Tag Archives: hospital

Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

by BrentC68dttk Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Low-fat dietary dogma—and, by extension, the plethora of processed junk the food industry conjured up to indulge it—has passed its sell-by date. But cutting down on sugary foods can trigger rapid health improvements.

Those are the messages of two studies released last week. For the fat one, a team of Harvard researchers scoured databases looking for randomized, controlled trials—the gold standard of dietary research—comparing the weight-loss effects of low-fat diets to other regimens like low-carb. They found 53 studies that met their criteria for rigor.

The result, published in the British journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: low-carbohydrate diets “led to significantly greater weight loss” than did low-fat ones. People assigned low-fat diets tended to lose a small amount of weight compared to no-change-in-diet control groups, but cutting carbs delivered better results than reducing dietary fat. “The science does not support low-fat diets as the optimal long-term weight loss strategy,” lead author Deirdre Tobias of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School said in a press release.

The study marks the latest indication that your fat-free fro-yo habit is not likely doing you any favors by cutting your fat intake. But its sugary jolt may be doing more harm than you already thought. That’s the suggestion of another new study, published in the journal Obesity, by a team led by longtime sugar critic Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist in at the University of California at San Francisco.

Lustig is a proponent of the idea that all calories aren’t created equal—specifically, that added sugars (in sodas, processed foods, etc.) do more harm than calorie-equivalent amounts of fats, starches, and complex carbohydrates. To test this theory, Lustig and his colleagues identified 43 kids diagnosed with obesity and metabolic syndrome—defined as a cluster of conditions associated with the risk cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes—and tweaked their diets.

For 10 days, the kids ate catered meals with caloric amounts equivalent to their previous diets but with all foods with added sugars removed, replaced with starches. Their overall sugar intake went from 28 percent to 10 percent (representing naturally sweet foods like fruit). Lustig summarized the results in an op-ed:

Diastolic blood pressure decreased by five points. Blood fat levels dropped precipitously. Fasting glucose decreased by five points, glucose tolerance improved markedly, insulin levels fell by 50%. In other words we reversed their metabolic disease in just 10 days, even while eating processed food, by just removing the added sugar and substituting starch, and without changing calories or weight. Can you imagine how much healthier they would have been if we hadn’t given them the starch?

It’s important to note that the results are suggestive, not conclusive. Unlike the studies conglomerated in the low-fat paper, Lustig’s project did not include a control group.

But both the Harvard study and Lustig’s reinforce an emerging consensus that fat is not necessarily a dietary devil, while quaffing sugar at typical US levels might just be.

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Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

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Aid Group Bombed for the Second Time in Three Weeks

by julyye49 Posted on October 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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For the second time in three weeks, a hospital belonging to the international medical aid group Doctors Without Borders has been bombed by warplanes.

The latest attack occurred on Monday night in Yemen, where aircraft from a coalition led by Saudi Arabia attacked a hospital belonging to the aid group, which is also known as Médecins Sans Frontières. While the group said patients and staff were in the hospital at the time of the attack, they did not report any deaths. The Saudi-led coalition has been bombing Yemen for seven months in a campaign against the Houthis, a Shiite rebel group that currently holds power in the country. But Doctors Without Borders says the Saudis were aware of the hospital’s location. “We provided the coalition with all of our GPS coordinates about two weeks ago,” Hassan Boucenine, Doctors Without Borders’ Yemen director, said to Reuters.

That mirrors the attack that took place three weeks ago, when an American AC-130 gunship destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing at least 30 people. The group said the US military had been given the coordinates of the hospital and should have known its location. American officials at first said they didn’t know they had fired on a medical facility. “The hospital was mistakenly struck. We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility,” said Gen. John Campbell, the US military commander in Afghanistan. But more recent reports claim American special operations soldiers knew the building was a hospital but believed the Taliban were using it as a base. The decision to attack the hospital anyway may mean the strike was a war crime under international law.

Boucenine did not shy away from using that language to describe the Saudi strike last night. “It could be a mistake, but the fact of the matter is it’s a war crime,” he told Reuters. “There’s no reason to target a hospital.”

The strike is only a small part of destruction caused by the Saudi-led air campaign, which the United Nations says is responsible for most of the approximately 2,000 civilian deaths in Yemen that have occurred since strikes began in March. The bombings have also leveled historic parts of Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, which had survived years of civil war and rebellion since the Arab Spring revolts hit Yemen in 2011.

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Aid Group Bombed for the Second Time in Three Weeks

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Here Are America’s Top 50 Health Care Thugs

by KevinWanganeen Posted on June 8, 2015

Mother Jones

As long as we’re on the subject of how poor people get screwed in the United States, the Washington Post revisits an old favorite today: the way hospitals gouge the uninsured. Here’s their summary of a new study that looks at the 50 biggest gougers, which charge uninsured patients more than ten times the actual cost of care:

All but one of the these facilities is owned by for-profit entities, and by far the largest number of hospitals — 20 — are in Florida. For the most part, researchers said, the hospitals with the highest markups are not in pricey neighborhoods or big cities, where the market might explain the higher prices.

….Community Health Systems operates 25 of the hospitals on the list; Hospital Corp. of America operates another 14. “They are price-gouging because they can,” said Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, co-author of the study in Health Affairs. “They are marking up the prices because no one is telling them they can’t.”

….Most hospital patients covered by private or government insurance don’t pay full price because insurers and programs like Medicare negotiate lower rates for their patients. But the millions of Americans who don’t have insurance don’t have anyone to negotiate on their behalf. They are most likely to be charged the full hospital price. As a result, uninsured patients, who are often the most vulnerable, face skyrocketing medical bills that can lead to personal bankruptcy, damaged credit scores or avoidance of needed medical care.

It’s hard to find the words to describe how loathsome this is. It’s a structure deliberately designed to bleed the maximum possible amount from the people who are least able to afford it and least able to fight back. We normally associate this kind of thing with Charles Dickens novels, or with thugs in leather jackets who have a habit of breaking kneecaps. But these thugs all wear suits and ties.

I’m not really sure how they sleep at night, but I guess they find a way.

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Here Are America’s Top 50 Health Care Thugs

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America Uses Fahrenheit. The Rest of the World Uses Celsius. America Is Right. The Rest of the World Is Wrong.

by Phil05Llcof Posted on June 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Vox has a post up called “Why Americans still use Fahrenheit long after everyone else switched to Celsius.” In it Zack Beauchamp sides with the standard line that America should jump on the Celsius train and leave Troglodyte Station.

The bizarre measurements commonly used in the US, including Fahrenheit, are bad for its scientific establishment, its kids, and probably its businesses.

Susannah Locke lays out the case for Celsius and the rest of the metric system very persuasively, but here’s a brief recap. The simpler metric scales make basic calculations easier and thus less error-prone. American companies incur extra costs by producing two sets of products, one for the US and one for the metric using world.

American parents and caregivers are more likely to screw up conversion rates when they give out medicine, sending some children, who are more susceptible to overdoses, to the hospital. Further, American students have to be trained on two sets of measurements, making basic science education even more difficult.

Going back to Jefferson there have been many movements to get the US to metricate. Lincoln Chaffee wants to get the US to adopt the metric system, too.

But I am a red-blooded American boy who likes listening to Tom Petty and riding motorcycles and wearing blue jeans and using Fahrenheit so Vox‘s post made me think of this great chart from the wonderful site isomorphismes which explains why our temperature measurement system is the best temperature measurement system.

“Fahrenheit uses its digits more efficiently than Centigrade” isomorphism

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America Uses Fahrenheit. The Rest of the World Uses Celsius. America Is Right. The Rest of the World Is Wrong.

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Tales From City of Hope #11: We Have Liftoff

by LawerenHeard Posted on May 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday’s white blood count went from just under 0.1 to just over 0.1. Let’s call it 0.05 growth. Today’s count is 0.2. That’s growth of 0.1.

And that, my friends, is exponential growth. Sure, we could use another data point or three. And some more significant digits. And if we’re being picky, a coefficient or two. But screw that. To this Caltech1 dropout, it looks like exponential growth has kicked in. Booyah!

In more visually exciting news, I know you all want to see my shiner, don’t you? I can feel the bloodlust all the way from my hospital bed. So here it is, you ghouls. As usual with these things, it looks a lot worse than it feels. In fact, I can barely feel it all. But it’s clear evidence that, yes, the bathroom really is the most dangerous room in the house.

1Did you know that the proper short form for California Institute of Technology is Caltech, not CalTech? They’ve been trying for decades to get the rest of the world to go along, but with sadly limited success.

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Tales From City of Hope #11: We Have Liftoff

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Tales From City of Hope #2: Chemo Has Started

by ErnestiZff Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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It is 10:43 am PDT on April 21, 2015. It is Day -2 (Day 0 is Thursday, when the actual stem cell transfusion takes place) and my final round of chemotherapy has officially started. Oddly enough, it only lasts about half an hour. The rest of my 8-hour stay in the hospital today is taken up with prep and about 4-6 hours of IV fluids.

Right now I am manically chewing on ice chips. Apparently they have discovered that this constricts the blood flow to the mouth and therefore reduces the amount of Melphalan that makes it into your mouth and gums. This is pretty effective at minimizing mouth sores, so I’m sucking on ice chips for all I’m worth. The photographic evidence, along with all the usual machines that go ping, is on the right.

UPDATE: Keeping up the ice chip routine gets old pretty quick. But worth it if it keeps the mouth sores at bay.

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Tales From City of Hope #2: Chemo Has Started

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Health and Logistical Update

by MyrtisFrith Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Howdy everyone. I’m back. But I’ll bet you didn’t even know I was gone.

I spent most of the day up at City of Hope in Duarte getting a few final tests plus a final visit with my transplant physician before I go up next week for the final stage of chemo. For those who are interested, here’s my final and (hopefully) firm schedule.

On Monday I go up to CoH and check in to the Village. This sounds like something from The Prisoner, but it’s actually just a small collection of houses on the grounds of the campus. Unless something goes wrong that requires round-the-clock observation and care, this is where I’ll be staying. It’s obviously nicer and more convenient than being cooped up in a hospital room, and it comes complete with its own kitchen so I’m free to make my own meals if I want. (I can also order out from the hospital cafeteria if I don’t feel like cooking my own stuff.)

On Tuesday and Wednesday I go into the Day Hospital for an infusion of high-dose Melphalan, a powerful chemotherapy drug. This will kill off all my remaining cancerous bone marrow stem cells, and, along the way, kill off all my healthy stem cells too. So on Thursday they’ll pump my own frozen stem cells back into me.

And that’s about it. Within a few days of all this I’ll be laid low with fatigue, mouth sores, and loss of hair—and hopefully not much more, since that would require transfer to the hospital, which I’d sure like to avoid. For the two weeks after that, I’ll take a wide variety of medications and check into the Day Hospital every morning for testing and whatever else they deem necessary (for example, IV fluids if I’m not drinking enough). The rest of the time I spend in my little house, waiting for my immune system to recover enough for me to be sent home.

That will take me through the middle of May, at which point I should be in fairly reasonable shape. Full and complete recovery will take longer—possibly quite a bit longer—but that’s unknowable at this point. I’ll just have to wait and see.

The next time you see me after this weekend I’ll be bald as an egg, as any true cancer patient should be. Yes, there will be pictures. I wouldn’t deprive you of that. Between now and then, wish me luck.

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Health and Logistical Update

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I’m Pretty Thankful This Year. Here’s Why.

by FelishaSoriano Posted on November 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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You might not expect someone who was diagnosed with cancer a few weeks ago to be feeling especially thankful right now. And it’s true that I’m not excited about either the cancer itself or the fairly miserable effects of the weekly chemotherapy that’s treating it. Nevertheless, this episode of my life has gotten me thinking about thankfulness, and it’s been on my mind for a while now. I know this is a little out of character, but allow me to share this with you in my usual bloggish way today.

The whole thing started on the evening of October 17th, when I sneezed hard and injured my back. On the morning of Saturday the 18th I couldn’t move enough to get out of bed. Here’s what happened next.

Marian called 911. Within ten minutes a troop of firefighters and paramedics were at our door. They hauled me downstairs on a stretcher, and ten minutes later I was in the emergency room. Over the next couple of hours I was tended to by an attentive staff of nurses and doctors. Blood was drawn, X-rays were taken, painkillers were administered. By a little after noon, a preliminary diagnosis of possible multiple myeloma had been made and I was admitted to the hospital.

The hospital was clean and efficient. My room was comfortable and private and had plenty of room for visitors. Over the course of the next few days, a rotating squadron of nurses took care of me. Biopsies were done. Medication was prescribed. A kyphoplasty was performed to stabilize my back. The myeloma diagnosis was confirmed on Thursday, and I was started on chemotherapy a few hours later. It was superb, unstinting care.

The day after I was released from the hospital, Marian and I went shopping and spent several thousand dollars on new furniture that my back could tolerate. A few days after that we got an enormous bill for the hospital stay, but it was nearly entirely paid for by insurance. The balance was something we could easily afford.

In short, everything that happened after that fateful sneeze has demonstrated just how lucky I am. I got immediate, skilled treatment. I have great health insurance. I have a good job and no money problems. I work at home and can set my own hours—and I even have a job I like so much it actually helps me weather the treatment. I work for editors who are completely understanding about what I’m going through and want only for me to recover. I have family and friends who care about me and are endlessly willing to help. And most of all, I have a wife who loves me and is always, always, always there for me.

There is nothing more I could want. I’m even thankful for the sneeze. It hurt like hell, but it’s the thing that got me to the hospital in the first place. Without it, I wouldn’t be recovering as I write this.

So sure: cancer sucks. But how many people who go through it have all this? Not many. Some have money problems. Some have work problems. Some are on their own. Some have lousy or nonexistent health insurance. Some get inadequate treatment. I have none of those problems. I am lucky almost beyond belief.

And one more thing: health care is suddenly a lot more real to me than ever before. Sure, I’ve always favored universal health care as a policy position. But now? It’s all I can do to wonder why anyone, no matter how principled their beliefs, would want to deny the kind of care I’ve gotten to even a single person. Not grudging, bare-bones care that’s an endless nightmare of stress and bill collectors. Decent, generous care that the richest country in the richest era in human history can easily afford.

Why wouldn’t you want that for everyone? It beggars the imagination.

In any case, that’s what I got—that and a lot more. And I am thankful for it. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

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I’m Pretty Thankful This Year. Here’s Why.

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16 Interesting Photos From the Ferguson Grand Jury Files

by JeannieHeberlin Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

After St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced Monday that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for killing Michael Brown, the county released a collection of documents from the grand jury proceedings. Among them were hundreds of photos from the investigation, depicting everything from the crime scene to Wilson at the hospital after the shooting. Here are just a few (all photos provided by the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office):

Wilson’s police SUV after the shooting. Brown’s hat lies next to it.

Brown’s hat.

The inside of the police SUV where the initial encounter between Wilson and Brown took place.

Shots were fired inside the car, and at least one went through the door.

The driver’s side door handle with what appears to be blood on it.

Wilson’s gun

A closer look shows what appears to be blood on the gun.

Blood on the street (presumably Brown’s)

Wilson, according witnesses and his own testimony, missed several times as he fired at Brown. Some of those bullets struck nearby buildings.

Where one of Wilson’s shots entered the wall of a nearby apartment building.

This shot narrowly missed a window.

There has been contention about the distance between Wilson’s car and Brown’s body. This shot shows Brown’s body behind a screen with Wilson’s SUV off further down the street.

Here’s the diagram of the entire crime scene. The New York Times created a color-coded version (see here).

Wilson said in his grand jury testimony that he only went to the hospital because a superior told him to. Here he is during his examination shortly after Brown’s death.

The left side of Wilson’s face.

The right.

A shot of Wilson taken Aug. 21 (according to the photo’s metadata), less than two weeks after the shooting.

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16 Interesting Photos From the Ferguson Grand Jury Files

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Judge Rips Alabama for Hiring a Discredited Abortion Foe

by panisylvia Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Vincent Rue, a marriage therapist best known for his discredited theories about how abortion causes mental illness, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars assembling legal teams to defend extreme anti-abortion bills. But lately, the states that hire him have been getting a raw deal.

On Monday, US District Judge Myron H. Thompson skewered Alabama for involving Rue in the defense of a law that requires abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges with a local hospital. Thompson struck down the law, which had threatened to close three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics. Notably, Thompson disregarded two arguments made by John M. Thorp, an OB-GYN at the University of North Carolina Hospital and one of Rue’s go-to expert witnesses: that complications arise from abortion more often than is reported in official statistics, and that admitting privileges are necessary to good patient care. Both claims have been key for states defending these sorts of abortion restrictions.

This is the second time this year that a federal judge has dismissed evidence brought by Rue’s favored expert witnesses. In September, a Texas judge ruling on an anti-abortion bill that would close all but six of the state’s clinics raked the state’s attorneys across the coals for bringing on Rue—and hiding his involvement.

Rue was thoroughly discredited as an abortion expert long before Alabama hired him. When he testified in two landmark abortion cases in the 1990s, judges disregarded his testimony for being personally biased and lacking expertise. Mainstream medical organizations have rejected Rue’s research on a supposed mental illness caused by abortion, “post-abortive syndrome.”

In Alabama, Rue recruited expert witnesses for the state and in one case wrote the entirety of the report the state’s witnesses submitted to the court. Rue didn’t testify. But the state paid him $82,890 for his work. It paid the two witnesses that Thompson called out in his opinion, Thorp and James C. Anderson, a Virginia emergency room physician, $40,174.75 and $76,279.20, respectively. Thorp, Rue, and Anderson did not reply to requests for comment.

Thorp based his testimony on a study he wrote for a pay-to-publish journal. (Traditional academic journals do not charge authors for printing their work.) He misplaced decimal points in his report to the court compiling abortion complication rates. When challenged about his methodology on cross-examination, Thorp told the court to “knock a point off” his estimate of complication rates.

At trial, Anderson admitted that Rue had written a report to the court that Anderson signed. Anderson also said that Rue provided most of the research for a second report Anderson wrote. Anderson further testified that he didn’t know courts had disregarded Rue’s testimony. Thompson was incredulous.

“You say you don’t know his employment or any organizations that he belongs to,” the judge asked Anderson. “Why do you trust him?”

In his Monday ruling, Thompson tried to guess at the answer: “Either Anderson has extremely impaired judgment; he lied to the court as to his familiarity with Rue; or he is so biased against abortion that he would endorse any opinion that supports increased regulation on abortion providers. Any of these explanations severely undermines Anderson’s credibility as an expert witness.”

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Judge Rips Alabama for Hiring a Discredited Abortion Foe

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