Health Care Passed? Ooh…Hitler’s Got Something To Say
Posted by Michelle Moquin on March 25th, 2010
This is funny.
ZL: My pleasure. Thanks for participating.
Power outage: Very funny. I could hardly contain my laughter. Although I definitely would not have stood there with my ‘breast sandwich’ for two hours. At least not without a magazine or two. :) Happy your day in court went your way though.
Dunia: Don’t give up.
Evelyn: That’s pretty dark – I laughed though. Although I’d kill for a day of shopping.
Trudy: It is evident that the passing of health care has inspired a revolution of rhetoric from the ‘party of no’, the ‘party against progress’.
Emily: I so enjoy creative analogies – just love the visual. Thanks for sharing.
Jamila: Thank you. I wish that I could do more. Be safe
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my ‘loyal’(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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March 25th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
MAKE YOURSELF 10 TIMES LESS LIKELY TO DIE OF A HEART ATTACK
An incredible medical report from a team of leading doctors shows how you can make yourself more than 10 times less likely to die of a heart attack.
And believe it or not, the secret isn’t diet, workouts or supplements. According to the latest research, it’s simply knowing what to do during and right after a heart attack.
Learn more…
PROS AND CONS OF PROSTATE SURGERY
Men facing radical prostatectomy (surgical removal of the prostate gland) may like the idea of having it done with state-of-the-art robotic technology.
And indeed, minimally invasive prostatectomies typically result in smaller incisions, less blood loss and quicker recovery.
But — get ready, this is a big one — it also carries a higher risk for very unappealing complications, including erectile dysfunction.
Any man considering this procedure should be aware that the trade-off can be considerable, especially since the newest version of the high-tech procedure is being aggressively marketed by hospitals eager to bring in patients — and the ads aren’t offering these details.
WHAT GOES WRONG?
The disconcerting finding that minimally invasive radical prostatectomies (particularly when performed with a robot) have higher rates of genitourinary complications, including infection, incontinence and erectile dysfunction, was published in Journal of the American Medical Association.
Comparing the minimally invasive procedure with open prostatectomy (in which a much larger incision is made to reach the prostate), researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital drew data from tumor registries and Medicare, evaluating surgical outcomes of 8,837 men with prostate cancer.
Of these patients, 1,938 had minimally invasive prostatectomy and 6,899 had their prostates removed the traditional way. The researchers found that the minimally invasive prostatectomies resulted in…
Shorter hospital stays (two versus three days, on average)
Fewer patients requiring blood transfusion (3% versus 21%)
Fewer postoperative respiratory complications (4% versus 7%)
Less risk that problematic strictures or scar tissue will develop (6% versus 14%).
However, these men also had…
A higher rate of infection (5% versus 2%)
Greater likelihood of incontinence (16% versus 12%)
Higher rates of erectile dysfunction after the operation (27% versus 19%).
The need for additional cancer treatment was similar in both groups.
DO THEY KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING?
Jim Hu, MD, MPH, genitourinary surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the study, told me that he believes these important differences in outcomes occurred because many surgeons using the new techniques and technology haven’t yet developed expertise with it.
Compared with the traditional open procedure, which has been used for 30 years, minimally invasive radical prostatectomy has been available just eight years.
It’s exploding in popularity — where a minimally invasive approach was used for just 9% of all prostatectomies in 2003, use grew to 43% in 2007.
Typically, surgeons performing open radical prostatectomy were either trained during their residencies or had more than 20 years of experience.
In comparison, many of the minimally invasive radical prostatectomy surgeons in the study were learning “on the fly” during the study period.
Dr. Hu said the laparoscopic practitioners start to perform procedures after a two-day course and being proctored for a few cases, rather than learning it more intensively in a residency or fellowship setting.
Ironically, this trend is being driven by consumer demand. Ads tout the advantages the robotic technology offers, which promises less blood loss, less pain and a quicker recovery compared with minimally invasive radical prostatectomy without robotic assistance.
In this study, researchers were unable to differentiate between the minimally invasive procedures performed with robot assistance and those done without, but according to Dr. Hu,
it is the robotic procedures that people are asking for. In his words, requests from patients have “grown beyond the general surgical expertise of the surgeons at this time of rapid, unbridled adoption.
” So it is especially important to be on the alert when this technology is new to a hospital — don’t just assume the training and experience are in place before the procedures are being done.
ASK YOUR DOCTOR
If you are considering robot-assisted minimally invasive radical prostatectomy, be sure to ask your surgeon:
How were you trained to do this procedure? Did you learn to do this during your residency or fellowship? A fellowship is an additional course of study for one or two years, where surgeons subspecialize.
In contrast, said Dr. Hu, robot certification can be obtained after a two-day course.
How many procedures have you performed with this technology? Dr. Hu recommends at least 250 surgeries, and that a surgeon is performing at least four/week.
The good news, said Dr. Hu, is that as more surgeons become skilled in minimally invasive radical prostatectomy, with or without robotic assistance, the benefits of this approach will eventually outweigh the risks. Until then, proceed with caution.
Source(s):
Jim C. Hu, MD, MPH, is a genitourinary surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana Farber Cancer Center, and is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. His area of expertise is applying minimally invasive approaches to prostate cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, testis cancer and adrenal cancers.
March 25th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
I am a court reporter. I thought you would like to hear just how stupid those lawyers you hire and put so much trust in are.
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This is from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are supposedly things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters.
ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK?
What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.
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March 25th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Thank you for being a voice for women everywhere. I am an ex Air Force woman. I had to share this.
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Women in the Air Force
By Amy Kemp Butler (Ogden Air Logistics Center History Office)
Last Edit: Mar 25 2010 – 10:17am
Women have been a valuable asset to the military from World War II onward. Many have put their lives on the line and dedicated themselves to protect this country and help others.
Many of these women have been and continue to be employed here at Hill Air Force Base. One of these courageous women is Judy Ricks.
Ricks was a welder in a refinery in the early 1970s and was looking forward to working in a shipyard before enlisting in the United States Air Force in 1979 when she was stationed at Castle Air Force Base, Calif.
What she wanted to do more than anything before then was work on “big” airplanes. She was able to do as she wished because of the experience and knowledge she had from working in the refinery.
She was asked many times if she had cross-trained into her field, which to their astonishment, her answer was “No.”
She was active duty at Castle AFB for eight years with the Strategic Air Command, launching and recovering the KC-135A Stratotankers.
She was a member of the first all-woman KC-135A ground and flight crew holding the crew chief position in charge of maintenance of the aircraft.
The “A” series KC-135 had turbojet engines, creating all the thrust from the core of the engines instead of 80 percent of the thrust by fan as on the newest turbofan engines.
The KC-135A series could carry almost 220,000 pounds of fuel while the aircraft itself only weighed about 145,000 pounds.
In order to take off, the aircraft was designed to burn water which made the air denser, creating more thrust to lift the aircraft’s fuel weight and basic weight. Ricks was in charge of making everything mechanical run smoothly.
Out of a maintenance wing of approximately 9,000, there were only nine or 10 women among them, including Ricks.
When asked how they were treated by their co-workers, she said, “The majority supported us, especially through leadership and the maintenance community. Because of this support, that is why we are where we are today.”
When asked about her experiences when in the all-woman ground and flight crew, she said there were too many to pick one.
She said, “We went TDY (temporary duty away from home station) a lot with the Pacific Tanker Taskforce. The F-16s couldn’t make it over the Pacific without a tanker.
We would be gone four months at a time. One mission, we left on a Sunday and didn’t get into a real bed till the next Thursday
. We slept on the aircraft in the crew bunk. We flew to Minot (N.D.) and spent four hours on the ground in Minot where we changed an engine water pump.
We then flew to Hawaii where we changed the engine angle driveshaft for the accessory drive.
On our way to Guam, we had a seal leak and spent eight hours in air. When we landed in Guam we had to add 22 quarts of oil when the engine held about 30 quarts. We flew lots of missions over there.”
After her service with the Pacific Tanker Taskforce she became an aircraft maintenance instructor at Castle AFB and also in Guam under the then-Air Training Command.
Concluding her service in Guam she moved to Dyess AFB, Texas, where she designed and built computer-based training for B-1B Lancer bomber crews. Ricks now works as an instructional designer at Hill AFB.
Ricks, with her admirable service, as well as many other women serving in the Armed Forces and as Civilian Civil Servants, is worthy of recognition and congratulations, especially this month
. With their heroic efforts, the U.S. military and government female personnel continue to be a diversified and significant asset to our nation.
March 25th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
I just wanted to get in something so that you will thank me. I found this
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Migraines vs. magnets
Nothing can ruin a day like a migraine… and the meds many people take to fight the pain can only make things worse.
But a new study shows that a simple magnetic treatment could cut the pain right off–and offer genuine lasting relief with no real side effects.
Too good to be true? The results speak for themselves.
The treatment is called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. An electronic wand is waved around the head and the pain just dissipates. Nothing penetrates the body, and there are no pills to swallow.
It sounds like pure science fiction–but it works… especially for migraines with aura, a condition in which patients see spots of light or have other visual problems, especially at the beginning of an attack.
Researchers recruited 201 patients who were experiencing migraine with aura, and gave 99 of them a sham stimulation and 102 of them sTMS devices (the “s” stands for “single,” because the device uses individual magnetic pulses). The patients treated up to three attacks over three months and recorded their symptoms and pain levels before and after treatment.
Two hours after an attack, 39 percent of sTMS users were pain-free, versus 22 percent of the patients getting the sham, according to the study published in The Lancet Neurology. Those getting the real treatment were also much less likely to need meds.
The researchers also found that for best results, the device needs to be used as soon as the symptoms hit– suggesting that even more people may have gotten relief if they had used the device earlier.
Other studies have also found a real benefit from this treatment for migraine patients. And the best news of all is that the device is very easy use to use and comes with virtually no side effects.
There are two kinds of TMS devices, repetitive TMS (or rTMS) and single-pulse (or sTMS). While sTMS has shown great promise for migraine sufferers, rTMS has been used to help people overcome depression without meds.
Like I said, this is almost science fiction. But if it works without pills or side effects, then there’s no reason not to try it out–especially for those hard-to-beat headaches.
As the study shows, it won’t work for everyone… so it’s important to know there are other safe and natural options out there for headaches. For example, magnesium and the B vitamins have helped plenty of patients overcome their migraines–with and without aura.
I recently went into detail on these and other migraine treatments, and you can read all about them here. [link to yet-unpublished piece, “Headaches linked to heart troubles”
And if you need more motivation to stay off drugs– especially painkillers–keep reading.
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This is a good article, isn’t it. I haven’t tried it but the use of magnets to relieve migraines is fantastic.
Penny