while others were screaming in pain and falling out of bed.

[snip]

Director of the Patients Association Katherine Murphy said ‘Government targets have directly impaired safe clinical practice and money and greed for Foundation Trust benefits has taken priority over patient’s lives.’

As you can see, the above story does not relate one of those increasingly frequent situations in which the British government decided to withhold treatment or tests from a single class of patients because the patients are more expense than they are worth.  The government wasn’t directly involved here at all.

The problem, instead, was that a hospital, rather than seeing patients at its customers, saw the government as its patron, and redirected its energies accordingly.  And because there was no connection between the patients and the hospital in terms of complaints (that is, the hospital didn’t care about the patients, who were not paying the bills themselves, nor did they have a direct relationship with an insurance company that wanted to keep their custom), the hospital managed to go for years without having to react to criticism or complaints.  It was only when patients and their families were able to achieve a critical mass that made a noise loud enough to spur the government to action that the hospital’s conduct finally came under scrutiny.

It’s a reminder to us all that the market speaks loudly and quickly.  The government may ultimately have the loudest voice of all, but getting it to speak is often an agonizing task for a consumer who is deprived of a true marketplace and, instead, is utterly dependent on the government to give him a voice.

Chipping away at liberals’ belief in Obama’s program *UPDATED*

For reasons too complicated to explain, I have more than a passing knowledge about medical informatics — or, in simple terms, the trend to put all patient records in computerized systems.  That’s why, at a soccer game, a young woman who is clearly an Obama supporter asked me what I thought of the move to put all American medical records in a federal database.  “What harm can it do?” she asked.

We both agreed that a comprehensive federal medical database probably couldn’t harm people financially, the way identity theft scams can.  I suggested to her, though, that federal control over medical records — could harm people in much more significant ways.  For example, I said, a 50 year old, vital man, might not want the feds responsible for keeping secret the fact that he has to use Viagra.  Likewise, I said, no one wants information about their hemorrhoids to go much beyond their own doctor.  Hackers, I pointed out, could easily blackmail or humiliate people with information such as that.

Further, I said, it’s not only, or even primarily, the big diseases like cancer or AIDS that are the problem.  For most people, privacy means keeping around them a zone in which they forever function like a healthy young person, free of warts and erectile dysfunctions and fibroids and whatever other systemic failures people don’t want to admit to having.

She was much struck by this argument.  She certainly agreed with me that the average citizen would be wise not to trust the government with his or her secrets.  She understood, as I do, that government loses control of secrets, that a hostile administration may give away secrets, that individual government employees abuse secrets and that, by the nature of government, too many people know the secrets.

The gal pointed out, though, that we already give that same information to insurance companies, hospitals and doctors offices, and that they too have that information on their computer systems.  That’s different, I explained.  In those cases, there’s a one on one quid pro quo that precedes the entity’s taking on and computerizing that information.  Thus, I, personally, agree to go to that doctor and I acknowledge that, as a necessary adjunct to my treatment, the doctor needs to create and maintain my medical records.  Likewise, I choose to have insurance and, as part of that agreement, I also agree that it is reasonable for the insurance company, before it pays for my health care, to know what’s wrong with me.

With a federal database, though, I don’t get to make that agreement.  The federal government, as it just did, dictates by legislative fiat that it is entitled to create and control these records — and, being the government, to lose, abuse, publicize, sell or, ultimately, use these records as a justification to deny me medical care entirely.  There is no quid pro quo here.  There is no contract.  There is simply a federal government using its vast power to access and control, not only my big secrets (assuming I have any), but my little, humiliating secrets, the ones that knock down the sphere of physical inviolability all of us like to believe we have around ourselves.

I doubt I shook this gal’s faith in Obama, or the Democrats, or even the spendulus plan.  But I like to believe I made her think. And maybe once she’s done thinking about this, she’ll start thinking about something else too.

UPDATE:  A little off topic, but a good reminder that you should never, never, never trust the government with your secrets.

A glimpse into the future of Obama care

Again, Britain reminds us of the possible consequences of allowing the government to control health care.  (See here and here.)

As always, what amazes me about the Left is it’s never ending optimism about the government.  Its members will cheerfully concede that the government pretty much bungles most of the things on which it gets its hands, and they’re terrified of the government when the “other” party is in power.  Nevertheless, in masterful cognitive dissonance, they’re always willing to turn over more and more of their lives to that same government.

Despite failure after failure after failure, those on the Left are always perfectly sure that this time (with Carter, with Clinton, with Obama, etc.), they’ll get it right.  They’ll never concede that their theory is flawed — that statism is imperfect and by its nature cannot achieve they goals they set for it — but will always insist that the execution was flawed and that this time it will work.  A hundred million lives have been lost in this quest for statist perfection, and hundreds of millions more have been made drab, depressing, demoralizing and dangerous.

Let me say it again:  The market is imperfect, but the spur of competition forces those who wish to survive to offer a service that consumers will buy.  In a properly functioning marketplace, the government’s only role should be to ensure that no one is cheating the market. If one takes away this competition — making government the only game in town — there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that gives the workers in that statist system any incentive to provide a decent service.  So what if they do nothing at all?  There’s nowhere else to go.

Convincing people with ideas

I carpooled to a soccer game today.  The driver, who is someone I don’t know very well, is a very charming man who is quite obviously a potential Obama voter.  He wasn’t quite sure about me and, since he was a very civil individual, he never came out and either insulted McCain or lauded Obama.  He did say, though, that he thought it was the government’s responsibility to provide medical care.  He also characterized Vietnam as a complete disaster.  That gave me an interesting opportunity to explain to him a few historic facts he didn’t know — because very few people know them.

I started out by reminding him of something that most people forget:  the Vietnam War was a Democratic War.  Kennedy started it and Johnson expanded it.  (Nixon, the Republican, ended it.)  I didn’t say this in the spirit of accusation, because I wasn’t being partisan.  I said it to give historical context to a larger discussion about freedom versus statism.

I noted that, in the 1930s — and, again, most people have forgotten this — the major battle in Europe was between two Leftist ideologies:  Communism and Fascism.  When he looked a little blank, I pointed out that the Nazis were a socialist party, a fact he readily conceded.   I also reminded him that, in the 1930s, given that Stalin was killing millions of his countrymen, and that Hitler hadn’t yet started his killing spree, Fascism actually looked like the better deal.  World War II demonstrated that both ideologies — both of which vested all power in the State — were equally murderous.

Men of the Kennedy/Johnson generation, I said, saw their role in WWII as freeing Europe from the Nazi version of socialism.  When that job ended, they saw themselves in a continuing war to bring an end to the Communist version of socialism.  Again, they were reacting to overwhelming statism.

Thus, to them, it was all a single battle with America upholding the banner, not of freedom, but of individualism. They knew that America couldn’t necessarily make people free or bring them a democratic form of government, but that it could try to protect people from an all-powerful state.  That’s always been an integral part of American identity.  He agreed with everything I said.

I then moved to the issue of socialized medicine, which I pointed out, again, gives the state all the power.  The state, I said, has no conscience, and it will start doling out medical care based on its determining of which classes of individual are valuable, and which are less valuable, to the state. My friend didn’t know, for example, that Baroness Warnock of Britain, who is considered one of Britain’s leading moralists, announced that demented old people have a “duty to die” because they are a burden on the state.

A few more examples like that, and we agreed that the problem wasn’t too little government when it comes to medicine, but too much. Health insurer companies operating in California are constrained by something like 1,600 state and federal regulations.  I suggested that, rather than give the government more control over the medical bureaucracy, we take most of it away.  He conceded that this was probably a good idea.

Lastly, I reminded him what happens when government steps in as the <span style=”font-style: italic;”>pater familias</span>.  He didn’t know that, up until Johnson’s Great Society, African-Americans were ever so slowly “making it.”  As a result of the Civil Rights movement, opportunities were opening for Northern Blacks, and they — meaning the men — were beginning to make more money.  The African-American family was nuclear and starting to thrive.

This upward economic trend collapsed in the mid-1960s, and its collapse coincided absolutely to the minute with government social workers fanning out to black communities and telling them that the government would henceforth provide.  Since it seemed stupid to work when you could get paid not to work, black men stopped working.  They also stopped caring about their families, or even getting married, since unmarried mothers did even better under welfare than intact families.  In a few short years, not only did African-Americans as a group collapse economically, their family structure collapsed too.  Men were redundant.  The state would provide.  Again, my friend nodded his head in agreement.

The ride ended at that point but, as he was dropping me off, my friend told me (and I think he was speaking from his heart), that it was an incredibly interesting ride.  And I bet it was, because I gave him real food for thought in the form of facts and ideas that fall outside of the orthodoxy that characterizes our ultra-liberal community.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and McCain-Palin 2008.

NHS leaves British women in pain

From Genesis 3:16 (after the expulsion from Eden):

To the woman He [God] said,
“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.

I’m feeling Biblical after having read a story about another one of the “miracles” of universal healthcare, as in effect in Britain:

Hundreds of women are being forced to give birth without proper pain relief because of staff shortages at an NHS hospital.

Mothers-to-be are being denied epidurals – which numb the body from the waist down  – because of a lack of anaesthetists.

[snip]

The failure flouts guidance from four Royal Colleges, including the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians, that women should have access to an epidural within 30 minutes of requesting one.

It adds to mounting concern about the quality of NHS maternity care, with midwives in some hospitals expected to attend to three women in labour at the same time due to staff shortages.

I like epidurals.  Epidurals are good things.  I know there are some women who want to have the full experience of childbirth, but have two long, long labors, one mostly without an epidural, and one entirely with an epidural, I know what my preference is.  Those poor women.  But what can you expect in a medical environment that doesn’t adequately reward people to go through the long, hard slog of becoming a doctor?

A blow to freedom of religion

Fertility treatment is big money, so there are gazillions of treatment centers in most communities.  One such center in San Diego County may well have been put out business, though, by a California Supreme Court ruling mandating that physicians have to provide treatment to lesbians and other unmarried women, even though doing so goes against their religious beliefs:

California doctors who have religious objections to gays and lesbians must nevertheless treat them the same as any other patient or find a colleague in the office who will do so, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday.

The justices rejected a San Diego County fertility clinic’s attempt to use its physicians’ religious beliefs as a justification for their refusal to provide artificial insemination for a lesbian couple. The ruling, based on a state law prohibiting businesses from discriminating against customers because of their sexual orientation, comes three months after the court struck down California’s ban on same-sex marriage.

“This isn’t just a win for me personally and for other lesbian women,” said the plaintiff, Guadalupe Benitez. “Anyone could be the next target if doctors are allowed to pick and choose their patients based on religious views about other groups of people.”

[snip]

“This court is allowing two lesbians to force these individuals to choose between being doctors in the state of California or being able to practice their faith,” said attorney Brad Dacus of the conservative Pacific Justice Institute, which filed arguments backing the doctors.

Benitez, now 36, sued North Coast Women’s Care in Vista (San Diego County) and two of its doctors, saying they told her in 2000 that their Christian beliefs prohibited them from performing intrauterine insemination for a lesbian. The doctors later said they would have refused the treatment for any unmarried couple.

They referred Benitez to another clinic for the insemination, which cost her thousands of dollars because it wasn’t covered by her health plan, her lawyer said. She did not become pregnant then, but since has borne three children and is raising them with her partner of 18 years.

You can read the rest here.

I can’t do any better than to echo Dacus: “This court is allowing two lesbians to force these individuals to choose between being doctors in the state of California or being able to practice their faith.”  All of you know from my previous posts that I believe that, where a marketplace exists, it ought to control the outcome of these matters — and that’s true even if I disagree with the business owner’s beliefs or decision.

It would be different if this were a situation akin to the Jim Crow South and there was a monolithic wall of hatred against gays and lesbians seeking infertility treatments.  Here, however, the contrary is true, because there is a thriving market and fertility clinics make much of their money off of lesbians.  Even in conservative San Diego, as the story above indicates, there are people willing to serve that market.  Further, I find it very hard to believe that, in all of San Diego, the defendants’ office was the only one that worked with the gal’s health plan.

The bottom line for me is that, if that office wanted to do itself out of business based on religious principles, that’s a market decision, not a “court denying people their livelihood based on their beliefs” situation.  And this is, again, different from a monopoly situation such as that at the Minneapolis airport, where almost all the taxi drivers were Muslim, where airport passengers were a captive market, and where the Muslims refused to accept dogs or alcohol in their cabs.  That situation, obviously, was closer to the Jim Crow analogy, where there is no real marketplace.

One other point of interest.  The San Francisco Chronicle story from which I quoted above has an interesting caption:  “Doctors can’t use bias to deny gays treatment.”  Doesn’t that sound as if some ER doctor had before him a gay person who was dying on the table and just walked away because the doc was a homophobe?  That would certainly be a dreadful situation, worthy of that caption, especially because imminent death again implies no marketplace.  A busy marketplace, however, in which doctors turn away money because of their religious principles, strikes me as a different situation altogether, and one that does not deserve that type of lede.

For a good analysis of the legal errors in the Court’s opinion, go here.

Socialized medicine

I heard on Dennis Prager today a call from a British man who pointed out that, in the 10 years of Tony Blair’s socialism, every major institution in Britain declined.  And the more the government meddled, the greater the decline.  Today’s British papers offer yet another example:  The dental portion of the National Health Service was in trouble, so the government, rather than releasing market forces, interfered even more than before (which is hard to imagine, but nevertheless true).  This is the horrible result of maximum government meddling in what should be a thriving supply and demand marketplace for dental care:

The shake-up of NHS dentistry has been a disaster with standards of care dropping and almost one million fewer people being treated on the health service under the new system, a damning report by MPs has found.

Dentists now have no financial incentive to treat complex cases and patients are being pushed unnecessarily into the hospital system

Instead of improving access to NHS dentistry the reforms have made it worse, the report by the House of Commons Health Select Committee found.

The number of dentists working in the health service has fallen, the number of NHS treatments carried out has dropped and in many areas patients are still experiencing severe difficulties in finding a dentist to treat them.

Worryingly, complex treatments carried out on the NHS have dropped by half while both referrals to hospital and tooth extractions have increased.

This suggests dentists are simply removing teeth rather than taking on complicated treatments because they have become uneconomical to provide.

The report said that in the two years following the introduction of the new contract in April 2006, 900,000 fewer people saw an NHS dentist than in the last two years of the previous system. Even this could be an underestimate, it said.

Ministers introduced the reforms to the dental contract despite widespread concern they would not improve access to care. The contract was so unpopular that more than one in ten dentists refused to sign it and more than a third signed it in dispute.

However, the then health minister in charge of dentistry Rosie Winterton insisted: “The reforms will improve access, encourage more preventive dentistry and provide a stable income for dentists.”

You can read the rest here.  It’s depressing reading and should be read with a part of your brain holding on to the fact that Barack Obama wants to put the American government bureaucracy in charge of your medical and dental care too.

The Left’s faith in government control is truly impressive when one considers that, with amazing consistency, after a brief bump from the infusion of vast amounts of taxpayer cash (or, in the case of Europe, American funding), the systems inevitably collapse under the weight of a government ineptitude, inflexibility, and corruption.

Whoo-Boy! It’s penicillin all over again

We all know the story of penicillin’s discovery:  it arose from a lab accident when Alexander Fleming noticed that an accidental mold was killing bacteria.  That coincidental discovery changed the modern world.  It looks as if we can be seeing another pencillin moment, with an accidental fungus leading the way in the fight against cancer (emphasis mine):

A drug developed using nanotechnology and a fungus that contaminated a lab experiment may be broadly effective against a range of cancers, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.

The drug, called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher who died in January. Folkman pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy — starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies.

Lodamin is an angiogenesis inhibitor that Folkman’s team has been working to perfect for 20 years. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, his colleagues say they developed a formulation that works as a pill, without side-effects.

They have licensed it to SynDevRx, Inc, a privately held Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company that has recruited several prominent cancer experts to its board.

Tests in mice showed it worked against a range of tumors, including breast cancer, neuroblastoma, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, brain tumors known as glioblastomas and uterine tumors.

It helped stop so-called primary tumors and also prevented their spread, Ofra Benny of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School and colleagues reported.

“Using the oral route of administration, it first reaches the liver, making it especially efficient in preventing the development of liver metastasis in mice,” they wrote in their report. “Liver metastasis is very common in many tumor types and is often associated with a poor prognosis and survival rate,” they added.

Read more here.

Some quick hits from the Brits *UPDATED*

Britain’s Telegraph has three interesting articles, and the London Times one:

Read about the vast difference between Britain’s and France’s socialized medicine. I’d certainly like to know what accounts for the difference before I start making changes to the American system. Color me skeptical, but I bet Obama, who shows himself to be remarkably ignorant about so many things, doesn’t know.

Speaking of the NSH, here’s one man’s story of what happened to him when he tried to improve his treatment for cancer. It’s a reminder that a whole bunch of socialism is less concerned with getting a good deal for all and much more concerned with making sure that some guy over there doesn’t get a better deal.

One British columnist offers a good analysis pointing to a McCain victory in November.

And some good news: Although it’s for the wrong reason (shock collateral damage in the form of Muslim deaths), some of the most outspoken clerics in the Islamic world are starting to turn on Al Qaeda. (H/t Danny Lemieux, who read it at Flopping Aces.)

UPDATE: You have to read this one too: Melanie Phillips’ marvelous op-ed about the way in which the British body politic is trying to bamboozle Brits into ceding all national power to the European Union (and the way in which plucky little Ireland is the one thing that stands in the way).  Phillips also disclosed the really dirty little secret, which is that the horses have already left the barn:  the EU controls most of British day-to-day life already.

Brave? Yes. Unique? No.

If you stop at the first paragraph of this AP article, you might think that Teddy Kennedy is the only person on earth who has ever faced a cancer surgery as daunting as the one he underwent (emphasis mine):

Bravery in the face of cancer? Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has given it new meaning. Few things require as much courage as being wide awake and aware, lying perfectly still for hours, while surgeons methodically slice out bits of your brain.

In fact, although this approach to surgery is not common, Teddy is by no means the only one who has done it:

To avoid cutting through vital areas controlling speech, doctors often return the patient to consciousness and stimulate tissue in the planned surgical path with a probe.

“We’ll have them do language tests like hold up pictures, name objects, repeat words, hold a conversation,” Ewend explained.

After that, the patient is usually put back under while the tumor is cut out, which takes about three to four hours.

However, Kennedy was awake for the removal of the tumor, his doctor’s statement says. That usually means local rather than general anesthesia.

His head would have been in a vise-like device and he’d have to remain very still for hours while the doctors poked, probed and sliced away the cancer, using his responses to guide them.

“That’s the best way you can determine if you’re incurring neurological impairment” as the operation proceeds, said Dr. Kevin McGrail, neurosurgery chief at Georgetown University Medical Center.

“It’s a safe way to do the operation, but it can sometimes be very stressful on the patient,” who is aware of what’s going on even though it is not painful, he said.

As it happens, I am extremely impressed by the fact that Teddy was willing to do this, although I can understand the motive too: the best surgical outcome. Frankly, I don’t know if I could have done that, even sharing his motive. Let me say again, therefore, that I am not writing this to denigrate Teddy’s courage in the face of what seems to be an incredibly uncomfortable and frightening procedure.

My beef — as it almost always is — is with the way in which the media spins things like this (and I’m confident that the spin would have been . . . um, different if Cheney had been the one undergoing surgery). That first paragraph makes it sound as if Kennedy is unique in the history of cancer patients and that no one, absolutely no one, has ever demonstrated this type of courage before. Courageous? Definitely. Unique? Only in AP’s eyes, and that’s true despite the fact that their own article gives the game away.

On the subject of bravery in surgery, I’d like to recommend to you Fanny Burney’s experience. She was a late 18th/early 19th century courtier and writer in England who, in 1811, underwent a radical mastectomy — without anesthetic. Here is her description of that surgery (which is not for the faint of heart):

Yet – when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through veins – arteries – flesh – nerves – I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision – & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still! so excruciating was the agony. When the wound was made, & the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp & forked poniards, that were tearing the edges of the wound – but when again I felt the instrument – describing a curve – cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose & tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left – then, indeed, I thought I must have expired.

I attempted no more to open my Eyes, – they felt as if hermetically shut, & so firmly closed, that the Eyelids seemed indented into the Cheeks. The instrument this second time withdrawn, I concluded the operation over – Oh no! presently the terrible cutting was renewed – & worse than ever, to separate the bottom, the foundation of this dreadful gland from the parts to which it adhered – Again all description would be baffled – yet again all was not over, – Dr Larry rested but his own hand, & – Oh Heaven! – I then felt the Knife tackling against the breast bone – scraping it! – This performed, while I yet remained in utterly speechless torture, I heard the Voice of Mr Larry, – (all others guarded a dead silence) in a tone nearly tragic, desire everyone present to pronounce if anything more remained to be done; The general voice was Yes, – but the finger of Mr Dubois – which I literally felt elevated over the wound, though I saw nothing, & though he touched nothing, so indescribably sensitive was the spot – pointed to some further requisition – & again began the scraping! – and, after this, Dr Moreau thought he discerned a peccant attom – and still, & still, M. Dubois demanded attom after atom.

Burney lived another twenty-nine years after that ordeal.

A cautionary tale if Hillary becomes health tzar

There’s talk of Obama giving Hillary the green light to socialize American medicine if she’ll walk away from the primaries.  Melanie Phillips gives us a good example of why the renewed specter of socialized medicine should worry us:

To the Labour Party, the National Health Service is the talismanic proof of its own moral superiority.

Time and again, Labour brandishes its undying commitment to the NHS as the embodiment of its social conscience, and vilifies anyone who suggests that a different system of health care might be better as a heartless brute who would force the sick to choose between death and bankruptcy.

Well, now we can see quite what odious hypocrisy that is. For in the cause of supporting the NHS principle of equal treatment for all, the Government is actually ordering the withdrawal of treatment from desperately sick and dying people as an act of ideological spite.

A woman dying of cancer was denied NHS treatment in her final months  –  because she had paid privately for a drug which offered her the chance of living longer, but which the NHS had refused to provide.

When she decided to use her savings to pay for this drug, the NHS withdrew her treatment, including her chemotherapy.

This is by no means a one-off case. Six other cancer patients are taking legal action against the NHS after their own treatment was cut off or a threat was made to do so because they too paid for lifeprolonging drugs.

This is simply obscene. It is hard to imagine anything more vicious than stopping, or threatening to stop, the treatment of seriously ill people simply because they have the audacity to want to improve their chances of staying alive.

Read the rest here.

I know that our medical system isn’t perfect, and that it’s expensive.  However, medical care at some level or another is available to all — and it’s good care when you get it.  There are human errors, but the system tends to strive for the greatest good.  What’s fascinating about reading about England’s health care service (and Canada’s, for that matter), is the number of times the health care is bad, not because a person screwed up, but because of ideological choices driving the provision of health care in those countries.  Because the government is rationing care, it decides who is unworthy of receiving that care:  the old, the very sick, and the mavericks who dare to buck the system.

At my martial arts studio, there is a British woman whose mother is mired in and dying from the NHS.  She won’t give details.  She just gives the bottom line:  America should never, never, never go over to socialized medicine, a system that will willingly, and without debate, abandon those in greatest need of its services.

The mysteries of the human brain

Many years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a medical student on his neurology rotation.  He related what was, to me, an amazing story.  The patient he saw that day was a fairly young man who had suffered a major stroke, resulting in an almost complete loss of speech (aphasia).  He could still form sentences, but the words were all wrong.  So, instead of saying “Can I have a drink of water,” he’d say “Cow book the drive blanket for tears.”  It was tragic.  What struck my friend, though, was when the doctor in charge asked the patient to sing “Twinkle, twinkle.”  My friend expected to hear nothing, or gibberish.  Instead, the patient sang the song word perfectly — and was able to do so with several other nursery songs.  That’s when I first learned that we store music, including lyrics, in a different part of our brain from language.

Because of my friend’s anecdote, I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection between words and lyrics.  I therefore read with interest a story in today’s New York Times about a singing therapy for aphasic stroke victims:

The technique, called melodic intonation therapy, was developed in 1973 by Dr. Martin Albert and colleagues at the Boston Veterans Affairs Hospital. The aim was to help patients with damage to Broca’s area — the speaking center of the brain, located in its left hemisphere.

These patients still had relatively healthy right hemispheres. And while the left hemisphere is largely responsible for speaking, the right hemisphere is used in understanding language, as well as processing melodies and rhythms.

“You ask yourself, ‘What specifically engages the right hemisphere?’ ” said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who studies music’s effect on the brain.

Melodic intonation therapy seems to engage the right hemisphere by asking patients to tap out rhythms and repeat simple melodies. Therapists first work with patients to create sing-song sentences that can be set to familiar tunes, then work on removing the melody to leave behind a more normal speaking pattern.

But relatively little research has been done to understand how this type of therapy affects the brain of a stroke patient.

In a study completed in 2006, Dr. Schlaug and colleagues at Harvard tracked the progress of eight patients with Broca’s aphasia as they underwent 75 sessions of melodic intonation therapy. M.R.I. scans taken when the patients were speaking simple words and phrases showed that activity in the right hemisphere had changed significantly over the course of treatment.

“The combination of melodic intonation and hand-tapping activates a system of the right side of the brain that is always there, but is not typically used for speech,” Dr. Schlaug said.

He recommends melodic intonation therapy for patients who have no meaningful form of speech, but can understand language and have the patience for therapy sessions.

You can read the rest of the story here, including an interview with a stroke victim who re-learned speech through this technique.

More on the “don’t get sick” in a socialized medicine country

One of Obama’s (and Clinton’s) many sins is the desire to nationalize medicine, so that the government gets to decide who deserves treatment and who doesn’t.  Britain, as always, serves as a useful horrible example of what can happen under such a system:

A 61-year-old grandmother has been denied vital heart surgery for being too old – despite the guideline being out of date.

Dorothy Simpson branded NHS chiefs “heartless” after they claimed the operation should only be carried out on people aged 60 and under.

But her own specialist said he wrote the guidelines three years ago and that they had now been superseded by national guidelines, which set no age limit.

Dorothy, of Thirsk, North Yorkshire, has suffered from an irregular heartbeat for three years, which is having an increasingly debilitating impact on her life.

But NHS managers in North Yorkshire have so far refused to fund a £5,000 operation to treat the problem – despite patients older than her in Teesside, less than 30 miles away, having the treatment.

On a completely unrelated point, I’ve been in Thirsk, Simpson’s home, which when I saw it was not only a charming northern village, but was also home to James Herriott.

Cause and addictive effect?

Britain’s health care system is again having problems. This time, the problem is that physicians are over-prescribing painkillers, causing addictive behavior — and doing so despite strong official guidelines to the contrary. This could just be a medical trend, but one does wonder if it’s also because doctor’s in Britain are no longer very good? I know that’s nasty of me to say, but I firmly believe that American doctors are amongst the best in the world, in large part because the compensation is good enough that the best and the brightest will sacrifice their 20s and part of their 30s to prepare to be doctors. In America, they spend 4 years in college, 4 years in medical school, 1 year in internship, and 2 years in residency — and that’s just to be an internist. If they want to specialize, they could be spending another 5 years in training, for a total of 16 years learning how to be the best. Unless one is a saint, one usually does that only for the promise of lots of money (coupled, one hopes, with job satisfaction). In countries where medicine is socialized there’s not much money, there’s not much prestige, and there’s less training. Is it surprising, then, that these doctors don’t know how to follow instructions? And is that what we want here?

By the way, I’m just hypothesizing based on first hand knowledge I have about the British and American medical systems. I have not looked for concrete information to back up my hypotheses, and could just be making a fool of myself here.

UPDATE: I’ve switched to a new server, so you can feel free to look around here or check out my new site, which not only has the old stuff, but also will move forward into the future with all my new material.

Soylent green *UPDATED*

One of the most striking things about the Jewish Bible is the respect it demands for dead bodies. As a result, Jewish ritual holds that the dead cannot be mutilated in any way and must be interred as quickly as possible — preferably within 24 hours of death. Desecration is anathema to the Jews. Many people ascribe this respect to the Jewish belief in resurrection. Others though, believe that there is one other element to the requirement that bodies be treated with respect, which is the fact that the Jewish religion arose during pagan times — and pagans were deeply committed to body mutilation.

In pagan cultures, which had no separation between “church” and state, the religious leaders would routinely sacrifice people to the Gods and then, before or as part of the death process, the victims’ brains and internal organs would be ripped out by the priests for study and ritual cremation for the gods. (The story of Isaac is, as everyone knows, the definitive Biblical statement against human sacrifice.) Even if people weren’t deliberately sacrificed, but died for other reasons, the state priests could still desecrate the corpses for religious purposes. The instant burial required under Jewish law was almost certainly an effort to protect bodies from assault by pagan priests. To this day, religious Jews will not allow themselves to be cremated.

I was thinking of the pagan state’s interest ripping out the deads’ internal organs when I read this, out of England:

Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year.

The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.

Pragmatically speaking, Brown is right — a lot of perfectly good human organs go to waste when they could be put to use in the living. Nevertheless, there is something creepy and frightening about the state harvesting dead bodies, and it made me think of Jews in pagan times. On the one hand, you had the Jews with their tremendous respect for humanity, and their rules aimed at elevating the human condition and, on the other hand, you had the pagans who viewed the body as something that could be folded, spindled and mutilated depending on how the priests interpreted the whims of the Gods.

The other reason to get worried about this proposal is the “soylent green” nature of it. Once the government gets into the business of harvesting body parts — especially if it’s the same government that runs the health care system — you might want to go somewhere other than a state hospital if you’re at imminent risk of death. Once in the hospital, you may discover to your cost that it’s cheaper for the government to let you die so that it can use your organs for someone who might subsequently be less of a burden on the health care system than you are. Indeed, the plan seems to be set up precisely to achieve that cost effective goal:

But patients’ groups said that they were “totally opposed” to Mr Brown’s plan, saying that it would take away patients’ rights over their own bodies.

There are more than 8,000 patients waiting for an organ donation and more than 1,000 a year die without receiving the organ that could save their lives.

The Government will launch an overhaul of the system next week, which will put pressure on doctors and nurses to identify more “potential organ donors” from dying patients. Hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they “convert” into donors and doctors will be expected to identify potential donors earlier and alert donor co-ordinators as patients approach death. [The emphasis is mine because, if this isn’t scarily Orwellian, I truly don’t know what is.]

Organ donation can be a great gift and I honor those who decide to make it a part of their death. Nevertheless, I cannot conceive of a situation in which it should be anything but voluntary. Having the same government that provides medical treatment make the decision is the stuff of the worst kind of Utopian totalitarianism.

UPDATE: The above story was from the right leaning Telegraph, which presents the plan as something upsetting (something with which I agree). Here’s how the left leaning Guardian presents the same story, with the focus on the needy transplant recipients, not on the state’s increasing control over life, death and after death:

A revolution in the way organs are donated for transplant is called for today by the government’s chief medical officer as concern grows over the acute shortage of donors and the rise in unnecessary deaths.

An expert report to be published this week says that every major hospital in Britain must have an organ donor specialist skilled in persuading grieving families that the hearts, lungs, kidneys and other vital organs of their deceased relatives should be used to save the lives of others.

Sir Liam Donaldson, England’s chief medical officer, will back the findings of the government’s taskforce on organ donation, but wants to go further and introduce a new system of donation because the shortage of organs is so severe. Three people a day are dying while on the waiting list for a transplant as the demand for a new organ is rapidly outstripping their supply.

Donaldson is advocating a system of ‘presumed consent’, where everyone in Britain would be presumed to be a donor unless they had specifically opted out, or unless their families had objections.

‘We have one of the lowest rates [of organ donation] in Europe, far lower than Spain,’ he told The Observer. ‘We have one thousand or more patients dying on the waiting list each year, and there is a lot of suppressed demand, with doctors not even referring patients on to the list because there is no hope for them. That is a lot of patients dying.

‘I think at the moment people often don’t know whether their relative would have wanted to be a donor. Families are being approached when they are in a very distressed condition and, faced with uncertainty, their default position is to refuse consent. Often the quality of their dealing with clinical staff is not as good as it should be – the dialogue could be better. It does require considerable skill to handle such sensitive situations.’

Today we reveal the heartbreak of those who are waiting for organs and the uplifting stories of families who have consented to donate, and launch a campaign for the UK to move to the new system of presumed consent so that hundreds more lives can be saved.

As for me, having read that, I still find too Orwellian the thought of the government, in all its bureaucratic splendor, deciding who lives and who dies, and desecrating the dead in between those two extremes.

Britain begins outsourcing health care — to the patients

Britain’s ailing national health care system continues to try to heal itself, usually at patient’s expense. I don’t know about you, but this proposal doesn’t strike me as something that’s going to result in improved health care:

Millions of people with arthritis, asthma and even heart failure will be urged to treat themselves as part of a Government plan to save billions of pounds from the NHS budget.

Instead of going to hospital or consulting a doctor, patients will be encouraged to carry out “self care” as the Department of Health (DoH) tries to meet Treasury targets to curb spending.

The guidelines could mean people with chronic conditions:

• Monitoring their own heart activity, blood pressure and lung capacity using equipment installed in the home

• Reporting medical information to doctors remotely by telephone or computer

• Administering their own drugs and other treatment to “manage pain” and assessing the significance of changes in their condition

• Using relaxation techniques to relieve stress and avoid “panic” visits to emergency wards.

Gordon Brown hinted at the new policy in a message to NHS staff yesterday, promising a service that “gives all of those with long-term or chronic conditions the choice of greater support, information and advice, allowing them to play a far more active role in managing their own condition”.

The Prime Minister claimed the self-care agenda was about increasing patient choice and “personalised” services.

Government happy talk notwithstanding, a lot of Brits are also suspicion that this is an Orwellian plan where all patients are equal, but some are less equal than others:

But an internal Government document seen by The Daily Telegraph makes clear that the policy is a money-saving measure, a key plank of DoH plans to cut costs.

Critics claimed the plan would provide doctors with an excuse for ignoring the elderly or those with debilitating, but not life-threatening long-term conditions, and would not work without significant investment in community health services.

The Arthritis Research Campaign said it risked providing health managers with “an excuse for neglecting elderly patients”.

Jane Tadman, a spokesman for the charity, said: “Arthritis is already too low down the priority list and the fact that this is being mooted as a money-saving measure is very worrying.

“Some GPs don’t take arthritis seriously enough, and the result of this could be to give them another excuse to tell arthritis patients just to go away and take their tablets.”

The Patients’ Association welcomed more moves to empower patients, but warned against using self-care systems to save money.

“We are all for better-informed patients,” said Katherine Murphy, a spokesman. “But it is a concern that financial pressures will take precedence over clinical needs.”

Peter Weissberg, the medical director of the British Heart Foundation, said: “People affected by heart disease need specialist care. Whilst we support changes that empower people to look after their own health, we would be very concerned if they led to any reduction in the availability or quality of expert care for those who need it.”

You really can’t blame the government, though, for this somewhat inane proposal. What we’re seeing is the inevitably of nationalized health care.  For a long time, Europeans enjoyed a strong economy (in England, aided by Thatcher’s reforms), and mainland Europe especially benefited, for many years, from the American military presence that removed Europe’s obligation to put money into its own defense infrastructure. A failing health care service is also probably inevitable when you have a declining (that is, shrinking and aging) native work population, and an influx of immigrants who rely on the system but either don’t work or work in such low paying jobs that they can contribute little to the system on which they rely. In other words, the government is doing its best to deal with a whole bunch of economic chickens coming home to roost.

Britain begins outsourcing health care — to the patients

Britain’s ailing national health care system continues to try to heal itself, usually at patient’s expense. I don’t know about you, but this proposal doesn’t strike me as something that’s going to result in improved health care:

Millions of people with arthritis, asthma and even heart failure will be urged to treat themselves as part of a Government plan to save billions of pounds from the NHS budget.

Instead of going to hospital or consulting a doctor, patients will be encouraged to carry out “self care” as the Department of Health (DoH) tries to meet Treasury targets to curb spending.

The guidelines could mean people with chronic conditions:

• Monitoring their own heart activity, blood pressure and lung capacity using equipment installed in the home

• Reporting medical information to doctors remotely by telephone or computer

• Administering their own drugs and other treatment to “manage pain” and assessing the significance of changes in their condition

• Using relaxation techniques to relieve stress and avoid “panic” visits to emergency wards.

Gordon Brown hinted at the new policy in a message to NHS staff yesterday, promising a service that “gives all of those with long-term or chronic conditions the choice of greater support, information and advice, allowing them to play a far more active role in managing their own condition”.

The Prime Minister claimed the self-care agenda was about increasing patient choice and “personalised” services.

Government happy talk notwithstanding, a lot of Brits are also suspicion that this is an Orwellian plan where all patients are equal, but some are less equal than others:

But an internal Government document seen by The Daily Telegraph makes clear that the policy is a money-saving measure, a key plank of DoH plans to cut costs.

Critics claimed the plan would provide doctors with an excuse for ignoring the elderly or those with debilitating, but not life-threatening long-term conditions, and would not work without significant investment in community health services.

The Arthritis Research Campaign said it risked providing health managers with “an excuse for neglecting elderly patients”.

Jane Tadman, a spokesman for the charity, said: “Arthritis is already too low down the priority list and the fact that this is being mooted as a money-saving measure is very worrying.

“Some GPs don’t take arthritis seriously enough, and the result of this could be to give them another excuse to tell arthritis patients just to go away and take their tablets.”

The Patients’ Association welcomed more moves to empower patients, but warned against using self-care systems to save money.

“We are all for better-informed patients,” said Katherine Murphy, a spokesman. “But it is a concern that financial pressures will take precedence over clinical needs.”

Peter Weissberg, the medical director of the British Heart Foundation, said: “People affected by heart disease need specialist care. Whilst we support changes that empower people to look after their own health, we would be very concerned if they led to any reduction in the availability or quality of expert care for those who need it.”

You really can’t blame the government, though, for this somewhat inane proposal. What we’re seeing is the inevitably of nationalized health care.  For a long time, Europeans enjoyed a strong economy (in England, aided by Thatcher’s reforms), and mainland Europe especially benefited, for many years, from the American military presence that removed Europe’s obligation to put money into its own defense infrastructure. A failing health care service is also probably inevitable when you have a declining (that is, shrinking and aging) native work population, and an influx of immigrants who rely on the system but either don’t work or work in such low paying jobs that they can contribute little to the system on which they rely. In other words, the government is doing its best to deal with a whole bunch of economic chickens coming home to roost.

More unintended managed health care consequences

When it comes to managed health care, the law of unintended consequences just keeps rolling along. The news out of England today tells the story of a woman who has been barred from New Zealand, where her husband has already moved, because she is “too fat.” Apparently in the conflict between politically correct thought and its managed care economy, the latter wins. Anyway, here’s the story:

A British man who moved to New Zealand has been told by officials that his wife is too fat to join him.

Richie Trezise, 35, a rugby-playing Welshman, lost weight to gain entry to New Zealand after being rejected for being overweight and a potential burden on the health care system.

His wife, Rowan, is now on a strict diet. However, she has been battling for months to shed the pounds so they can be reunited and live Down Under.

Mr Trezise moved to New Zealand in September after shedding two inches from his waist on a crash diet. He said that if his wife was not allowed to come out by Christmas they would abandon the idea of emigrating.

His employer-backed skills visa was initially rejected by immigration officials when they discovered that his body mass index, or BMI, was 42, making him morbidly obese.

BMI measures a person’s weight in relation to their height. Anything over 25 is regarded as overweight, and 30 or above is obese.

But his wife Rowan, who planned to emigrate with him, has failed to overcome the obesity test.

Mr Trezise is a submarine cable specialist, who has also served in the Army.

He said yesterday: “My doctor laughed at me.

“He said he’d never seen anything more ridiculous in his whole life. He said not every overweight person is unhealthy or unfit.

You can read the rest of the story here. It’s obvious that New Zealand’s medical bureaucracy has not yet caught up with recent scientific findings showing that excess weight does not automatically correlate with ill health.

In the old days, when immigrants to America arrived at Ellis Island or Angel Island (the entry point for immigrants from Asia), the doctors looked for contagious diseases and mental illness. I was raised in an era when we were taught at school (and are still taught at the Ellis and Angel Island museums) to be horrified by the insensitivity of it all. Indeed, even now, some on the Left seem inclined to turn a blind eye to immigrants with nasty things like untreatable, highly infectious tuberculosis, fearing that it could be used as a wedge issue to tighten immigrant controls. But in New Zealand, in the name of managed care, you can keep out the people who just don’t look right. That makes Ellis Island look almost humane.

Memories — bad ones

Back in 1981, during a summer break in college, I got a job working as a medical transcriptionist for a couple of research virologists in a local hospital.  Their past secretary had been a disaster but, because of union rules, they couldn’t fire her.  Fortunately, for them, she got pregnant and went on maternity leave.  I came on board, a 20 year old college student, and finalized five articles for them, one of which dealt with a bizarre cancer that was showing up amongst gay men in New York:  Kaposi’s Sarcoma.  I typed lots of stuff about that, understanding little of what I typed, but keeping hold of that name in my brain.  A few years later, of course, the puzzle pieces that were bedeviling my employers came together — KS was one of the most visible signs of someone with advanced AIDS.

I hadn’t thought about Kaposi’s Sarcoma in a long time and, it turns out, most HIV/AIDS patients and their doctors hadn’t either.  The disease had gone underground, beaten back by the new AIDS treatments.  What’s disturbing now is that KS is making a comeback amongst AIDS patients.  All of us, high risk and low, have gotten complacent about medicine’s ability to beat back even the most virulent diseases.  It’s not 1348 anymore.  And then you read a story such as this one and realize that, even if we close the front door, Mother Nature often finds another way in.

Memories — bad ones

Back in 1981, during a summer break in college, I got a job working as a medical transcriptionist for a couple of research virologists in a local hospital.  Their past secretary had been a disaster but, because of union rules, they couldn’t fire her.  Fortunately, for them, she got pregnant and went on maternity leave.  I came on board, a 20 year old college student, and finalized five articles for them, one of which dealt with a bizarre cancer that was showing up amongst gay men in New York:  Kaposi’s Sarcoma.  I typed lots of stuff about that, understanding little of what I typed, but keeping hold of that name in my brain.  A few years later, of course, the puzzle pieces that were bedeviling my employers came together — KS was one of the most visible signs of someone with advanced AIDS.

I hadn’t thought about Kaposi’s Sarcoma in a long time and, it turns out, most HIV/AIDS patients and their doctors hadn’t either.  The disease had gone underground, beaten back by the new AIDS treatments.  What’s disturbing now is that KS is making a comeback amongst AIDS patients.  All of us, high risk and low, have gotten complacent about medicine’s ability to beat back even the most virulent diseases.  It’s not 1348 anymore.  And then you read a story such as this one and realize that, even if we close the front door, Mother Nature often finds another way in.

More on the joys of socialized medicine

Gotta pick up the kids, so no comment here.  Read and draw your own conclusions.