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I recently watched a movie called What the bleep? that merged quantum physics and new discoveries such as the teleportation of molecules (Nature vol.443, 557″ Quantum teleportation between light and matter. ) with new age beliefs of consciousness. Eventually I bought a book which I am reading by Dean Radin called Entangled Minds.

I can’t make up my mind if quantum physics has unlocked door to new levels of existance and consciousness and explains the rare events of pre-cognition and other things we see or if it is all borderline cult hookum. But none-the-less through the book I found a site called got psi

I’ve been having lots of fun on it. Give it a try. Perhaps you’ll discover a hidden talent.

Kid Break Your Brain was not recieved neutrally. It was loved. It was hated. People laughed belly laughs and people rolled their eyes.

So as a public service www.kidsbreakyourbrain.com was launched.

Visit us soon for an important public service announcement and items to help spread the word that KIDS BREAK YOUR BRAIN!!!!

I find I’ve tried this diet and that diet and they never seem to work for me. So I decided to dive into the hard core scientific literature and find out what science says works.

The sad thing is that we are basically clueless on how to manage the obesity problem in just about any county. There is a high correlation between economic success and obesity. But sadly, encouraging poverty is not a feasible cure.

There are many studies out there that say exercise and diet works. But not the same for all age groups due to differences in metabolism. The other result is that many individuals as they age are not able to keep up the level of activity required to maintain their weight loss once achieved, and study after study reports back sliding.

One of the key facts that does arise time after time, is the reduction in caloric use with age. Also there is a reduction in muscle mass. If muscle mass is increased, caloric use increases. So rather starving, perhaps encouraging muscle development exercise is the way to go.

Currently, I’m upping my aerobic exercise and seeing if I can’t develop a bit of muscle mass as well, to fight that metabolic slide downhill.

Sadly, many studies also reported the medical doctors were reluctant to address the obesity problem when it was at manageable level in their patients. It would seem that we need a three pronged approach to manage this problem at the nation and world-wide level as well as help us personally. One would be to encourage food manufacturers and food purveyors to develop healthier foods. Work places should be required to have an exercise room as well as a lunch room. Medical doctors should be required to give workable programs to their patients that are obese and to follow up on their progress. As we work longer and longer hours, eat more fast food to manage our time, and by the time we actually get home, are too tired to hop on that elliptical.

Well, I’m going to crank up the exercise and cut back more on the food. Updates to follow!

I have always been the black sheep of the family, some members of which are..ahem cough staunch Christians. My husband and I are Episcopalian, and further qualify ourselves as non-evangelical Christians. We don’t believe in distributing leaflets, having services on TV or the handling of snakes.

Furthermore, I also firmly believe in evolution. There is just so much evidence for it. That evolution actually occurs can be shown in rapidly reproducing populations.
For some additional reading http://www.evolutionhappens.net/

But I have finally found an argument for intelligent design that makes some sense.
It is even an approach that is culturally sensitive to my Italian heritage.
http://www.venganza.org/

Go ahead…clickit..read it. I have gone to pray to the great noodle.

Special thanks to Bobby Henderson for allowing permission to use the art at the top of this entry from his webpage. Praise all to the Pasta.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5536730/ “>Today my husband received some sad news from abroad about a dear friend, only 42 years old, who died of complications from her diabetes. He joked, darkly, on how they did it right over there, as she was dead from a heart attack and various other complications a few days after being admitted from the hospital.

Here in America with our incredible technology, we can keep people alive forever it seems. And even after they want to die, beg to die, we deny them because we can keep them alive. It smacks of an incredible arrogance, not that we can do this, but that we do this.

But then there are also the cases where even with this incredible technology, wealth, and highly educated staff mistake after mistake after mistake is made and swept under the rug. The recent HealthGrades study summarized in an article on MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5536730/ reports 195,000 that is ONE HUNDRED AND NINETYFIVE THOUSAND US deaths PER YEAR were caused by easily preventable hospital errors. To quote directly “If the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual list of leading causes of death included medical errors, it would show up as number six, ahead of diabetes, pneumonia, Alzheimers disease and renal disease.” In another article, MSNBC reports a doctor is sued after 50 botched surgeries http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6945667/ kind of amazing that nobody noticed something was being done wrong after the first two or three. The National Center for Policy Analysis estimates that cost of these errors runs about 9.3 billion in extra charges each year http://www.ncpa.org/iss/hea/2003/pd100803c.html. We worry about medicaid costs and social security costs, but if not the costs of stupid mistakes. And this does not even begain to measure the costs of personal pain and suffering or the loss of a family member. But it seems no one gives a damn.

The health care industry has been slowly killing my mother through a series of errors and just lack of caring. They say one person is a tragedy. One thousand a statistic. Here we have a huge statistic but let’s blog a little about a tradgedy.

My mother entered the Westchester Medical Center in New York State for a simple test. One that used an iodine dye. She had previously known dye sensitivities. She walked into the hospital, simply with some angina and today is lying in a hospital two years later with septicemia, and pneumonia on a ventilator. My mother had the angiogram at Westchester Medical Center and soon developed a fever and rashes on her skin. The rashes turned to blisters and daily her doctor, Dr. Cohen of the cardiac cath lab, would come in, look at the worsening skin and go “OH that looks better”. She asked for a dermatologist and the nurse told her she didn’t need one. Let’s remember she had previously known iodine dye sensitivities. Finally one came and took a skin sample which was never processed. She had an IV by this point and a friend who was also an RN noticed it was compromised and it took 24 hours to get it changed. I should have just ripped it out myself. By the following Friday her kidneys failed, and her skin was peeling off in sheets and she was moved to the burn unit (allergic reaction to the dye) and she was not expected to live. Next she developed MRSA, drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus, possibly from that compromised IV and Clostridium dificile. She had a hard time breathing. Oh and by the way they diagnosed that she needed a quadruple bypass. This was all in November. By Christmas Eve she was moved to another floor, as her skin was growing back, still under treatment for Clostridium dificile which caused such pain in her gut that she begged me to die.
Well, mom could no long stand by herself. She was too weak and the hospital was chronically short staffed from budget cuts. So when a lone nurse tried to move her, because she could not find help and my mother’s arthritic spine had her in incredible pain from sitting in a chair in one position for so long, she dropped her on the floor. In her medical records, no such detail is provided, my mother simply fell. After this I complained to the New York State Department of Health and the Hospital Regulatory Agency JACHO. While I didn’t expect the DOH to find everything, I expect them to find SOMETHING. Six months later I received a letter back from them saying that they could find nothing wrong with the hospital and no wrong doing on the part of the staff. JACHO doesn’t share its information. The hospital patient relation people never solved anything for me, only tried to placate me and make things go away, rather than using my complaints to identify and resolve potentially dangerous problems. Its no wonder the HealthGrades study reports the new estimate on hospital deaths associated with errors has doubled. Its a crime. Even those supposed to regulate simply make the complaints go bye bye. Why not, its easier that way. And no one gets involved. I’ll skip the nursing home nightmare, but by June my mother had another heart attack and was rushed to Westchester Medical Center. Dr. Cohen showed up again and the look of shock on his face that my mother was still alive was criminal. He rushed her back out of the hospital to the nursing home without treating her saying..oh she is too weak and has so many allergies we don’t want to do anything. In short, go away and die. Let’s get you back to a minimal care facility where that is very likely to happen.

I contacted Columbia Presbyterian. Dr. Oz took my mother on and did surgery. He is a kind and wonderful man. Her recovery was not smooth and by December of 2004 mom was back in the hospital, her chest wound infected. She never came completely off the ventilator from the chest wound infection. If you see my previous posts on the HIPPA rant you will find she has been back in the hospital twice for pneumonia now. They fear the heart valves are infected. Somehow, this has all been a downward spiral, subjecting my mother to test after invasive test and painful time after painful time. This has caused a syndrome called critical care myopathy where her muscles have just quit working. In time, they say things can recover. But her protein levels are constantly low, as she is on a ventilator she is fed through a tube in her stomach, and her nutrition is low and the spiral down continues. I can only wonder, if she had not walked into the doors of Westchester Medical Center, if she would have a decent quality of life today. I blame her condition on medical errors and both the hospital and the New York State Department of Health that did nothing to prevent more errors from occurring and to treat her medically after the second heart attack and all of the errors. But in the end, no one cares, until they are under the knife or dying themselves because of these errors and then it is just too damn late.

Shrug your shoulders if you will, if something isn’t done, it is likely you will loose function and quality of life through medical error.

In an article in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com entitled “Doctor’s Journal Says Computing is No Panacea” by Steve Lohr, a report on computer systems in hospitals is summarized.

http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=steve%20lohr&date_select=full&srchst=nyt

Major hospitals have found that computer systems are so poorly designed from a user standpoint that simple information, such as patient medications are scattered across 20 different pages. Reviews, which sing the praises of these systems have often been written by the developer of the system, rather than a user. It seems that a new hybrid technologist is needed. One that is part computer programmer, part medical expert and systems architect. I do wonder how many of these systems, in part or entirely, were designed by outsourced labor in countries unfamiliar with our culture or medical system.

I use a number of systems where I work, that were designed and programmed piecemeal, by individuals who are far from expert in the field. The systems are slow, user unfriendly, cumbersome, and seldom reflect much, if anything that we write in our paper reports. Aside froms statistics for program fund allocation, they really are useless.

The one thing that is irksome, is that medical establishment seems to have a smoothly running computerized billing system. Funny, but when they put a priority on something, they seem to be able to make it work.

July 5, 2005
This just in…record keeping could get better…

The e-Health Revolution

How a bipartisan bill from Hillary Clinton and Bill Frist could help jump-start a new kind of health-care reform

By BILL SAPORITO

Jun. 27, 2005

Once before in his entrepreneurial career, Glen Tullman was standing at the threshold when technology transformed an industry. In the ’90s, he helped figure out a system that allowed insurance claims to be recorded and processed on computers, not paper. It made him a bundle.

Now Tullman heads Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, which sells a product that lets doctors run a paperless medical practice–including booking appointments online and creating e-prescriptions and, most important, collecting X rays, lab results and medical histories in one database, accessible to physicians and patients. He thinks he’s on the doorstep of another transformation. “There is less penetration of information technology in health care than any other major industry,” says Tullman. “Someone has said the advent of electronic health records will be as significant as the discovery of penicillin.”

It’s medicine that the health-care system needs desperately. Backed by the Bush Administration, prodded by employers and under pressure to contain costs and improve service, the medical community is finally–and rapidly–plugging into the new world of electronic health records, in which your personal health information shows up wherever you do–at your doctor’s office, the emergency room, the MRI machine, even your home. “Resistance is at an all-time low,” says Neal Patterson, CEO of Cerner, an e-health company based in Kansas City, Mo. Cerner and Allscripts are racking up quarter after quarter of double-digit sales growth.

Underscoring the new urgency to shift to e-health was the joint press conference held in Washington last week by Senators Hillary Clinton and Bill Frist, two potential presidential candidates who otherwise rarely get near enough to pass a communicable disease. They’ve got together, however, to introduce legislation that would provide seed money for local health networks and eliminate the biggest hurdle to beaming medical records to where they are needed: the lack of interoperability among the myriad systems now in use. Medical record keeping in the U.S. is in the “Dark Ages,” Clinton complained. “We need to have the information easily accessible.”

The U.S. government is leading this charge into the medical information age–robustly and, by most accounts, effectively–because it pays 46% of the nation’s medical bills. Dr. Mark McClellan, former head of the FDA and now director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is making paperless medicine mandatory for physicians who want to participate in the agency’s potentially remunerative pay-for-performance scheme. The aim, sensibly enough, is to pay doctors for keeping their patients healthy, as opposed to the current fee-for-service basis that simply rewards patient throughput. A priority for McClellan is to improve the treatment of diabetes and other chronic diseases, which absorb a disproportionate amount of health-care dollars. That requires better data collection–uploading and monitoring information from glucose meters, for instance–and more communication with patients.

“McClellan has made it clear. They are not going to pay the same whether you leave horizontal or vertical,” says Dr. Don Rucker, head medical officer of Siemens Medical Solutions, one of a handful of large corporations, including IBM and General Electric, that are betting billions on the market for health-information technology.

Driving all this are some frightening statistics. The U.S. is No. 1 in the world in terms of health-care expenditures–a total of $1.8 trillion last year and rising at a rate more than twice as fast as our incomes–yet it ranked no better than 16th in a study of 22 industrialized countries in what medical professionals call outcomes. That’s in part because so much of the care delivered is unnecessary–as much as one-third, according to a Dartmouth study–and in part because of the inefficiency of a system in which tens of thousands of patients die each year as a result of medical errors.

“We have to do this; there is no other choice,” says Dr. Alan Wasserman, president of Medical Faculty Associates (MFA), a 270-doctor practice affiliated with George Washington University Hospital in Washington that happens to treat many members of Congress. MFA recently converted to a system made by Allscripts called TouchWorks. Before the conversion, the practice employed 23 people whose sole function was to collect, store and maintain paper files that filled several rooms.

TouchWorks is vastly more efficient at such mundane medical tasks as booking appointments and renewing prescriptions. About 90% of renewals can be processed within an hour and, because doctors’ handwriting has been eliminated, with far greater accuracy. There are enhancements in the back office too. Because automation improves documentation, the group’s “lag charges”–the cash tied up in the fee-collection process–have dropped to $1.5 million from $2 million. MFA gets paid in 63 days on average, as opposed to 102 days before TouchWorks.

At the heart of the TouchWorks system is its “tasking engine,” a piece of software modeled after physicians’ standard 10-step diagnostic approach. Test results from outside labs pop up on the doctor’s screen, allowing him or her to plot, say, cholesterol levels over time and present the information to the patient. If a physician writes a script, the system will flag possible interactions with other drugs the patient is taking or question dosing levels that are out of the norm.

Automation has also created what Dr. Ryan Bosch, who directed MFA’s TouchWorks project, calls stickier patients, borrowing an Internet measure of loyalty. “I spend less time gathering information and more time being proactive,” he says. “Delivering good-quality health care is about a relationship.”

It’s not surprising that a big urban practice such as Bosch’s would get wired. Most health care in the U.S., however, is delivered by small practices with fewer than 10 doctors, and these physicians don’t yet see any payoff. That’s because so far there is none. The cost is high, about $10,000 to $12,000 per doctor, and most of the benefits accrue to other players in the system, such as hospitals, employers and insurers. Doctors in small practices, many experts believe, won’t link up unless their patients demand it. At least that’s the assumption behind a company called Medem, which introduced a website in May called iHealthRecord.com The site lets you store all your family’s medical information–prescriptions, allergies, health histories, etc.–and share them with physicians, as long as the doctors are on the system. You can also download vital information onto a smart card to carry with you. The software is free; Medem charges doctors who get the benefit of the record keeping. Linked to insurers, these so-called personal- health-record systems could also pave the way for “mouse calls,” arrangements by which doctors can consult patients over the Net for a fee. “It’s so much better than our main competition,” says Medem CEO Ed Fotsch, referring to the data-collection device still used by the vast majority of doctors: the clipboard.

There are risks involved in computerizing anything, of course. Privacy advocates are especially concerned that once patient records are online, it will be that much easier for sensitive information to fall into the hands of, say, insurance companies or potential employers. “It’s not about being scared of technology; it’s about the appropriate safeguards,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. To Rotenberg, the push to automate is running way ahead of the legal protections. Even Newt Gingrich, a longtime champion of health-care reform, sees the need for updated legislation to protect medical privacy as technology evolves. But, he adds, it’s important to keep the relative risks in perspective. Should you get into a car wreck, he says, “if you’re an absolute privacy addict you can always say, ‘I’d rather die.’” Identity, in fact, could be a far bigger issue than security, given the vast number of Americans with common names such as Smith, Sanchez and Lee.

The growth of regional health information organizations (RHIOs) is another step at dispelling the Big Brother scare. Although only a few RHIOs are operating, some 500 locally controlled information networks are being built, and the Clinton-Frist bill would put money on the table to help get more of them up and running. In New York’s Hudson Valley, the Taconic Health Information Network and Community serves 600,000 patients along with area doctors, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, insurers, employers and consumers. If a resident makes an emergency-room visit on a Saturday, the ER doc can pull the patient’s records from his personal physician.

The bottom line is that better health care may not happen in the U.S. without better health-care information technology. Sooner or later all of us will probably be carrying around our medical history in a key-ring device or an ATM-type card or maybe even a surgically implanted chip. The benefits could be extraordinary. IBM sees opportunities to apply massive computing power to help doctors make diagnoses and treatment decisions. New standard practices could be communicated to doctors within months rather than 15 years, the current lag between discovery and practice. Pharmaceutical companies with access to anonymous health data could improve and speed up drug development. There may even be a buck or two in it for consumers from what has been called information liquidity: If you want access to my data, pay me. Best of all, we could finally throw away those damned clipboards.