Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

I met Billy Tauzin last summer in Aspen and you couldn’t help but love the guy. He had that amazing Louisiana charm, and was helping PhRMA walk a tightrope between being the bad guys, and giving away the store. Whether or not like Paul Krugmanyou’re appalled at his old school N’Awlins sense of ethics, he was clearly able to cross lines and get PhRMA to a place it hadn’t been before.

But now that reform is receding from likelihood, where does big pharma need to go now that Billy jumped (or was pushed)? At the Disruptive Women in Health Care blog, Robin Strongin suggests that pharma needs to get out of its box and really embrace the new type of patient—and appoint a leader who is on the technological cutting edge.

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I'm excited to announce the latest program coming from Health 2.0 - The Health 2.0 Show with Indu & Matthew! This monthly webinar series will focus on news from the Health 2.0 community, a look at some cool new technologies, and interviews with industry leaders.

January 19, 2010
11 am PT / 2 pm ET
We’ll start the series off with a look at what lies in store for Health 2.0 in 2010 – including updates from the Advisors, the Accelerator and exciting new partnerships.

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They said it couldn’t happen in Europe, that social media and online tools wouldn’t catch on, because the healthcare context was soooo different from the US. They said thatEuropeans don’t worry about access and cost, that they aren’t looking for information online because they they trust their doctors utterly and fully, and thatEuropean doctors don’t go online, except if they're Scandinavian.

Well, it just isn’t so! True collective intelligence will tell you that participatory medicine is a natural human instinct and that Health 2.0 is kicking up a storm in Europe this winter! Consumers and professionals are generating content everywhere, even though they don't necessarily cross language or country borders. Unfortunately, no one European organization is studying consumer health Internet usage trends on the same basis year after year, as is the Pew Foundation in the U.S. Nonetheless, there is empiric proof; during the current flu epidemic, information from informal sources in Europe is fully surpassing official data. Wikipedia is cited in a recent study by Manhattan Research as one of the most regularly used sites for physicians and consumers across Europe. Private initiative has generated many significant consumer/patient communities, several major physician community portals, online consultation sites, and more.

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My lefty friends at Moveon.org emailed me (and a few million others) appalled that Rick Scott’s group is going to be spending $1 millionrunning ads attacking the as yet officially non-existent Baucus/Daschle/deParle/Obama health plan. Now that’s not exactly a surprise. Rick Scott has been on the offensive for a while now and in the spirit of inclusiveness (or the more cynical among you might say, to start a fight in an empty house) THCB ran his op-ed a while back. Frankly it was pretty tough to figure out what he was “for” but it’s clear what he’s against—the evils of Canada and the UK.

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It has never been proven that marijuana has killed anyone, although smoking herbs can cause cancer. So if you like marijuana or use it for medical reasons, it is a good idea to consume marijuana in a healthy way. Therefore cooking with marijuana or using a vaporizer makes sense.

The following are the annual causes of death in the USA:

Tobacco435,000Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity365,000Alcohol85,000 Microbial Agents75,000Toxic Agents55,000Motor Vehicle Crashes26,347Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs32,000Suicide30,622Incidents Involving Firearms29,000Homicide20,308Sexual Behaviors20,000All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect17,000Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Such As Aspirin7,600Marijuana0
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In a letter of congratulations, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus told Obama he's already got health reform on his radar.

THCB regular Michael Millenson doesn't understand Baucus' strategy.

Here’s Millenson's two theories on what this could mean:

Scenario No. 1: The Republicans in Congress, chastened by their election losses, join in a lame-duck effort with Democrats who, in the a spirit of forgiveness and comity, help pass a bipartisan health care reform plan before Christmas. President Bush, fresh from long weeks of prayer and repentance, signs the bill on the morning of January 20 with President-elect Obama looking on. Bush hands him a pen, and then they step out onto the Capitol Rotunda for the swearing-in.
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The entire country now has heard about how Sarah Palin and her husband knew in advance that their son, Trig Palin, would be born with Down Syndrome. The Palins also must have known that they would have health insurance and the financial resources needed to pay for the extensive medical care Trig is likely to need

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Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Barron's and Institutional Investor. She is the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Why Healthcare Costs So Much, an examination of the economic forces driving the healthcare system. A fellow at the Century Foundation, Maggie is also the author the increasingly influential HealthBeat blog, one of our favorite healthcare reads, where this piece first appeared.

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Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke’s freshman-level term paper on health care economics shows how little he knows about it.

Here’s the evidence:

He talks about the health care system in America as if there is one. There are thousands of health care systems in this country. They include the military and Veterans Administration health care systems, the investor-owned and not-for-profit health care systems and systems owned and run by states, counties and municipalities. Typical systems include hospitals, specialty hospitals, long-term care facilities and services and primary care, diagnostic, emergency care and surgical clinics. Every state and municipality that has a hospital, doctor’s office, nursing home or other health care provider is a health care and health insurance market. In addition, we have dozens of medical devices, medical supplies and pharmaceutical markets. While they are interdependent, they are not in a “system.”

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