Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

Over the past two years, I've witnessed a transition in modern website design from plain text and static information to multimedia centric and interactive. I've written about the new BIDMC website we implemented to meet patient expectations for a modern website.

Many healthcare organizations I work with are considering content managed, new media, highly interactive web 2.0 sites. I thought it would be useful to describe how we approached the BIDMC website so you can leverage our experience.

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Ah-ha. Michael Cannon has now replied to me and it basically comes down in his mind to me being a crypto-fascist Stalinist wanting to break the will of the American people mediated through its representatives, the health care industry lobbyists. His piece isThe Ultimate Question: Freedom or Power?

He closes by saying that I could onlyfix the health care system by gettingrid of constitutional democracy. And Michael’s right.

ButI have one small correction, the problem isAmerican constitutional democracy. Plenty of countries have written or unwritten constitutions that enable parliamentary parties to govern and make significant changes to social systems, like health care, for the general good of the population as the electorate sees fit. (The UK, Sweden, Germany, Australia, Taiwan and a few others come to mind). Last I checked they were all Democracies with much much higher voting participation than ours. The US Constitution and its associated “constitutional democracy” doesn’t allow such changesdue to many factors all highlighted by the highly undemocratic nature of the Senate.

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H-Law published a reviewby Lynne Curryof two recent books on eugenics, including Paul Lombardo's account of Carrie Buck, and her experiences before, during, and after the notorious case of Buck v. Bell.

Here is an excerpt from the Review:

Eugenicists, many of whom were associated with the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Springs Harbor, New York, exercised a profound and disturbing influence on law and social policy, including drafting a model compulsory sterilization law and then vigorously campaigning to have it replicated in the states. While much of this material will not be new to historians, Carrie Buck’s story becomes even more compelling steeped in the rich detail that Lombardo provides. Buck was an extremely poor, barely educated, seventeen-year-old rape victim, who in 1920s Virginia became a pawn of a blatantly self-serving cast of incredibly shady characters. Mandatory sterilization laws had met with mixed success in state courts, and therefore in Virginia a small circle of eugenicist lawmakers, doctors, and institutional directors conspired to write and enact a statute and then manufacture a test case to gain a judicial stamp of approval for their own project. Lombardo vividly presents the patently absurd case concocted purporting to show that Buck was both “feeble-minded” herself and the daughter and mother of feeble-minded females, rendering her a genetic threat to the population and a fit subject for the operation. (Her younger sister was also sterilized.) Buck’s lawyer, himself a major crusader in Virginia’s sterilization campaign, “violated every norm of legal ethics” in deliberately failing his client at each step in the case, leaving Buck quite literally defenseless (p. 155).

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**** Generation to Reproduction ****

** Wellcome Strategic Award for Cambridge History of Medicine **

The University of Cambridge has secured major funding in the history of medicine from the Wellcome Trust. A strategic award of £785,000 for five years from 1 October 2009 will allow a cross-disciplinary group of researchers to take a concerted approach to the history of reproduction. The research will provide fresh perspectives on issues ranging from ancient fertility rites to IVF. A strongly grounded account, building on a lively field of historical investigation, will offer a fresh basis for policy and public debate.

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In the comments on my piece on Michael Cannon (which Michael has not commented on sadly, as I was hoping for a nice fight!), everyone’s favorite insurance broker Nate asked me to describe a bit more the process of a small group buying health insurance. I’m not quite ready to do that yet, but instead I will point you towards this piece I wrote about buying individual insurance in 2006. It’s called A Tale of Two Underwritersand it explains how screwed up the process is.

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This article was contributed by Paul Li, who teaches neurobiology at UC Berkeley.

The human brain is quite remarkable. It does not remain static, but instead ceaselessly changes throughout life. Everything you learn or experience impacts the biology of your brain.

Though some cognitive abilities typically begin to decline in the third decade of life, cortical plasticity renews our hope that new connections can be willfully forged. For example, there was a little girl who was born with very little cortical tissue. Doctors did not see much of a future for her because she did not have a ‘normal’ brain; however, because of cortical plasticity and the brain’s ability to reorganize itself, she learned to function quite well (Distelmaier et al., 2007).

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The EHR TimeBar functions as a high-level overview of the patient record, as a query device, and as an intuitive navigation tool. Each EHR file (event) for the patient is represented by an icon. The set of icons and their labels are displayed in column format on the right side of the screen.

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There has been much brouhaha about the medicinal uses of marijuana or cannabis; on the one side we have proponents of the move who swear by the medicinal benefits that this drug can bring to people who suffer from chronic pain, loss of appetite, nervous disorders and mental illnesses, and on the other, we see law enforcement officers and officials questioning the right of people to possess this drug because of the potential for abuse.

Medical marijuana has mostly been leveraged as a way to manage the pain that is a constant part of chronic illnesses like cancer, to increase the appetite of cancer patients, cure alcoholism, calm patients with nervous disorders, and treat patients with a family history of degenerative brain diseases. It is said to promote neuron growth according to a Canadian study, which means it is helpful in staving off and minimizing the effects of Alzheimers and other diseases that affect the brain in their early stages.
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Todd Wittmer and his entertainment staff threw a brilliant deck party last night………one of the very best I have ever seen. Todd was up there leading the fun, singing about not being able to get any satisfaction, but having seen his girlfriend I know that’s a load of bollocks. He was also dressed in ummmm…….well……..what [...]

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Last nightIwas busy spending two hours of my and my business partner’s time buying health insurance for our massive 4 person company. That means doing a multi-factorial equation between premiums, co-pays, deductibles, out of pocket maximums, & in & out of network costs. It’s no wonder that no one understands their health insurance, especially when eHealthinsurance.com still doesn’t bother putting half of the important variables on its front page.But no matter, it will be my pleasure to make Wellpoint or Aetna better off—they’re not having such great years and they can use the money.

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