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MYANMAR JUNTA DIDDLES WHILE BURMESE DIE

IF EVER THERE WERE A CASE FOR REGIME CHANGE . . .

Generals Intent Upon Profiting From Disaster

The Myanmar Junta refuse to allow foreign aid workers in, demanding money instead, those Burmese Army thugs who run that country by brute force and constant fear. All entreaties have failed. The Franco-American invasion bluff has, if anything, made matters worse by giving the regime an excuse to block entry by foreigners. The Chinese simply don't care what happens in Burma. That leaves it up to us. You and me.
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Via Matt Yglesias, I am sad to say that Barack Obama has joined John McCain in embracing vaccine anti-science:

You are breaking your oath if you vote against the Democratic plan to provide healthcare to all citizens of the United States!

Provided below for your perusal are both of the medical oaths taken at the graduation ceremonies of the Doctors of Medicine and Osteopathy in America:

While this is no suprise to those of us who work in or near academic medicine, the prestigious JAMA is bringing attention to 2 particulary aggregious examples of PhRMA's shenanigans with research

In today's NY Times:

With little fanfare, a small number of prominent academic scientists have made a decision that was until recently all but unheard of. They decided to stop accepting payments from food, drug and medical device companies.

the article is on the front page of Science Times, or linked here

more below the fold

It's terribly tragic whenever someone is so ill or injured that the best our medical science can do for him is keep him alive - barely - by tying him into machines. Really it is. I saw someone live that way for a few weeks, and eventually die in agony, and it was difficult to watch. (The gentleman declined a subtle offer for an OD of opiates, on religious grounds, even though the maximum dose was no longer providing any real relief.)

Anyhow. This is not a diary about suffering and death, this is a diary about fun things to do if you have an excess of engineering skill, scientific curiosity, and mechanical parts and a lack of sense.

The idea of putting someone so cocooned in life-support machinery into a mobile protective bubble is what I really wanted to write about today.

crossposted from unbossed

In a speech Tuesday, April 8, at the American Hospital Association's annual membership meeting, David Walker, who just recently resigned as Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office, said that he supported

Providing universal coverage for "basic and essential" health care services is one part of an overarching strategy to address the financial crisis in the health care system.

Love and Laughter; The Best Medicine

With all the tension that has built up during this primary season, (my wife often walks around the house muttering "the Clintons are killing me"), I believe it is important to find ways to relieve the stress and bring us back to a more centered space. As a physician, (surgeon for 16 years, now in integrative medicine), I was inspired last week by dallasdoc healthcare night. So I decided to start another short series of diaries in integrative medicine. If you are unfamiliar with integrative medicine, it is generally considered a blending of conventional and alternative medicine. We are bombarded with television ads on how numerous pharmaceuticals, supplements or various devices can improve our health and our lives, but no talks about the things that are readily available to all of us and have been shown to be far more effective than any medicine or devices.

On March 30, 1842, James M. Venable, a resident of Georgia and the not-so-proud owner of two neck cysts, finally consented to having a doctor cut into his neck — while Venable was wide awake — and remove one of the cysts.

He didn't feel a thing.

That isn't because the cysts had caused nerve damage; for any significant nerve damage to have occurred, the cysts would basically have to have been pressing against Venable's spinal column, in which case he likely would have died; pressure on the spinal column above the C3-C5 vertebrae would have caused atrophying of the diaphragm, the muscle that makes our lungs inflate.

He didn't feel a thing because he had been inhaling ether — a recreational drug the medical establishment, courtesy of Dr. Crawford Long, borrowed from contemporary society. And while this wasn't the first time he'd inhaled ether recreationally (ether was all the rage back in the day), it was the first time ether had been used as a general anaesthetic.

If so, I encourage you to attend the premiere, on U-Mich campus, of a new film: Life is for the Living, a documentary about the people, the politics and the science of stem cell research. It will be shown on March 12, at the Michigan Theater (603 E. Liberty St.) at 7:30 pm.

CHICAGO (AFP) - Nearly two decades after veterans of the 1991 Gulf War came home complaining of odd illnesses, enough evidence has been gathered to determine that many of them were sickened by chemical exposure, a study published Monday concluded.

Nearly two decades ago, an American-led coalition of 700,000 troops drove the invading forces of Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and returned the Kuwaiti oil oligarchy to power. The Persian Gulf War, fought in the early months of 1991, temporarily settled by main force a regional quarrel over oil resources. The war also generated a number of adverse short- and long-term consequences, some of them too well-known to need repeating here. The war was a disaster for the Iraqi military forces and also for the Iraqi civilian population, who suffered the political social and health hazards of living in a war zone and under a brutal dictatorship.

Among the many varieties of evil fruit born from this conflict was a mysterious syndrome afflicting about 250,000 American Persian Gulf War veterans with chronic, multi-symptom health problems.

Not content with just pandering to the creationists at the Discovery Institute, GOP nominee John McCain doubled down on Friday and made a push for the anti-vaccinationist vote.   According to Jake Tapper at ABC News, McCain still gives credence to the now-discredited "vaccines cause autism" hypothesis:

Yes, let's wade into religion, shall we?  My second favorite topic, after politics.

Pharyngula today has one of his usual brief, humorous posts that directs us to "an excellent website reviewing the evidence for intercessory prayer."

Everyone is talking about healthcare reforms, but what is really on the horizon? After all, our system, for all its faults, provides the best healthcare in the world, right? (No.) Although we have many uninsured, the system is great if you have insurance, isn't it? (It isn't.)

What actually needs to be done? A lot. Most of it can (and should) be done whatever model of healthcare (single payer, national health service, mandatory insurance, or voluntary insurance) we, as Americans, chose. Many are a lot easier with a national health service or single payer, but, regardless, there is a dearth of information out there, for the layperson, about the nature of the "reforms" for which all the presidential candidates have such hopes.

Below, in the first of an occasional series, I describe one such reform: a national electronic medical record.

According to U.S. News & World Report, Doctors have seen promising results with a modified version of the Herpes Simplex virus (the cause of cold sores). It killed & slowed the growth of neoplastic tissue (cancer cells), while not affecting normal tissue.

Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center armed the oncolytic herpes simplex virus (oHSV)with a gene that steps up the body's work to block enzymes that aid the development and progression of certain cancers. Previous studies had shown oHSV can infect and kill human cancer cells without causing other harm or disease.

[...]The gene added to the virus carries instructions for a cancer-fighting protein, human tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase 3 (TIMP3). TIMP3 blocks enzymes that aid the development and progression of cancer, called matrix of metalloproteinases (MMP).

If it sounds similar to the plot of I Am Legend, well it is. And yes, there's even modified versions of the Measles virus being tested.

Perusing the news I came across a news story about a man in Finland who had his upper jaw replaced.  How?  The doctors over there used the man's own stem cells to clone him a new one!  Reading this, it brought to mind how we in this country are failing on the medical front.

I'd like this to be a no bullshit zone, if at all possible. Try to keep the partisan sniping to other diaries. Lord knows there's plenty to choose from.

I'm just posing a simple question -- whose healthcare plan would be better for a lower middle-class family with kids on the way, like my family?

Read the scenario after the fold, and be prepared to speak to me as though I'm a person of below-average intelligence. Also, English is my 3rd language. Also, I'm from Mars and barely understand what a doctor is.

Science has printed an article about research done by Dr. Ibolja Cernak and others, demonstrating that cognitive and emotional deficits of brain damage are much more common than previously thought among soldiers. Due to the advances made in body armor, combat injuries involve fewer bullet wounds and more blast injuries. Bombs do their damage by creating a blast wave, a fast-moving wall of compressed air. Obviously this can cause injury by throwing soldiers and vehicles around, but it can also cause injury to delicate pressure- and shear-sensitive tissues like those in the lungs, the bowels and the brain.

Dr. Cernak's excellent finding - excellent from a medical point of view, mind you, not from the point of view of soldiers - is that blast waves too weak to damage the lungs or the bowel can still cause serious, if subtle, brain damage.