MCN | Medical Consultants Network

The Power of a Second Look

Home / MCNTalk / Tag: Lifestyle and habits

Viewing items tagged:

Lifestyle and habits

Planning (and funding) for fulfilling one’s potential

Being able to decide when to have children is central to fulfilling one’s potential. In the year ahead, many women will harness this power for the first time. Melinda Gates discusses funding for family planning in this  New York Times Op Ed piece:

In July 2012, I co-hosted a summit meeting on family planning in London. The evidence was clear: The world had been underinvesting in the field for years, with serious consequences for women, their families and their communities. We invited leaders from dozens of countries and key global health organizations and private industry, along with women’s health advocates, to put the needs of women back on the global agenda. It was deeply moving to see older advocates who’d given their lives to this issue pass their passion to a new generation. The participants signed onto a big goal: helping 120 million women who didn’t have access to family planning to get it by 2020.

Read more…

Resistance to Common Core Curriculum

We generally write at MCNTalk about medical topics. But this article from The New York Times is interesting in its own light; discussing resistance to a common core educational curriculum because it may wound the feelings of those who find it challenging – both students and their parents. But it also relates to a general theme that we find most interesting – a flight from reality that drives so much that we see in our culture and in the medical world, with pseudo-problems that people want to throw labels, entitlements and money at. Fear of excellence at the expense of recognizing the average or mediocre brings down many a business, or an otherwise decent person to loathe themselves or others.

The reality of the world is that abilities and attributes vary, whether how high one can jump or run, how fine a phrase one can write, beautifully one can sing, or how attractive and desirable one is to others. These features are a function of both nature and nurture, practice and effort. But in the end, we all land somewhere along a continuum of capacity and attributes in any number of areas. It sure ain’t fair, when one is on the weaker end, but it is real and it will not go away, no matter how much one may protest or wish otherwise.

Perhaps one of the benefits and attractions of athletics is that at the highest levels, it can’t be faked or gamed. The best teams require great athletes who got that way by birth and sacrifice,  and superb coaching leadership. Society loves the purity of sports victories and defeats. We may argue an “unfair” call, or decry the jock who does not play by the rules, because we want to enjoy the simplicity and elegance of a well fought game, or a beautifully run race.

There really are two parallel societies; those who work hard and recognize and honor success and failure, and those who would strive to deny unequal ability and outcome, and avoid the demands of winning or the pain of defeat. The former achieve and transform our world while the latter embrace mediocrity, denial of reality and frequently retreat into victimhood and defeat.

Emotional Support, with Fur

Pocket, the author's pet, aka emotional support animal.

Pocket, the author’s pet, aka emotional support animal.

That a dog provides comfort to owners is a given. That’s why we call them pets. But now, under the guise of subjective criteria of any physician or licensed therapist and the perceived needs of certain individuals, some are claimed as a necessity that others must tolerate in the public sphere.

Some are claiming and demanding that their pets have therapeutic impact and address an emotional disability and must accompany them on planes, at work, in restaurants, and in pet-free housing. Others claim their animals can retrieve dropped items that they can’t stoop down for, or have the uncanny and improbable talent of detecting and stopping seizures.

Please note that highly trained service animals such as seeing eye dogs actually DO something and deserve respect and access to any setting. But a clear line must be drawn when it comes to animals whose sole talent is BEING. By all means, enjoy your pet, dress it up in silly costumes, feed it from the table, and pay for its chemotherapy. But someone else’s pet provides zero social good to society at large. It will never pay taxes, teach our kids, or shovel the snow off your walk out of altruism. They have earned no dispensation or right to privilege or sacrifice from the rest of us. As one commenter queried, she derives comfort from their husband — can he fly free and sit at her feet on a plane? One’s perceived needs and wishes need not be indulged by society, or endorsed with misguided and abused rules.

Childhood obesity rates improve

As noted in The American Medical News  online, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that more than a third of adults and 17% of children ages 2 to 19 are considered obese. But at least in the childhood obesity area, signs of declines in those rates are taking place in numerous cities, counties and states, said Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“The good news is coming from places large and small,” Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey said. “It’s coming from rural North Carolina, New York City and Philadelphia. When I see that, I’m thrilled because what this tells us is we can reverse this epidemic. It tells us that we don’t have to accept 23 million children being overweight or obese.” The foundation has a goal to reverse the epidemic of childhood obesity by 2015.

Reducing obesity rates is a challenging goal, Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey acknowledged.

“Although the rates are coming down in some places, they’re still far too high. And the progress that we’ve seen has not been shared equally,” she said. Most advances in reducing obesity rates have taken place among white children in affluent communities, with fewer successes seen among African-American, Latino and low-income children. “Frankly, that’s not OK. The benefits of being healthy have to be within the reach of all of our children,” she said.

Read more…

“Healthy Life Expectancy” News

If you’re 65 and living in Hawaii, here’s some good news: Odds are you’ll live another 21 years. And for all but five of those years, you’ll likely be in pretty good health.

Hawaii tops the charts in the government’s first state-by-state look at how long Americans age 65 can expect to live, on average, and how many of those remaining years will be healthy ones.

U.S. life expectancy has been growing steadily for decades, and is now nearly 79 for newborns. The figures released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate life expectancy for people 65 years old, and what portion will be free of the illnesses and disabilities suffered late in life. Read more…

Smoking Ban in Apartments Implemented

In a move that may enrage those who enjoy a cigarette on their couch after work, but delight air-freshener-wielding neighbors, a major landlord has banned smoking in all of its apartments across the country.

As noted in this article, although the program will roll out gradually, it appears to be the first of this scale by a national property owner. It also seems likely to create controversy. Where past efforts against smoking have focused on public gathering places — like bars, stadiums and courthouses — the landlord is now trying to prohibit legal private behavior.

Many studies have proved that secondhand smoke, which is cited as the reason for most smoking bans, is a health hazard. What’s less obvious is how much smoke actually seeps from one apartment to the next.

Whether the cause of that decline or just a coincidence, a raft of policies in the last decade have greatly limited where people can smoke. In New York, smoking was snuffed out in restaurants in 2002 and on beaches and in city parks in 2011; last year, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he wanted every building, including co-ops and condos, to draft a smoking policy, whether pro or con, which some saw as encouraging bans on apartment smoking. The mayor also hopes to set limits on who can smoke: in April, officials unveiled a plan to raise the age limit for cigarette purchases to 21 from 18. Read more…

The State of US Health

This important article from the Journal of the American Medical Association outlines the state of health in the US, comparing and contrasting it to other countries. Given our health spend, the data is not pretty, nor is it surprising. The US News and World Report article summarizing the study notes that our lifestyle is a major culprit contributing to morbidity and disability. As the author Harvey Fineberg MD said:

 “We spend, on average, twice as much as the rest of the countries. Approximately 30 percent of all health expenditures in the United States, which would amount to $750 billion a year, don’t actually contribute to better health…We have a big job ahead of us to create a health care system that really adds value and doesn’t just cost and waste a lot of money.”

This editorial in the Journal of American Medical Association provides further context and thought on the situation.

These Deaths Are Not Statistics…

In medical school and residencies the teaching is that narcotics have no place in the treatment of most chronic pain, especially musculoskeletal pain. But these teachings have been ignored and people are dying as a result. This article cites findings on significant death rates among women due to opiate overdoses, including from Oxycontin. These are prescription drugs, either received directly or drugs diverted to the street. These deaths are disproportionately the poor, single mothers, and the defeated. Federal data shows a quintupling of deaths among women due to prescription pain killers since 1999, climbing at a rate higher than men, with the gender gap narrowing.

More women die from these drugs than from homicide or cervical cancer. These deaths are not statistics. They are men and women who did not need to die and most likely did not need the narcotics.

Physicians who prescribe them casually and the companies that create and promote them aggressively should rethink their motives and their practices. It is easy to say yes to drugs. It is harder to listen with one’s heart and mind to the real pain that underlies many of these lost lives. Collectively we must find a different path. Read more…

More News in the Global Obesity Crisis

 According to the AMA, obesity is now a disease. Setting aside the particular condition, this decision reminds us that the concept of “disease” is complex, as are the social constructs attached to the disease label.

For example, the disease label may imply responsibility or lack of same by the person who has it. And in fact the person with a disease often attains the label of “patient.” Being a patient implies to many that they are passive recipients of care by the health care system rather than personally responsible for engaging in choices and behaviors that reduce or eliminate the condition. Diseases often carry with them stigma and shame, legal exculpation from responsibility, employer obligation to accommodate, insurer/government obligation to pay for and so on.

Expect this decision to generate considerable debate, emotions, and both intended and unintended consequences. Read more…

Kennedy, Vaccinations, Autism, and Junk Science

It’s been quite a while since MCNtalk has posted on the subject of childhood vaccines—since our February 12, 2012 post, “More Doctors ‘Fire’ Vaccine Refusers.” But the issue has not gone away. As this article in Slate points out, there are still those who argue publicly that there is a link between autism and childhood vaccinations, specifically that a vaccine preservative called thimerosal causes autism when injected into children.

It is important to understand that the original study in 1998 linking childhood vaccinations and autism has been thoroughly debunked multiple times using rigorous standards of scientific evidence. (Read “Vaccinations and Autism—Junk Science Is Not a Victimless Crime” for a summary.)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave this year’s (May 24) keynote address at the Autism One/Generation Rescue Conference in which he strongly argued for a link between childhood vaccination and autism. The Slate article touches upon the speech and subsequent conversation between Slate and Kennedy as well as neatly summarizing pertinent facts on the issue. Why is this important? Because when people are not vaccinated, they needlessly put not just themselves at serious health risk, but their entire community as well.

We refer to people who say vaccines cause autism with the shorthand “anti-vaxxers” or say that they are part of the “anti-vaccine movement.” Kennedy said that he is “very much pro-vaccine” and that “vaccines have saved millions and millions of lives.” They will save even more lives if he and his colleagues stop spreading fear and misinformation about them. Kennedy is a passionate guy with practically unique name recognition, powerful connections, and the ability to command attention. He could reverse the course of the anti-vaccine movement today if he announced that his concern about vaccines had been well-intentioned, but that research has shown that vaccines don’t cause autism after all. It would be a proud legacy, one worthy of his name.

Read more…