KOLAHUN

The Cursive Q

The Ministry of Information has learned that school boards across the United States are reducing the amount to time devoted to the teaching of cursive handwriting.  That’s bad news, folks.  Pathognomonic. As cursive goes, so goes the state of the American public education system! 

In 2000, approximately 1/3 of California lawmakers with school-aged children had their kids in private schools, and the same was roughly true for other big states like New York, Texas and Florida…not to mention for members of the US Senate and House of Representatives, according to a 2001 study by The Heritage Foundation.

At time when urban schools are being racially re-segregated under the guise of “school choice”, and teachers focus more on standardize test preparation, enforcing gang affiliation dress codes, conflict resolution, sexual health, English as a second language, etc., who has time to make sure no child's left behind AND teach all that “readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmatic”  - let alone how to write the cursive G, S or (our favorite)… the cursive Q.

To remedy this situation facing the US education system, the MInistry recommends that all American parents follow the lead of your elected officials - become a attorneys, make millions dollars and pay to get your kids out of public schools - A.S.A.P.  It is the only hope we have to rescue for human society the native values of cursive writing.

The Ministry of Information

“more power to the misinformed”

Missing Targets

Bruce Psaty and Wayne Ray write the following in this weeks JAMA:

Recently, the FDA proposed new guidelines that enable sponsors to distribute publications about unapproved uses of approved drugs and devices.² For drugs, for example, an sNDA [supplemental New Drug Application] is no longer required. The journal that published the article to be distributed must have both an editorial board that uses independent reviewers and a policy of full disclosure of conflict of interest; the article must be peer-reviewed; and the article should not be in a supplement funded by the sponsor.² The information should address adequate and well-controlled clinical investigations and not be false, misleading, or pose a significant threat to health. Distribution is to include the product label, a relevant bibliography, and a representative publication, if it exists, that reaches a different conclusion about the unapproved use. 

Are these proposed changes consistent with the FDA's mission of protecting the public health by ensuring the efficacy and safety of medications? Although peer-reviewed literature serves as the gold standard for evidence-based medicine, there are major limitations in relying on sponsor-distributed literature to regulate off-label use, including the selective publication of studies, the systematic manipulation of the literature, the absence from the literature of critical data necessary for evaluating off-label use, and the potential for undermining the NDA review process.

While I'm sympathetic to their cause of limiting the dispensation of poor or misleading studies the targets of their remedy are incomplete.  If pharmaceuticals are denied the right to distribute these articles, they'll simply find some other way in this, the age of creative information sharing. 

Happy Birthday, Mr. Shakespeare!

In 1584, William Shakespeare left his clerk job at the Ministry of Information (then know as "Merriman's Ale and Buscuit House") to pursue an acting and writing career and in the process went on to contributed more phrases and expressions to the English language than any of those the chaps who wrote the English Bible.

Today is his birthday and our loss was the literary world's gain.

Below is a short list of expressions given to us by the plays of William Shakespeare. Click on the link for more...

Happy Birthday, Willie!

All that glitters is not gold (The Merchant of Venice)

All's well that ends well

As good luck would have it (The Merry Wives of Windsor)

The Ministry of Information

“more power to the misinformed”

Patient, Heal Thyself...CALL NOW!!!!

If it hasn't come to your state yet, direct access testing (DAT) may be on its way.  In several states patients are free to request certain laboratory tests without physician orders.  Direct access testing already exists for over the counter test like pregnancy tests and few states prohibit people from having diabetes screening or cholesterol levels checked at health fairs all over the country, without a medical provider's order or responsibility to treat.

DAT is also big business. Over $10 billion are spent out-of-pocket on health services, with over $1 billion spent on in-home/mall/health fair testing, alone. The market is expected to grow as hospitals, lab testing companies and numerous on-line testing services seeking to directly access patient dollars by cutting out the "middle-man" and allowing patients to manage their own health with less assistance from a licensed provider. 

Some medical boards have lobbied successfully to limit direct access testing in their states, whereas others have offered their services in ordering any test that their patients...er, customers desire.

Similar trends in customer led consulting/purchasing have been seen in other industries. Stock brokers realized, long ago, how much money is to be made in letting their clients manage their own portfolios and Bob Villa was the first of many to convince us to "do it yourself".  You decide the tests and your health care broker will arrange the purchase - $9.99 per trade.

Click below for the test most commonly ordered by direct access clinical laboratory tests....

Willing to Guest Author for Pharmaceutical Companies

I have an offer to all drug companies:  I am willing to sell out.  Honestly.  The latest JAMA has an article describing the role of ghost writing in the lead-up to the Vioxx debacle.  In short, it may have been the case that Merck did some in-house research, then found some experts to put their name on the articles which legitimized them to the medical community. 

But it may have cost them a whole lot to procure, you know, big whig experts.  I, on the other hand, come cheaply.  I don't have a big name yet...so you, Merck (or other big drug company), can get me for pennies on the dollar now.  And when as a result of publishing a whole lot of articles with your work I am recognized as an "expert", I promise to discount you for future services.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Next President of the United States...

Is this kid going to be our next President?  Most people don't know - but he's already been the Governor of Washington State.

With an African American male and a white woman fiercely contesting for the Democratic presidential nomination, many are asking, “Is American ready for one of them to be President?” 

We probably wouldn’t have to ask that question if more people knew about the many non-white and non-male elected leaders that we currently have serving this country as the chief executive of 11 of our states.  Don’t even get me started on all the ones we’ve had in the past!

See if you can match the names with the state they govern…

Neglected Diseases – Low Socioeconomic Status

Missing from the WHO list of neglected diseases is the root of the problem and a now (another) recent study relating the stressors of living in poverty to mortality in San Francisco Bay Area residents will have us going around the table talking about what the poor already know…being poor makes you sick.  But since this is not the first study that suggests that people at lower socioeconomic levels carry a heavier burden of illness, disease and death, the question remains, “What is to be done?”

Now, we might take that study and fuss around with new clinics, or health promotion ads, or community action groups, or outreach programs and call it "work" – but if the community does not become more affluent, in the process - isn’t that just ignoring the evidence?  Should the poor cut to the chase and follow the advice of the rap star, 50 Cent?  “Get rich or die tryin’.”

The Dangers of Plastic!

After our groundbreaking story about the fluorination of water by terrorist who wish to destroy our way of life, we turned our attention to the numbers in the triangle on plastic water bottles, food containers and other common household items looking for signs of…hidden dangers in our plastics!

Many try to link these codes to cancer risk, as indicators of how much toxic exposure exists for people using those products.  But the Ministry of Information knows better – the codes aren’t meant to inform you of how dangerous plastic is to you, but to convince you of how good plastic is – for the environment.

The plastic industry’s use of these resin identification codes, introduced by its trade association in1988, promotes the idea that plastic is highly recyclable, so you should feel good about throwing it out and buying MORE plastic because, using these codes, it will all be sorted and recycled, right?

WRONG (smack to your face)!!! Unfortunately, recycling plastics is an expensive process, recycled plastics (especially mix-plastics) generally are more expensive than virgin plastic and most recyclable plastic, especially the kinds too toxic to incinerate, makes its way to landfills where they last forever, if not leak toxins into the surrounding environment.

So instead of telling you which codes to look for when buying bottled water, or using grocery bags, the Ministry suggests you REUSE over RECYCLE…refill water bottles with tap water (boiled or filtered, if you must), use reusable cloth bags when shopping and practice saying, “No thank you, I don’t need a bag”, when you buy something that you can carry in your reusable hands.

For those of you lucky enough to have grown up in the ‘60s…this scene from The Graduate.

The Ministry of Information

“more power to the misinformed”

Healthy San Francisco?

Healthy San Francisco’s plan to bring universal health care access to the uninsured of San Francisco gets a lot of media praise, but some of not-so-great truths related to this brand of universal access need be told.

Truth #1 – Status Quo ≠ Innovation.  There’s nothing “new” about an uninsured San Francisco resident walking into the public health clinics to receive care. They’ve been doing it since Chinatown Public Health Center opened its doors in 1971 and at San Francisco General Hospital since the 1870’s.  Healthy San Francisco’s innovative idea is to have businesses contribute to the cost of health care for employees, charging premiums to program participants and charging people to access health services based on income.  Sounds a lot like our current health care system.

Truth #2 – Universal safety nets are actually quite small.  Healthy San Francisco calls for expanding access to the already overburdened Department of Public Health’s (DPH) clinical services. Public plans to expanded primary care services are funded by one-time federal and state grants that don’t cover cut backs being made in public health nursing, mental health services, dental services or any other DPH service that falls to the city’s budget deficit axe.  The safety net will soon have room only for those who can afford to stay on it.