Every doctor knows that a gagging patient is a sick patient. But apparently the American Medical Association believes gagging medical research is just dandy when it serves the AMA agenda at the expense of public health. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently “gagged” authors of articles submitted to JAMA from speaking to the media or issuing a press Read More ›
Are we worrying too much about arsenic in the water? The anguish is making us more aggrieved than the actuality! In late March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency asked for a 60-day extension of the effective date of the arsenic standard for drinking water released Jan. 22. Administrator Christine Todd Whitman announced that the EPA would seek “independent reviews of Read More ›
Let’s start with three facts. First, patients are unhappy and growing unhappier with the nation’s medical care system. People want changes. Second, there are plenty of proposals out there. Third, this plenitude, indeed plethora of proposals demonstrates that none have the single right answer. In medical practice, multiple treatment approaches usually show that there is no single best treatment. But Read More ›
From Capitol Hill to the evening news, the pharmaceutical industry has been and is being pilloried as the “pariah de jour.” We have all seen the stories about the alleged greed of pharmaceutical companies. They range from accusations of the highest profits of any industry in the country to shortages of flu vaccines and other medications because there was no Read More ›
We all think we’re pretty valuable stuff. But what are we really worth? That all depends on whether you ask your mother, grandmother, siblings, your priest or rabbi, pharmacist, local chemist, philosopher, organ salesman, or the government and its endless agencies. With all the concern about health-care costs, a number of statistical czars in various branches of government have pegged Read More ›
Cars are just too expensive for seniors, proclaimed the politician when he unveiled his new plan. The bill passed, and so the government collected money from every worker’s paycheck to buy the cars, then paid the dealers about 20 percent of the market prices. Soon every senior had a car through the government program cleverly called “AutoCare.” But there were Read More ›
Warning! There are some new contagious diseases that even the modern miracles of medicine won’t ever be able to cure. Spread through close contact with trial lawyers, they include lawsuititis, legal paralysis and class-action insanity. Unfortunately these societal diseases will have to be treated by some person or group other than the same modern day “out-law” group that caused them. Read More ›
So the United States Army finally made a decent decision and decided to trash all those Made-in-China and “Chinese Material” black berets. Perhaps we should follow their lead. A boycott? No way. Still, there may be good reasons for individuals, as individuals, to start looking more carefully at those labels. We take as our text the American Revolution, and a Read More ›
When the Bush administration took office last January, the Pentagon ended several years of (to borrow from a recent movie) “Waiting to Exhale.” Soon they were gasping again. Now, once more, they’re holding their breath. Nothing quite like this has ever happened in Washington, D.C. That’s because no nation has ever faced the military situation this nation confronts. And the Read More ›