In this weeks NY Times, a article discussing the alarming increase in the prescription of methadone as a pain killer almost slipped past me, since like most of us here, I've been caught up with the election.
Methadone Rises as a Painkiller With Big Risks  

Suffering from excruciating spinal deterioration, Robby Garvin, 24, of South Carolina, tried many painkillers before his doctor prescribed methadone in June 2006, just before Mr. Garvin and his friend Joey Sutton set off for a weekend at an amusement park.
On Saturday night Mr. Garvin called his mother to say, "Mama, this is the first time I have been pain free, this medicine just might really help me." The next day, though, he felt bad. As directed, he took two more tablets and then he lay down for a nap. It was after 2 p.m. that Joey said he heard a strange sound that must have been Robby’s last breath.

Health care in the United States costs about twice as much as in most other industrialized countries, yet coverage is inferior.  This is a major problem facing the country and something that the next president will have to face up to.  It is not just about insurance, it's about controlling costs while delivering high-quality care.

Other countries have a wide range of health care systems and payment or insurance plans.  All are much cheaper; most are better.  What is going on, and what is the lesson?  It comes down to purpose.  In the United States, health care is an industry.  Pharmaceuticals are an industry.  Medical insurance is an industry.  Our national priority is in encouraging profits. Actually taking care of people is seen as a side effect, something that generates demand for a service and a product, not a national priority per se.

UPDATE:  Edited title and parts of the story to indicate that this is not a full stage-3 trial, so the results are not yet guaranteed.

Anyone who has had a friend or relative slide into the bottomless pit of Alzheimers, never to return, will find this bit of news a bright spot for the future.  According to a story on the Daily Mail's website, there's a new daily medicine that may, according to a stage-2 drug trial, slow or totally halt the progression of Alzheimers.

Its not often that Madame Tussaud's builds a wax portrait that evokes the soul of Oscar Wilde.
...Or reverses a fiction and a life.

So, now, with Amy Winehouse, a great blues singer, and Dorian Gray.
The living reality is that addiction, neurological damage, and bad care opened the door for Staphylococcus aureus.
The bacterium did this to her.
-

-
Then there's the new wax in London -- Amy above matches Dorian's portrait while the wax Amy remains perfect -- reversing Dorian Gray .

Amy, pure of poisons.
-

-
Tussaud's big miracle is Amy's face, clean and healthy.
-

-
Lose these looks for crack binges ?

Anybody's kids, here, still wanna do hard drugs ???

Usefully, these Amy/Amy Dorian/Dorian images can go on the doors of many a family refrigerator.

More below.

Okay, let's try this again. Last time I posted this, I got absolutely no reads, which is totally not right. Other diaries of mine got at least one or two people to read and comment. I think this one got lost in the early morning flood, so I'm rescuing it myself and giving it another chance. I hope all readers get something out of it.

Yeah, I know this is being posted very late. If you're really wondering, I write Project Awakening issues as an email newsletter that I send to a very small (but hopefully growing!) group of subscribers. I hadn't posted this one earlier because the response to the last two, quite frankly, was pants (yes, I just used an Anglicism there). After the moderate response to the last non-Project Awakening diary I posted, I figured I'd try again, while I get myself in the mood to write the next issue (which is also very late).

Past issues are here and here.

Based upon past perusals of diary titles, the following information may be of interest to some in the dKos community.  In an article just published today (although available online for some months), Drs. Omar Ghaffar and Anthony Feinstein of the University of Toronto found, among 140 consecutive MS patients, 10 who regular users of cannabis.  Compared to a well-matched control group (n=40) using a standard evaluation tool (the Neuropsychological Battery for MS),

Group comparisons revealed that the proportion of patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for a psychiatric diagnosis was higher in cannabis users (p = 0.04). In addition, on the SDMT, cannabis users had a slower mean performance time (p = 0.006) and a different pattern of response compared to matched controls (group x time interaction; p = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Inhaled cannabis is associated with impaired mentation in patients with multiple sclerosis, particularly with respect to cognition. Future studies are required to clarify the direction of this relationship.

Another chink in the armor of the alleged indications for "medical marijuana".

My daughter was brought into the world this morning at 8:26am Japan Standard Time. It was a full day of rushing, managing, emoting, empathizing, and celebrating. My daughter was carefully and compassionately delivered here in northern Japan by the same team that delivered my son a year and a half ago.

This diary is about two things. First, it's about the hopes I have for my daughter on this special day. Second, it's a thank you to Japan for embracing social medicine and affording my family the opportunity to benefit from the prosperity of great nation.

A great and influencial surgeon has died.  His techniques and work have allowed so many with heart disease to live.

Via Yahoo News:

Pioneering heart doctor Michael DeBakey dead at 99

Dr. Michael DeBakey, the world-famous cardiovascular surgeon who pioneered such now-common procedures as bypass surgery and invented a host of devices to help heart patients, has died. He was 99.

DeBakey died Friday night at The Methodist Hospital in Houston from "natural causes," according to a statement issued early Saturday by Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital.

   I'm writing this diary because the other day I wrote a comment in a diary here and was shocked by the intensity of what I posted. (It wasn't rude or anything, I copied it below the fold.) Then today I read the Op-Ed that's listed below and the two seemed to fit together.
    For what it's worth, surviving a suicide is something no one should ever experience.
 

The overall physician suicide rate cited by most studies has been between 28 and 40 per 100,000, compared with the overall rate in the general population of 12.3 per 100,000.[1

These statistics are old. It is very difficult to get an acurate number, because most studies get "cause of death" from death certificates. They are known to markedly under report suicides.

The United States might rank number one in military strength, arms sales worldwide, and GDP although the European Union has overtaken the U.S. as number one, but in terms of healthcare, the U.S. is off the radar screen.

As one of the most important determinants of quality of life, healthcare in the U.S. not only deprives 45 million people of any coverage but even those with coverage frequently face almost insurmountable challeges in collecting insurance payouts for illnesses or injuries for which they confidently believed they were covered.

I entered the world of surgery with a desire to help those in need. Kings County Hospital is one of my hospitals, and a place where I thought I could do the most good. It is, after all, a public hospital smack in the middle of one of the poorest, most violent neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Therefore, the events of the last several days have been especially gut-wrenching for me.

The low point came when I was watching "Countdown" last night. Keith Olbermann came on television and called the psychiatric staff involved runner-up to the "worst person in the world," and this right next to Karl Rove of all people. As I stared at the screen in shock and disbelief, I thought to myself, can this hospital sink any lower?

But I should not be surprised. The problems at King's County Hospital have been festering for years.

For some time now, I've been expecting to read about some mah-valous scientific discoveries in the nano-tech field.  You know, super-science.

I've been waiting.  

Waiting.

Still waiting.

Oh, looky here, maybe the waiting is about over?

Fluoride could damage bones of kidney patients

In yesterday's post on a case of an ambulance driver's "moral refusal" of taking a woman in severe pain to a women's clinic, a frequent criticism came up: "But wouldn't the EMT get in trouble if she died?  Surely they could revoke his license?"

This, sadly, can no longer be assumed.  In at least one state--Mississippi--the scenario of an EMT conducting a "moral refusal", the woman dying as a result, and the EMT getting off scot free is an unfortunate possibility.

Even worse, Mississippi's law is now considered a model "moral refusal" statute--as we'll see below.

In Part 2 of the miniseries which we began yesterday, we discuss how "moral refusal" clauses are increasingly going far beyond just doctors and pharmacists, and are now extending to the most basic thing we associate with healthcare--the trip in the ambulance to have emergency surgery.

Yes, you're reading this right--dominionist ambulance drivers are now refusing to take people to women's clinics just because the woman needs a medically necessary abortion.

And at the end of the post--because I never like to just bring bad news without discussing ways to fix what's broken--I present some possible solutions to the problem of "moral refusal".

Gotta run to work, so this is a short one, and I apologize in advance.
Found this in the Guardian and, given the reversal of the gay marriage ban in CA, I thought it was relevant and interesting:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/...

This research appears to destroy any remaining debate over whether sexual orientation is a choice or not. As my wife just commented, anyone with a brain knows that sexual orientation is not a choice, but we all know that the mainstream in our oh-so-civilized society is completely brainless...
Please go below for snippets and commentary.

Cross posted at americanpatientsunited.org

The AP is reporting that the American Medical Association today released a report card on the health insurance industry. The primary focus is on the how quickly and accurately doctors get paid but it does have some interesting data that might be useful for patients. It would be interesting to see if the same health insurers that are slow to pay providers are also slow to pay patient claims. The takeaway is that even the AMA admits single payer is the best way to go.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, diabetes was in many ways a death sentence. Things we take for granted now, like the development of an insulin supply for medical uses, did not exist. Only in 1922 was enough prepared for use in humans; and from then until 1965, insulin had to be prepared by rendering down the pancreatic tissues of animals. You just had to hope you were not allergic to those animals (e.g., oxen), but if you were, there was a serious risk you would be S.O.L. Only in 1965 was the full synthesis of insulin performed.

Thirteen years later, in 1978, Herbert Boyer et al. at Genentech did a pretty mind-blowing thing. The amino-acid sequence for human insulin was known, at that time; it was fairly simple to reverse-translate the sequence into nucleic acid sequences. A gene for human insulin was inserted into Escheria coli bacteria, and they were cultured: the first bacteria to be manipulated into producing human hormones.