"For the progress of humanity, work alone is not adequate, but the work should be associated with love, compassion, right conduct, truthfulness and sympathy. Without the above qualities, selfless service cannot be performed."
On
Sunday morning, Indian guru Sri Sathya Sai Baba
passed away. He leaves behind a massive
empire, several million
mourning devotees worldwide, an
extensive religious philosophy, a great deal of
controversy and a legacy of large-scale philanthropic projects in India, including
free hospitals and mobile medical facilities,
a free university and schools, and other efforts which included supplying
clean water to hundreds of rural villages.
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posted by zarq
on Apr 25, 2011 -
41 comments
Coalition health reforms will spell the end for the NHS and lead to U.S. style system, claim researchers. 'Prof Allyson Pollock, from the Barts and The London School of Medicine, and David Price, senior research fellow at its Centre for Health Sciences, write in a paper published on BMJ.com that the legislation “amounts to the abolition of the English NHS as a universal, comprehensive, publicly accountable, tax funded service, free at the point of delivery”. They say the Government “has repealed the health secretary’s duty to provide or secure the provision of comprehensive care” in order to create a commercial market in care. Instead, under the new system the state "finances but does not provide healthcare", in “equivalent to Medicare and Medicaid schemes in the US”'. Meanwhile, Dr Kim Price, claims '
the UK coalition government's planned NHS and welfare reforms, and their use of 'nudge' theory, hark back to ideas on welfare and recession from the end of the nineteenth century, according to studies by a University of Leicester historian whose research paper has recently been published in the Lancet'.
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posted by VikingSword
on Mar 23, 2011 -
33 comments
Progesterone caproate injections have been used to reduce the likelihood of premature births in at-risk pregnant women for years. Up until now, the drug was custom-compounded by wholesale and specialist pharmacies, legally, but without federal approval. These injections cost between $5 and $15 a dose and were regularly reimbursed by insurance companies and Medicaid.
Last month, the FDA announced
their approval of a commercially produced version of the compound, to be marketed under the brand name Makena by a company called KV Pharmaceuticals.
No stranger to controversy and trouble, KV barely survived a rash round of
layoffs and wrongful termination lawsuits. Their former chief executive
now faces criminal charges surrounding the company's failure to notify the FDA that they were producing oversized morphine tablets.
(He could also do for a shave, it appears.)
Now, KV has announced that the new drug will be available at a cost of
$1,500 per dose,
bringing the total pregnancy term cost of treatment to $25,000-$30,000, from its former cost of $250-$300, a
100-fold increase—but it gets worse...
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posted by disillusioned
on Mar 9, 2011 -
63 comments
South Dakota Rep. Hal Wick (R-Sioux Falls),
is sponsoring a bill [
text] which would require all citizens to buy a firearm “sufficient to provide for their ordinary self-defense” within six months of turning age 21. Rep. Wick said he is introducing the bill to prove a point that the federal health care reform mandate passed last year is
unconstitutional. [
previously]
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posted by T.D. Strange
on Feb 1, 2011 -
146 comments
What should medicine do when it can't save your life? Atul Gawande looks at the system of final-stage treatment for terminal patients, which, despite
more than 40 years of a hospice movement for better end of life care, often ensures that patients die exactly how they least want to: in a hospital, hooked up to machines. Gawande tries to envision how, "when the chemotherapy stops working, when we start needing oxygen at home, when we face high-risk surgery, when the liver failure keeps progressing, when we become unable to dress ourselves" medical care can focus on quality of life, rather than prolonging it.
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posted by ocherdraco
on Jul 26, 2010 -
36 comments
What US Health Care Needs Medical doctor and writer Atul Gawande gave the commencement address recently at Stanford's School of Medicine. In it he lays out very precisely and in a nonpartisan way what is wrong with the institution of medical care in the US — why it is both so expensive and so ineffective at delivering quality care uniformly across the board. (
via)
posted by kliuless
on Jun 21, 2010 -
43 comments
It is not our role to take power. It is our role to make the powerful frightened of us. And that's what we've forgotten. Give up that dream! Chris Hedges talks neoliberalism and neofeudalism, the civil rights movement, Camden, Obama, Clinton, Tea Parties, moral nihilism, inverted totalitarianism and corpocracy, NAFTA, welfare reform, health care, labor, poverty, Yugoslavia, post-industrial capitalism, economic crisis, imperial collapse, socialism, and democracy, among other things.
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posted by gerryblog
on Apr 24, 2010 -
51 comments
The Obama Coalition "
These general findings suggest the possibility that the political strength of voters whose convictions are perhaps best described as Social Democratic in the European sense is reaching a significant level in the United States. With effective organization and mobilization, such voters are positioned to set the agenda in the Democratic Party in the near future."
posted by Glibpaxman
on Apr 4, 2010 -
37 comments
Following the vote on Sunday, Mike Troxel of the Lynchburg Tea Party posted the address of what he thought was Dem Rep Tom Perriello, with the comment that activists should add a "personal touch" to their anger at Periello -- who voted yes on the health care bill -- by going to his house. It turns out the address was actually Perriello's brother's house, and the FBI are currently investigating the
cut gas line that was discovered the next day.
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posted by FatherDagon
on Mar 24, 2010 -
380 comments
"In May, 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college,
he had purchased his own health insurance. Shortly after his diagnosis, however, his insurance company, Fortis [now
Assurant Health], revoked his policy. Mitchell was told that without further treatment his HIV would become full-blown AIDS within a year or two and he would most likely die within two years after that."
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posted by ericb
on Mar 17, 2010 -
139 comments
Do you have a life-changing medical condition?
Patientslikeme (mentioned previously in a 2008 post on mood conditions) is a way for you share information online with other people who have the same condition. Some of the conditions with groups established already are epilepsy, depression, and Multiple Sclerosis.
Started by 3 MIT engineers who had personal experiences with ALS (Lou Gherig's disease), the site is funded by
partnerships with healthcare providers who have access to anonymised data about the member base. The stated goal in their
Openness Policy is to speed up the pace of research and help fix the broken (US) health system. The
Privacy Policy has a plain-English description of what happens to information that members share.
posted by harriet vane
on Mar 16, 2010 -
15 comments
Atul Gawande
offers a way for health care to be improved through experimentation and pilot programs, much as agriculture was in 20th century
posted by reenum
on Feb 27, 2010 -
24 comments
Is There Life in Health Care Reform? Elizabeth Drew analyzes the current prospects for US health care reform, in the New York Review of Books.
Logically, there should still be a way to get a bill passed. But logic went out the window on January 19. The situation was as much psychodrama as legislative stalemate. The perfectly reasonable argument was made to Democrats in Congress, mainly by the administration, that, having voted for the bill already, it would be worse for them to fail to pass it than to pass it, but this seemed not to be heard.
posted by russilwvong
on Feb 16, 2010 -
213 comments
Health Care: Who Knows 'Best'? "...comparative research on effectiveness is only part of the strategy to improve care. A second science has captured the imagination of policymakers in the White House: behavioral economics. This field attempts to explain pitfalls in reasoning and judgment that cause people to make apparently wrong decisions; its adherents believe in policies that protect against unsound clinical choices. But there is a schism between presidential advisers in their thinking over whether legislation should be coercive, aggressively pushing doctors and patients to do what the government defines as best, or whether it should be respectful of their own autonomy in making decisions. The President and Congress appear to be of two minds. How this difference is resolved will profoundly shape the culture of health care in America." Interesting NY Review of Books article by
Jerome Groopman.
posted by cog_nate
on Feb 8, 2010 -
29 comments
"Melissa" (name changed for privacy) is a transwoman who was badly injured in a car accident and is in hospital in critical condition. While in treatment, some of the medical staff and her family decided that since she still had a "male" body, to make things "less confusing", they will
erase 4 years of her female identity by referring to her as a man and taking her off her hormone therapy. (Warning: possible triggers) As little light puts it:
And if she woke up as from a deep sleep, she’d wake up into a world where her best friend was dead, where her body had been forcibly edited back to its pre-transition state and given a few more years of the influence of testosterone to boot, where her memory and self were hazy and confusing and nobody was calling her by the right name and pronouns, they were in fact pretending four years of her life, the four years she finally got to be honest and true to herself, those had never happened, and shh, she’s just confused, shhhh, calm down, let’s work on fixing your memory some more.
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posted by divabat
on Jan 13, 2010 -
147 comments
Yesterday, the little-noticed U.S. Preventive Services Task Force caused a stir by releasing
new guidelines discouraging routine mammography for women under age 50 and breast self-examinations at any age. (Comparison chart of new and old guidelines
here.) The American Cancer Society immediately registered its strong
disagreement; meanwhile, the National Breast Cancer Coalition came out in
strong support of the new guidelines, saying:
The over-emphasis on the importance of screening, despite a lack of strong evidence, has been elevated to such a degree that some even equate screening with prevention of breast cancer. The National Breast Cancer Coalition hopes that today’s release of the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) revised recommendations will put the brakes on this run-away train and will put screening and its limitations into proper perspective.
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posted by iminurmefi
on Nov 17, 2009 -
64 comments
