Never thought I’d be writing a book on medicine with a doctor. Of course, I never thought I’d hit middle age and start to find the subject personally interesting, either. I took it on because, after a couple decades pondering the Pentagon, I was ready to try something really crazy. I have not been disappointed. What’s wrong with American medicine? Read More ›
Last Monday, Mark Edwards, PR man for the conservative think tank the Discovery Institute, was excited. “We landed on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times,” he enthused. Two weeks prior, the Discovery Institute was featured in a story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. And CNN recently turned its cameras on the Seattle institute. The Read More ›
http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=/stories/20010505/553186.html In America, in the United States particularly, culture wars are so hard fought that the modernist tribes are many, various and jealous of their place and context and meaning. Which means there is always a great deal of energetic sartorial signaling going on: “I am a slacker geek, with closet literary ambitions.” “I am an upper middle-class golf club Read More ›
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 ›