This humorous article breaks down just how dangerous it can be to be a patient in July. Take a look at what a difference a day makes for a med student/intern/resident.
- From Kevin, M.D.
The White Coat Ceremony is a relatively recent tradition, which has, in a short time, taken on considerable prestige and honor at the majority of U.S. allopathic medical schools and even some international medical institutions.
Read for yourself, and roll your eyes, from Reuters.
I’m not saying the job-based health insurance system is efficient but the article is more about the necessity for “equality” in health coverage than other problems inherent in the U.S. system. As well, several inaccurate ’scare statistics’ exist in the article — including the 45 million uninsured million Americans figure — which is patently false.
George Will has written a great Op/Ed in the Washington Post on the recent decision by the Supreme Court to further the power of eminent domain.
Scietonologist are nutcases. Including Tom Cruise this morning on Today.
L. Ron Hubbard’s views on psychiatry arose before the founding of the Church of Scientology. However, they are an intricate part of the “religion’s” practice. Slate magazine has a nice article on just what those views are. As can be seen they have no basis in science, and you basically must forget the most basic ideas of cause-and-effect and the scientific method, which every high schooler is taught, in order to buy into these ideas on how to treat mental illness.
Government can seize property for…any reason. Okay that’s an overstatement, but the power of eminent domain has been extended significantly.
The Supreme Court has dealt yet another blow to the idea that property rights are somehow inherent. I guess you can tax me all you want once I’m wealthy. What a load…
GlaxoKlineSmith has teamed up with a non-profit for work on one of their AIDs vaccines.
The first AIDs vaccine will appear in the next decade. It’s effectiveness may be in question, however.
Affirmative Action is not the solution to the disparity in care.
Despite that belief, I hold up the right for private institutions, including medical schools, to discriminate all they want. If they believe that affirmative action serves their school then they should be able to insert that as a policy.
However, public, government run and funded state schools have no place with reverse discrimination and affirmative action.
I’ve started work at an ophthalmology clinic until school starts. It explains my posting frequency recently.
It is actually cooler than I thought it could be. I’m working with the ophthalmologic photographer who takes pictures of patient’s eyes (inside and outside). I can pick out obvious cholesterol deposits, melanomas, ulcers, some glaucoma complications after only a week. That part of the work is actually pretty fun.
In a stunning move, the NY Times has published an op/ed supporting a single payer government run healthcare system.
What Krugman fails to mention, but I have, is that more recent surveys find that support for national health insurance drops well below the majority mark if 1) Patients are limited in what physicians they can see and 2) Waiting times for elective procedures increase.
Both of these are inevitable in a single payer system.
This is a home state case that has grabbed national attention.
A child with Hodgkin’s who had been through chemo was told she would have to go through radiation therapy by her oncologist. When the family decided to postpone the therapy and try to get a second opinion with another oncologist, the physician’s practice reported them to CPS, and the state took the girl away and her brothers.
Child negligence when it comes to healthcare is a tough situation. How far do, say, religious freedoms extend when it comes to trying to force your children to practice them. It’s perfectly all right for a Seventh Day Adventist to refuse a blood transfusion but should he be able to refuse one for his child?
The CDC estimates that as of December 2003 the number of Americans infected with the AIDS causing virus broke the 1 million mark.
Finally, I come to it.
I am not a pragmatist. I do however define myself as an idealist. That title however has come, with time, to denote a bleeding heart. I’m much more cerebral about my ideals but they are certainly there. I would rather do what I believe to be right despite charges that sometimes such action lacks real world functionality.
To all who level such charges I paraphrase George Bernard Shaw:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world…The unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to himself…Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Individual liberty versus equality. From slavery to the welfare state to the Cold War, it has simply been the underlying struggle of America’s more than 200 year history. There are notable historians and political philosophers who will say it is not simply that black and white. There are well versed and highly educated and intelligent individuals who claim that these two things — individual liberty and equality — are not mutually exclusive and to view all political debates in terms of one or the other limits your thinking and blocks out solutions to the problems facing the world.
However, more than the trailblazers of political correctness and moral ambiguity would have us believe, the world is often black and white. The world has come to accept all viewpoints and potentially legitimate; it is the greatest folly of the political correctness ‘movement,’ although giving such a title implies an organization not present. It dilutes individual responsibility, excusing any situation and with the erosion of responsibility comes the loss of liberty and morality as well. Perhaps what we have witnessed in the past forty years is merely the inevitable liberalization of the western world which history has clearly shown. Such inevitability does not however make the ideology correct, of course.
I’ve rambled off track and I’ve failed to mention universal healthcare once so far, but bear with me.
Tom Cruise gives medical advice in this hilarious blog.
Of course, it also has links to the ‘I Fucked Ann Cloutier in the Ass’ blog. But I forgive them for being so creative.
Found on Kevin, M.D.
