I guess track marks won't necessarily mean you're heroin addict anymore...

There was many a morning when I would down cups of coffee after a rough night like an athlete drinks Gatorade following a dehydrating run and joked that it would be so much easier if they could just hook me up to an IV and give me a slow drip of coffee throughout the day.  Leave it up to the Japanese to get close.

Tenteki10 in Tokyo, Japan may be the first in the latest fad of "health bars" where you can order up your own selection of IV cocktail to provide a nice pick me up for the day.  From Japan Today:

Ten options with different effects and five courses consisting of these options are available. The basic price is 2,000 yen, and customers can request an option or course menu, for an additional charge.

“Many people daily suffer from exhaustion, insomnia and backaches on a daily basis because they don’t take proper care of themselves,” says a doctor at Tenteki10. “They try supplements, home remedies or cheap energy injections. Some of these ailments cannot be healed that way and could possibly develop into more serious illnesses, including depression.”

I'm not sure getting supplements injected straight into the bloodstream is that much better than taking the old fashioned oral route and letting your body absorb it, but I guess in this fast-paced world, every second counts.  That, or people really like needles--OUCH!

Hopefully you didn't have these bikini clad women in mind for Firecracker George's car...

I don't know if Wild Willie is still the frugal penny pincher that he used to be in his youth, but he may want to lay off the healthy lifestyle and fatten up.

In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.

Van Baal and colleagues created a model to simulate lifetime health costs for three groups of 1,000 people: the "healthy-living" group (thin and non-smoking), obese people, and smokers. The model relied on "cost of illness" data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.

The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.

OK. So the point of the article isn't really to let your flab fly, so don't go crazy with the Ben and Jerry's just yet.  But it does question this notion that obesity and smoking are the primary culprits for the rising cost of healthcare.

On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years, and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.

Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.
The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.

The results counter the common perception that preventing obesity will save health systems worldwide millions of dollars.

"This throws a bucket of cold water onto the idea that obesity is going to cost trillions of dollars," said Patrick Basham, a professor of health politics at Johns Hopkins University who was unconnected to the study. He said that government projections about obesity costs are frequently based on guesswork, political agendas, and changing science.

A few extra calories never hurt anyone, and maybe it will give you an extra year or two on your life...

Sometime in the past couple of years or so, my Body Mass Index (BMI) edged into the obese range, prompting me to get in the pool and back in the gym over the summer. I had grand plans to somehow get myself back to my svelte college BMI that was in the normal range, but alas, I think age, the accompanying decreases in metabolism getting older brings, and my lack of inhibition when it comes to fatty food, is preventing me from getting there. A new study that will be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, however, may make me feel a bit more satisfied about my overweight frame. From The New York Times:

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

Now there's probably more to this study than meets the eye, and I don't think the purpose of this report is to give us all carte blanche to get crazy with cupcakes. Still, I kind of like having a reason to not feel so guilty about that extra slice of pizza I eat every so often.

Sacrificing the health of kids to make a point? Shame on you...

My wife and I find ourselves at times mimicking couples like James Carville and Mary Matalin--happily married, but at polar opposites when it comes to political issues. But on issues such as the ongoing debate about funding for State Children's Health Insurance Programs (CHIP), I'm finding myself continuing to slide closer to her on the left.

CHIP is a government-sponsored plan which provides basic medical coverage and presciption drugs to children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to afford private health insurance. The program has been relatively successful in the ten years it has been implemented, but more funding is needed to ensure all kids in this group are covered. As the plan is set to expire in two months, Democrats and a few Republicans from across the aisle have been scrambling to put together a bill that increases federal funding of the program. The House, in fact, just approved their version of the bill today by a narrow margin of 225-204. Republicans, however, see this as a sneaky way of introducing socialized, government-run health care into the system, and want the program halted. In fact, President Bush has already stated he would veto any such bill that comes to his desk.

As much as I tend to fear what a catastrophe government-run medical care would be like in the United States, I can't agree with this ideological stand the Republican Party is taking. Florida Senator Mel Martinez probably sums up the skewed conservative logic on this issue:

“A number of us on the Republican side really do believe that we need to insure every American, and the way to do that is to provide the tax credits necessary to allow people to obtain individual private health insurance policies.”

Well, that's all fine and good if you could guarantee those people would actually buy insurance for their kids, a legal mandate that pretty much every Republican opposses. So instead, we'll be left with this growing population of uninsured children. Hospitals tend to eat up the costs of the uninsured, which is why many of America's top children's hospital budgets seem to run in the red each year. As a result, I fear we'll all be feeling the hurt in the form of increased medical fees and health insurance premiums. Heck, someone's has to pay for all this. It's strange that we can all agree that children are entitled to a free education up to the age until they reach adulthood, but we can't all agree that their health needs should be covered, too. It's one thing to give adults the right to choose whether they should spend their money on health insurance or not, but it's ridiculous that conservatives are taking a stand on the issue of socialized medicine using a pediatric population that needs to be protected.

Perhaps I don't know enough about the details of this plan, but certainly the Republicans aren't making much of a case for themselves if there is something I've missed in this whole debate. I have a feeling this is really going to bite them back in the end. Interestingly, I don't even think Democrats are pushing for actual "socialized" health care, just "universal" health care. Even looking back at Hillary Clinton's debacle to introduce radical health care reform back in the early 90's, what was summed up as a left-wing plot to socialize medicine in the U.S. actually was based on a foundation of private HMO's and insurance companies providing the actual medical care. The two words aren't synonymous, but conservatives seem to be trying their best to make them so.

Somedays, I think the country should just split in two...

Has anyone been keeping up with this feud between Michael Moore and CNN? Moore has been on CNN a couple of times to promote his film Sicko and answer some of his critics, including CNN's own resident medical expert, Dr. Sanjay Gupta appearing on Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room and Larry King Live. What has transpired since then and how you view it probably depends on which side of the fence you're on.

From Moore's perspective, CNN made several egregious errors in their reporting of the health care debate and its so-called fact checking of some of the claims made in Sicko, all adding up to the same game of a news corporation protecting its interests in keeping pharmaceutical companies and their ad revenue happy. His website lists each contentious point, and he even posted an open letter to CNN (and used the opportunity to criticize their role in possibly promoting the Iraq War). CNN, on the hand, claims they only made one error, which they publicly acknowledged, and have since posted their own point by point response to say there was nothing wrong with what they've said.

So CNN is picking Sicko apart and claiming Moore "fudged" some facts or at least cherry-picked some data, which I might agree with slightly. It seems there is so much data available out there, that you could argue any side of any case and seem credible. But the fact that CNN decided to even focus on "fact checking" rather than having an intelligent discussion about an issue both CNN and Moore agree on, that American health care has major problems, I can see how Michael Moore could be pretty irate right now. He doesn't help things along, though, with his impassioned stance that his one-payer solution is the only intelligent solution out there while calling any other proposal a sell-out to Big Pharma and the health insurance lobbyists.

Pretty sad that, again, a lot of bickering will probably get this problem swept under the rug for someone else to clean up years from now. I know the Presidential candidates have made health care a big part of their platforms, but somehow I think we'll all just be getting some fancy lip service over the matter in the coming months instead of viable solutions.

Amazingly, Fox News has managed to stay out of Michael Moore's crosshairs. I guess that would have been too obvious, though.

Vitamins?

Well, it has been a while since I have posted anything, and I must warn you now that this post is not one to get too excited about. On the other hand I do expect a plethora of comments.

For quite some time now, basically since I have been dating my wife, the two of us have had this mildly ongoing debate about taking multivitamins. I say it is a waste of money. She says it is not. I would like to hear from those in the audience what your thoughts are on a daily multivitamin and if your thoughts have any sources that you could cite.

He's nailed the diagnosis, but I'm not sure he's got the right prescription...

So I did a bit of a naughty thing a couple of evenings ago, and watched a pirated copy of Sicko off the Internet instead of waiting for its premiere in theaters today.

A couple of my earlier posts and comments should have clued you into the fact that I went into this viewing a bit skeptical as to how Michael Moore would portray the health care crisis here in the United States. As a whole, though, I thought it was a pretty good movie. He makes a solid argument that the health care system in America is so inherently broken that, in comparison, medical care in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and even Cuba looks downright Utopian. Unfortunately, in painting such a rosy picture of medical services and its universal access in other countries, I was left still wondering if I had been manipulated. I can't say he lied about anything, but am I getting the whole picture? I mean, you've always got to be just a wee bit skeptical when you can't find anyone that's not completely in love with how your government does things. There's always at least a handful of people that like to complain about something, right?

One would expect that in countries where there's no bills to pay, no cashiers at the hospital to collect your money, and cheap medications, people would be burdened by higher taxation. Whether or not they truly are, however, was kind of glossed over from my perspective. Instead, Michael Moore cleverly shows an "average" French family living a comfortable life in a comfortable house able to afford the comfortable number of two cars, and all the while enjoying the comfortable benefits of free health care, cheap daycare, 35 hour work weeks, and lots of holiday time. And as if this wasn't enough, they get free physician house calls, too (which obviously would never work in our litigious American society). Do they worry about taxes? Didn't seem like it--I'll give him that. But I'd also argue that this has become the lifestyle expectation in France, and perhaps something the "average" American would not tolerate easily. Could you really imagine turning over more than a third of your pay for income taxes AND paying an additional 20% in sales tax on most products you buy in the store? You'd have rioting in the streets, and not the peaceful protest marches Moore shows in France.

Should physicians under universal health care worry about being underpaid? Well, a general practitioner in the UK makes roughly $170K, according to an "average" physician Michael Moore interviews in a London hospital. And that's a pretty comfortable living for him, his wife, and their baby. Why? Well, because he can still drive a new Audi and living in a $1 million home on that salary. Sounded pretty good until I did the math. If he's making only $170K and having to payoff such a high mortgage and the car payment for a nice German luxury car, what does he really have left over at the end of the day? Doesn't seem so comfortable to me, after all. And as far as Canadian physicians? Moore never tells you that they get substantially less salary than American ones do, which is probably why you see a large number of Canuck doctors crossing over the border to work in the U.S.

What about cheaper drugs? The last segment of the film has Moore taking a group of 9/11 volunteer workers with chronic medical problems to Cuba in hopes of getting them medical care that they were denied in the United States. In Havana, they visit a local pharmacy where an inhaled medication that costs $120 in the U.S. ended up being only five cents in Cuba. Five cents! This brought the woman who needed this medication to tears. That just about made me want to cry, too. But then I wondered, how could it possibly be only five cents? I can't even get a can of Coke for that cheap. So who's flipping the bill? A similar story happens in the United Kingdom where the National Health Service issues a flat rate of around $12 for any medication prescription, whether it's 120 pills of anti hypertensives or 60 pills of aspirin. Well, in the case of Cuba, five cents might sound like chump change to us, but remember that an average Cuban probably only makes somewhere in the ballpark of $15/month. As far as the U.K.? Well, the government negotiates wholesale prices from the drug companies and allows the NHS to essentially subsidize the medications costs for the general public. That's all well and good, but if the U.S. did the same, I'm wondering if the negotiated costs would go up globally to increase the profit margin, since they're not making the money from the American market. After all, pharmaceutical companies rely on profits to invest in research and development. Take away the profits, and making drugs becomes a losing endeavour when you think about the money lost in the research of failed medications that never come to market.

Well, but what about the story of a cancer patient that can't get coverage for his chemotherapy because it was deemed "experimental" by his insurance company? A sad case, but Moore never really tells us whether such treatment would have been covered in his other Utopian systems. Part of the reason that France can afford to provide universal health care is because there's a strict system of what is standard of care and what is not. An "experimental" therapy might not be covered in their system either, which is why a significant number of the French actually buy supplemental health care to cover such things that fall out of the guidelines of the governmental system.

And as far as a governmental single-payer system being the savior of the U.S. health care crisis, all I can say is we already have examples of such methods in this country in the form of Medicare and the Veteran's Affairs Hospitals, neither of which inspires confidence to me that this is the answer.

Anywho, my purpose here is not to poo-poo all over Sicko. I think Michael Moore has put together a powerful movie that really does pull viewers into the emotions and pain that many Americans must endure as they try and navigate through a medical system that doesn't seem to care. I'm not sure he's convinced me that a single-payer system is the answer, but he certainly makes the case that we can't continue to be so indifferent about our current way of doing things. Perhaps the best idea he puts forth is this notion that this country needs to become more "we" than "me." Ultimately, I think Michael Moore has nothing but the best intentions with all of his movies, and truly is trying to make us think with a more "we" attitude. But unfortunately, because of his divisive reputation, this movie may not be the catalyst to get there no matter how good it is.

*** (out of *****)

I'd hate to know how much it would cost to reattach my...

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So here's a clip from Michael Moore's upcoming film Sicko which kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Now, I'll admit that I'm probably too quick to judge since I haven't seen the whole movie, but I thought I'd share my thoughts to chew on until the movie's wide release later on this month.

In this snippet, a man accidentally cuts the tips of two fingers off with a table saw. By the way Moore tells the story, we're led to believe that the hospital gave the man a choice as to which finger he wanted reattached based on his ability to pay, and seems to distort the probable case that the man willingly chose not to have his middle finger reattached because he didn't want to pay for it. I mean, unless I'm mistaken, a hospital denying a needed medical service for any reason other than patient refusal, is illegal. Now this still points out a serious problem with the system. The guy was uninsured and out-of-pocket expenses for those without medical coverage are exorbitant. But I hope the movie goes more into the issue of why this guy was uninsured in the first place, rather than just getting an audience riled up on the false belief that a heartless medical care facility wouldn't reattach both fingers because a patient couldn't ante up the cash.

As I've said before, I think it's admirable that Michael Moore is raising the issues and throwing it into the public forum, but I think he's doing his audience a disservice by not presenting all the facts from both sides. I thought it was a bit laughable in his interview with Good Morning America (part 1, part 2) where he states that the reason he doesn't present the problems of a single-payer health care system is because the media already does a good job pointing out the flaws of "model" systems like the United Kingdom and Canada. I see the flaws of the American system in the news daily, so it's not like the media isn't covering that, as well. In fact, it's almost a sad commentary about our country that we need an extreme film like Michael Moore's to wake up and get enthusiastic about trying to solve such a national social issue. I anticipate hordes of people coming out of Sicko feeling like they just got educated on the state of our health care system, ignoring the fact that it's covered in every newspaper and television news program almost on a daily basis.

Anywho, maybe I should just wait for the movie to come out before I make anymore rash judgements.