NewsFlash: A Serum Made From Toxic Botulism Can Kill And Make You Sick! Who'd A Thunk?

Gee, when I think of something like Botox/botulism which can cause a miserable death, I just don't simultaneously think, "Wow, let me inject it into my face on a regular basis. And, while I'm at being effing moronic, let me have those injections done by a person who didn't necessarily graduate high school who buys this shit off the black market where who the bleep knows WHAT you're getting and then there's that question about whether the needle used is sterile."

Yup.

Granted, perhaps I may reach a day when I feel I MIGHT do something silly - not deadly silly, thank you - to look younger. But that day isn't here - thank God for some genes, eh? - and I'm hoping it does not happen. When it does, injecting botulism into my face for kicks won't be a consideration.

Now, also granted, botulism is used FOR actual medical purposes. I in fact once had a severe muscle problem where it was considered as a short-term "fix" to stop spasms that responded to nothing else. Some of the folks who've died, in fact, were medical rather than plastic surgical users. But anyone who HAS a different option probably isn't racing out to use Botox, and men and women with a few character lines shouldn't either.

Hey, Healthy People: You Cost TOO Much!

A new report says that healthy people who live longer COST society MORE than smokers and the obese. Oops.

Thankfully, I'm only moderately healthy and will probably die early so I won't cost too much. ;)

Yet Another Fat, White Fascist GOP Lawmaker Wants Rights To A Woman's Womb

Dolt.

Gee, what a surprise; a Republican who wants to force his beliefs upon others. Who'd a thought? Mind you, there are many women doctors who will NOT undergo an ultrasound with their own pregnancies (except in extraordinary circumstances) because they question the "health" of doing so.

Women seeking an abortion would first have to undergo an ultrasound under a new bill proposed in Kentucky, reported Louisville, Ky., TV station WLKY.

Members of the Kentucky Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice in Louisville had a lot to say about the bill. They drove to Frankfort hoping to get more information about it, and hoping to convince the senator who sponsored the bill that it should not get passed at all.

"I think defeating it would be the best thing for the people of Kentucky, regardless of your feeling about abortion," said coalition member Anne Maron.

The new bill would make it mandatory for doctors to perform an ultrasound on a woman seeking an abortion, provide an explanation of the results and provide the ultrasound images to the pregnant woman and review them with her.

"I want to make sure women understand fully what is happening if they get an opportunity to see the little fingers and toes of the baby that they're thinking about aborting," said state Sen. Jack Westwood.

Come to think of it, "dolt" is too kind for a man like Westwood who would probably kill before he'd let a law directly act on his penis.

Pot Boosts Brain Cell Growth?

It almost makes me wish my smoking days were not long behind me; this from Libby posting at Newshoggers under "Marijuana is good medicine":

The prohibition profiteers lie to you when they tell you that pot has no medicinal value. A new study just out shows marijuana increases brain cell growth.

ST. JOHN’S, Nfld — Supporters of marijuana may finally have an excuse to smoke weed every day. A recent study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation suggests that smoking pot can make the brain grow.

Though most drugs inhibit the growth of new brain cells, injections of a synthetic cannibinoid have had the opposite effect in mice in a study performed at the University of Saskatchewan. ...

The researchers found that rats treated with HU-210 on a regular basis showed neurogenesis — the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. A current hypothesis suggests depression may be triggered when the hippocampus grows insufficient numbers of new brain cells. If true, HU-210 could offer a treatment for such mood disorders by stimulating this growth.

Now cannabis is a complex plant and the research was conducted with only two of a multitude of elements it contains so this study isn't really a license to smoke pot, but this could explain why so many people who suffer from depressive disorders self-medicate with marijuana. Taken in moderation, it works better than Zoloft with a lot less dangerous side effects.

Meanwhile, I have mixed feelings about this research. It's good to establish that cannabinoids are useful as medicine but the focus on using synthentic compounds suggests to me that prohibitionists want to profit from marijuana without having to give up their equally lucrative war on the natural plant.

Financing Tax Cuts for Billionaires And Corporate Welfare With Lives of Sick Kids

As promised, President Bush - who has never met a tax cut for the wealthiest or a way to have taxpayers foot the bill for mega corporations such as making Americans pay for oil industry refineries at a time when energy companies are seeing their most massive profits EVER - has vetoed the Congressional bill which would have allowed more kids to be covered by health care insurance under SCHIP.

Calling this disgusting and unconscionable simply does not begin to describe this.

Think about this: thousands if not tens of thousands of kids could be covered SIMPLY for the cost of what taxpayers will be expected to pony up so that Jenna (the even dumber Bush twin) can get married at the White House. Guess Bush has his priorities straight.

Republicans, Mental Health, And Delusions

As Ricky Shambles posts at my "other" home at All Things Democrat, GOPeeuponers are into delusion: they think their mental health is better than anyone else's.

Ricky puts it well: ignorance MUST be bliss.

"Diagnosis: Conflict of Interest"

Perhaps another reason to see Michael Moore's "Sicko"? Or just another indication of how much the FDA is in the pocket of pharmaceutical companies who decide what your doctor knows about treating you with what drug?

THE revelation that the diabetes drug Avandia can potentially cause heart disease is the latest in a string of pharmaceutical disappointments. Vioxx was pulled from the market in 2004 because it doubled the risks for heart attacks and strokes. Eli Lilly recently paid $750 million to settle lawsuits alleging that Zyprexa causes diabetes. Many have criticized the Food and Drug Administration as being too lax about monitoring drug safety.

While those criticisms have merit, there is another culprit: the transformation of continuing medical education into an enterprise for drug marketing. The chore of teaching doctors how to practice medicine has been handed to the pharmaceutical industry. As a result, dangerous side effects are rarely on the curriculum.

Most states require that doctors obtain a minimum number of credit hours of continuing medical education each year to maintain their medical licenses. Not so long ago, most of these courses were produced and paid for by universities and medical associations. But this has changed drastically over the past decade.

According to the most recent data available from the national organization in charge of accrediting the courses, drug-industry financing of continuing medical education has nearly quadrupled since 1998, from $302 million to $1.12 billion. Half of all continuing medical education courses in the United States are now paid for by drug companies, up from a third a decade ago. Because pharmaceutical companies now set much of the agenda for what doctors learn about drugs, crucial information about potential drug dangers is played down, to the detriment of patient care.

Paul Krugman: "The Health Care Racket"

Leading economist and Times' OpEd columnist, Paul Krugman, once again tackles a subject near and dear to many: American health care. Read it all at Rozius, but you can start with this snippet:

Is the health insurance business a racket? Yes, literally - or so say two New York hospitals, which have filed a racketeering lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group and several of its affiliates.

I don't know how the case will turn out. But whatever happens in court, the lawsuit illustrates perfectly the dysfunctional nature of our health insurance system, a system in which resources that could have been used to pay for medical care are instead wasted in a zero-sum struggle over who ends up with the bill.

The two hospitals accuse UnitedHealth of operating a "rogue business plan" designed to avoid paying clients' medical bills. For example, the suit alleges that patients were falsely told that Flushing Hospital was "not a network provider" so UnitedHealth did not pay the full network rate. UnitedHealth has already settled charges of misleading clients about providers' status brought by New York's attorney general: the company paid restitution to plan members, while attributing the problem to computer errors.

The legal outcome will presumably turn on whether there was deception as well as denial - on whether it can be proved that UnitedHealth deliberately misled plan members. But it's a fact that insurers spend a lot of money looking for ways to reject insurance claims. And health care providers, in turn, spend billions on "denial management," employing specialist firms - including Ingenix, a subsidiary of, yes, UnitedHealth - to fight the insurers.

So it's an arms race between insurers, who deploy software and manpower trying to find claims they can reject, and doctors and hospitals, who deploy their own forces in an effort to outsmart or challenge the insurers. And the cost of this arms race ends up being borne by the public, in the form of higher health care prices and higher insurance premiums.

The rest is here.