Monday, June 30, 2014

Justices rule on contraception coverage | UTSanDiego.com

It appears that the right-wingers on the US Supreme Court, in the interest of "freedom of religion" decided to jam their religion down everyone else's throat.

Justices rule on contraception coverage | UTSanDiego.com:  Here is a link to the actual decision: http://www.scribd.com/doc/231968582/Burwell-v-Hobby-Lobby


So now employees who work for right-wing companies will no longer be able to get coverage for birth control.  Of course men will still be able to get drugs to help them with impotency such as viagra.  All of this is to support the right-wing desire for members of their religion to have more babies. The one thing the world doesn't need is MORE babies.  Catholics want more babies, Mormons want more babies, Muslims want more babies, Hasidic Jews want more babies.  They all want more children to help spread their "only true" religions.  We need incentives to people to reduce the number of children --particularly in the US.  One child born in the US consumes many times the world's scarce resources than a child born in almost any other country.

One thing that the Obama administration could do is make it easier to obtain birth control pills.  It no longer makes sense for women to have to go to a doctor to obtain prescriptions for birth control pills unless they have medical symptoms that could contribute to problems (high blood pressure, for example).  The FDA should authorize pharmacies to be able to issue birth control pills based upon a few simple procedures.  For example,

The patient would fill out a form on a terminal at the pharmacy and answer a series of questions about their health.  Based upon the answers to the questions, the terminal would request the patient to have blood pressure taken, temperature taken, provide a blood sample (finger prick), or a urine sample.  When the pharmacy receives acceptable response back from those tests, the prescription would be issued.  If the patient has vital signs that are in "marginal category" the software may require repeated blood pressure, or fluid samples in order to obtain refills of the prescription.  If answers to questions or lab tests are in "abnormal" category, the patient would be referred, of course, to a physician.

There are many other drugs in that category.  It never made sense to me to require prescriptions for toenail fungus treatments for example.  I believe that by using technology and allowing pharmacies to work directly with patients to manage a little of their own healthcare we could dramatically reduce the cost of healthcare in the US.


Sunday, April 27, 2014

Who really pays for health care? It might surprise you!

I found this article by Jay Hancock very interesting.

Who really pays for health care? It might surprise you | Cincinnati.com | cincinnati.com

The article was published in a lot of City newspapers.  The facts he mentions didn't surprise me, because I think I understood most of them conceptually.  However it did confirm my beliefs.



It is clear that the Government & Employers have been paying for most of our medical care for years, so Obamacare really didn't make much change, except for forcing people who weren't paying their fair share to start paying also.



The real problem is the actual cost of the medical care is so much higher in the US than any other country in the world.  We need to figure out ways to reduce that cost without affecting the quality of health care. As an engineer, I like to break the cost down to its basic elements and then see what can be done to "value engineer" each component.  All of those little components where we have waste, fraud or abuse in our system adds up to huge numbers in the overall system.



Some of the big cost components are:

1. Fraud --We have heard estimates of huge amounts of fraud in medical claims.  These include insurance fraud of many different types.

2. Conflicts of Interest -- Medical providers, whether doctors, drug companies, or hospitals all have a profit motive to sell more of their product or service whether it is needed or in the best interest of the patient.

3. Hypochondria -- We have a lot of people now who request, or insist on additional medical care based upon incomplete knowledge of their health situation, which is often influenced by marketing from drug companies

4. Ineffective treatments -- Even though there are new and improved treatments for many diseases, doctors continue to perform or prescribe treatments that are less effective or more expensive

5. Barriers to "self help" -- Patients with many symptoms could, in fact, diagnose their own medical problems with very high accuracy and prescribe their own remedies for minor problems.  However, our US system of delivering medical care is "tilted" to require everyone to go to a doctor for almost every problem.  This increases the overall medical costs, and sometimes actually delays getting the proper care.

Examples of this include:



  • We go to doctors because when a doctor prescribes a medicine, it is covered by insurance, vs paying for an over-the-counter medication at a drug store.
  • We go to the doctor because we find it hard to get the facts we need to help us diagnose our problem.  However, now there is a wealth of knowledge available on-line...but can we trust it?
  • We go to a doctor because the medication we need for a simple problem is sold "by prescription only." It doesn't make a lot of sense why some medications are only sold by prescriptions--for example topical treatments for toenail fungus



Saturday, March 22, 2014

Auto Immune Syndromes

I just read that Venus Williams is suffering from a disease called Sjogren's syndrome.  but still won the Dubai tennis tournament.  I looked upSjogren's syndrome on Wikipedia.  It is a difficult disease to diagnose and treat.  It doesn't sound like we know the cause, and there is apparently no cure.  Because one of the symptoms is fatigue, I also looked up Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Fibromyalgia which in some ways seems similar.  Apparently all three of these diseases are more prevalent in women, and we don't know the cause or have a cure.   There are some common symptoms among the three syndromes, but there are enough differences to allow them to be classified as separate diseases.  I wonder if there are other syndromes that are also similar.  According to Wikipedia A syndrome:  In medicine and psychology, a less specific definition of syndrome is used, which describes a collection of symptoms and findings without necessarily tying them to a single identifiable pathogenesis.  Is there a common cause for this type of syndrome?  Is it genetic?  Or is it a viral infection?  Or both:  for example a viral infection triggers an immune response which becomes self-destructive due to a genetic mutation?



From searching on the internet, it appears that each of these syndromes have their own support organizations, which consists of other patients sharing with each other.  Each also appears to have fund-raising to help with patients and research.  The research seems to be fragmented, and studying the unique properties and symptoms of each syndrome.  It doesn't appear that there is any organization, including NIH, or the equivalent in other countries, sponsoring research into the possible common cause, treatment or cure of these type of syndromes.  



I wonder if it would make sense to map the DNA of individuals with these various syndromes and see if there are common genetic markers that indicate a possible contributing cause of the syndromes.  If the FDA had continued to allow "23 and me" to collect specimens, maybe it would help. It seems to me that the world really does need an immense database of DNA to be able to identify unique differences that could contribute to causing rare syndromes such as this.  


Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Stand against sitting disease: Expert offers ideas for moving more

It appears that we've all "gotta move" more -- maybe the increase in some of our diseases in the western world is caused by "sitting disease" --facilitated by television & computers



Stand against sitting disease: Expert offers ideas for moving more – USATODAY.com:





Also on Mayo Clinic web site:



http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-blog/sitting-disease/bgp-20056238