Eideard

Medical marijuana advocates are hoping state governments can succeed where their efforts have failed by asking federal authorities to reclassify pot as a drug with medical use.

Shortly before Christmas, Colorado became the fourth state to ask the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to reclassify marijuana as a narcotic in the same league as heavyweight painkillers including oxycodone. The governors of Washington and Rhode Island filed a formal petition with the agency in November, and Vermont signed onto that request shortly afterward.

All four are among the sixteen states and the District of Columbia that have laws on the books that allow the medical use of marijuana, even though the drug remains illegal under federal law. Meanwhile, federal authorities have asserted their power by raiding dispensaries in states including California and Washington.

Supporters say the public is on their side, and the state requests show the feds are increasingly isolated on the issue. But they acknowledge it’s still an uphill battle…

Insert appropriate smartass remark about “Change” here.

In their November petition, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire and Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee argued that “the vast majority of modern research” has found marijuana useful for treating patients with glaucoma, for relieving the nausea suffered by cancer patients in chemotherapy and for relieving symptoms of degenerative nerve diseases…

Critics call medical marijuana a “Trojan horse” for legalizing the drug entirely, and federal authorities mounted a string of high-profile raids in California, Washington and Montana in 2011…

Which further convinces social conservatives that their backwardness has at least an opportunist ally in the White House.

Morgan Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project said the states’ requests to reclassify the drug “could and certainly should” give the states some breathing room, “but I really don’t think it will…I think that it’s not going to provide any real tangible benefits immediately,” he said. But it if succeeds, “It will definitely bring the federal government more in line with currently accepted science.”

In the meantime, “There’s no reason for the federal government to be wasting resources going after medical marijuana providers,” he said.

Yup.

As an example…

Paul Hambleton didn’t know what to do. He was uninsured, hurting, and facing a $30,000 bill to fix his torn-up knee.

So after researching his options, the owner of a valet-parking firm in Henderson, Texas, came up with an inspired solution. He got treated at a luxury facility, by doctors trained at top institutions, and enjoyed a sunny getaway at the same time, all at a fraction of the cost.

Of course there was a hitch: He had to go abroad. After checking out a number of local hospitals in Texas, Hambleton ended up heading across the border, to a facility in Monterrey, Mexico. The entire cost, including airfare: under $6,000.

“I was treated like a billionaire,” says the 52-year-old, who even squeezed in a couple of rounds of golf during his trip. “I had a Baylor-trained surgeon, a personal nurse the entire time, stayed at a top hotel, and had the best chicken enchiladas I’ve ever had. If I had my choice, I’d never go to an American hospital again.”

More Americans than ever are following Hambleton’s logic, and forgoing their local General Hospital in order to travel to places like Thailand, India, or Costa Rica for medical tuneups. More than half a million Americans every year, in fact, who are seeking out everything from dental work to cosmetic surgery to heart stents and hip replacements. It’s called “medical tourism,” and it amounts to a $40-billion annual business…

“It’s a lunatic statement, to say that there’s no quality healthcare overseas,” says Josef Woodman, author of the book Patients Beyond Borders. “For baby boomers who are in financially challenging circumstances, there’s a lot of choice out there now.”

The savings can be significant. Angioplasty that can cost up to $43,000 in the U.S. costs $4,700 in India, or $7,300 in Malaysia, according to data compiled by patientsbeyondborders.com. And in terms of amenities, hospitals like the famed Bumrungrad in Bangkok put their cash-strapped American counterparts to shame…

RTFA for details, anecdotes. I have peers among the grayheads in my family whose regular doctor and dentist are in Mexico. If they can time things appropriately their annual escape via 5th-wheeler to America’s southern border for the winter includes time set aside for medical and dental work on the Mexican side of that border.

Cripes – at least one of our “family” dentists belongs to the American Dental Association and has the contract for dental work for schoolchildren – of the town on the US side of the border.

The people at Miracle-Gro are going to start marketing to marijuana farmers, reasoning that they need fertilizer, too.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

In an unlikely move for the head of a major company, Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. Chief Executive Jim Hagedorn said he is exploring targeting medical marijuana as well as other niches to help boost sales at his lawn and garden company.

“I want to target the pot market,” Mr. Hagedorn said in an interview. “There’s no good reason we haven’t.”

Sales at Scotts rose 5% last year to $2.9 billion. But the Marysville, Ohio, company relies on sales at three key retailers—Home Depot Inc., Lowe’s Cos. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.—for nearly two-thirds of its revenue. With consumers still cautious about spending, the retailers aren’t building new stores as quickly as they used to, making growth for suppliers like Scotts harder to come by. Against that backdrop, Mr. Hagedorn has pushed his regional sales presidents to look for smaller pockets of growth, such as the marijuana market, that together could produce a noticeable bump in sales.

NPR is reporting:

The medical marijuana market will reach $1.7 billion in sales this year, the story says. Scotts-Miracle Gro’s annual sales are $2.9 billion.

So on the face of it, marijuana growers can’t add much to the company’s revenues. Of course, there’s clearly a very large non-medical-marijuana industry in this country that the company could also sell into.

Overdue. Get the fracking politicians out of the simplest of homegrown relaxation therapies. Tax it. Regulate it – as little as possible. Let’s get on with the real world, please.

The abortion rate in the United States, which has declined steadily since a 1981 peak of more than 29 abortions per 1,000 women, stalled between 2005 and 2008, at slightly less than 20 abortions per 1,000 women, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute.

While the new report is a statistical survey and does not provide any explanation for why the numbers hit a plateau, Rachel Jones, the lead author, said the economy might have played a role.

“Unintended pregnancy is increasingly concentrated among poor and low-income women, and for the 2008 survey, we were collecting data in the midst of a recession,” Ms. Jones said. “So there are more poor women in the survey, women who in better economic times might have decided to carry to term, but since they or their partner lost their job, decided they couldn’t…”

The report found that more women were turning away from surgical abortion in favor of medication, usually mifepristone, the drug formerly known as RU-486, to end their pregnancies. The report estimates that about 17 percent of all 2008 abortions, and more than a quarter of those performed before nine weeks of gestation, were medication abortions.

Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Committee, said the trend toward medication abortions had helped keep the abortion numbers steady…

Mifepristone was introduced in the United Sates in 2000, and according to the report, there were 187,000 medication abortions in 2008, compared with 158,000 the previous year. Many clinics that do not specialize in abortions offer only medication abortions.

Ms. Jones sees the increase in medication abortions as good news, because such abortions occur early in pregnancy, when abortion is safest…

The Guttmacher report found an increase in harassment of abortion providers, with clinics in the Midwest and the South the most likely to experience harassment and those in the Northeast and the West the least.

Do those statistics signify anything special to you?

Certainly, the geographic spread in harassment of women who feel they have a right to choose fits right into America’s politics and religion. And, frankly, whatever the application – I think most folks would choose pills over surgery when practical.

Two physicians were arrested Friday for allegedly subjecting mentally ill homeless people to unnecessary tests and other procedures at a North Hollywood clinic in order to submit fraudulent bills to government insurance programs.

Dr. Eleanor Santiago Arthur and Dr. Rodney Stephen Barron participated in a scheme in which “cappers” recruited Medicare and Medi-Cal enrollees from as far away as Long Beach and drove them to the Victory Boulevard clinic in exchange for a fee…

The “patients” were subjected to abdominal ultrasounds and other procedures that were unwarranted, the complaint says. In some instances, their blood was drained into unsanitary, open containers, it says. One official said the clinics submitted the blood for tests under multiple patients’ names so they could bill multiple times.

After the visits, the cappers drove the patients back to where they picked them up and paid them $100 each, according to the complaint.

The clinic billed the government for up to $1,000 worth of medical care per patient, and each physician saw 30 to 50 patients a day, city attorney’s officials said in a news release. The investigation carried out by the Los Angeles County Health Authority Law Enforcement Task Force found that the scheme cheated the government out of millions of dollars over six months.

Santiago Arthur and Barron each face up to seven years in prison if convicted of charges that they conspired to cheat Medicare and Medi-Cal, the government medical insurance programs for seniors, the poor and disabled.

These are the cruds protected by lobbyists, insurance companies and teabaggers.

Throw away the key!

July 2008, Robert Edwards, Lesley Brown, Louise Brown and her son, Cameron
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Nobel prize for physiology or medicine for 2010 has been awarded to the British scientist who pioneered in-vitro fertilisation, a procedure that has helped in the conception and birth of 4 million people around the world since the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown in 1978…

Edwards developed the IVF technique in a research career that started in 1958 at the National Institute for Medical Research in London and continued at the world’s first IVF centre, the Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridge, founded with the English surgeon, Patrick Steptoe…

Robert Edward’s wife, Ruth, and his family said in a statement today that they were “thrilled and delighted” at the award of the Nobel Prize. “The success of this research has touched the lives of millions of people worldwide. His dedication and single-minded determination, despite opposition from many quarters, has led to the successful application of his pioneering research…”

“Opposition from many quarters” means the same religious fanatics, political opportunists and cowards who have always rallied together in vain attempts to halt human knowledge and application. Whatever the science, the fearful, the indoctrinated, those afraid to venture out into this good night try their best to stop progress, censor understanding, disallow choice.

Speaking in 2008, Edwards recalled the moment he first created a fertilised human embryo in 1968. “I’ll never get forget the day I looked down the microscope and saw something funny in the cultures. I looked down the microscope and what I saw was a human blastocyst gazing up at me. I thought: ‘We’ve done it.’”

“The most important thing in life is having a child,” he said. “Nothing is more special than a child. Steptoe and I were deeply affected by the desperation felt by couples who so wanted to have children. We had a lot of critics but we fought like hell for our patients…”

Three decades on, IVF is an established technique to help infertile couples have children. There have been many advances on Edwards’ initial research: a single sperm can now be injected directly into an egg and the extraction of eggs from ovaries has been improved so that it causes less trauma. IVF is also at the centre of a technique, called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), that screens fertilised embryos for genetic conditions such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease…

Martin Johnson, professor of reproductive sciences at the University of Cambridge, said he was delighted. “This is long overdue…Bob’s work has always been controversial but he has never shrunk from confronting that controversy. He was a real visionary, and always ahead of his time on so many issues – not just IVF – but also on PGD in the 60s, stem cells in the 70s, and the whole process of thinking ethically.”

Bravo! The world has moved ahead another few steps because of Doctor Edwards. Modern medicine casts aside the curses of priests and pundits like the dust mites they imitate.

We condemned the Nazis for the same kind of medical experiments

U.S. government medical researchers intentionally infected hundreds of people in Guatemala, including institutionalized mental patients, with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission more than 60 years ago.

Many of those infected were encouraged to pass the infection onto others as part of the study.

About one third of those who were infected never got adequate treatment.

On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are expected to offer extensive apologies for actions taken by the U.S. Public Health Service…

The episode raises inevitable comparisons to the infamous Tuskegee experiment, the Alabama study where hundreds of African-American men were told they were being treated for syphilis, but in fact were denied treatment. That U.S. government study lasted from 1932 until press reports revealed it in 1972.

The Guatemala experiments…were discovered by Susan Reverby, a professor of women’s studies at Wellesley College, and was posted on her website [.pdf].

According to Reverby’s report, the Guatemalan project was co-sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, the NIH, the Pan-American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government.

Reverby, who has written extensively about the Tuskegee experiments, found the evidence while conducting further research on the Alabama syphilis study.

The policies of the United States government have always been founded on the arrogant presumption that if our government feels something is beneficial to their corporate bosses, then they have the right to do whatever they wish. International law, the laws of our own land, ethics and decency are out of the equation.

My first thought on these revelations? What will be exposed, say, in 2070 about what our politicians are doing to exploit ordinary folks today?

Audi keeps on growing its e-tron family. The automaker pulled a fast one by unveiling yet another electrified monster at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, only this time, the low-slung hybrid came sans-top. The concept is powered by two electric motors and a 300-horsepower twin-turbo TDI V6 that comes to the fight with 479 pound-feet of torque. Audi says that despite the hefty 9.1 kilowatt-hour battery mounted up front, it managed to keep the weight low and distribute the pounds evenly across the chassis. As a result, this e-tron should be plenty flingable if it ever makes it off of the stage and onto a public road.

Audi says the e-tron Spyder hits the scales at 3,196 pounds and that the drivetrain can be driver-controlled to operate on electric power only at speeds up to 37 mph for a total of 31 miles. The manufacturer says that in city driving, the capability is more than enough to hang with traffic. If not, there’s always that juicy diesel V6 to play with…

That’s a twin-turbo V6 diesel that gets up to 102 mpg. Plus – you add in the electric drive.

Nearly three decades of war and religious extremism have devastated medical libraries and crippled the educational system for doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Factions of the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, singled out medical texts for destruction, military medical personnel say, because anatomical depictions of the human body were considered blasphemous.

“They not only burned the books, but they sent monitors into the classroom to make sure there were no drawings of the human body on the blackboard,” said Valerie Walker, director of the Medical Alumni Association of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ms. Walker is helping lead an ambitious effort by American doctors and nurses, both civilian and military, to restock Afghanistan’s hospitals, clinics and universities with medical textbooks and other reference materials.

The project, called Operation Medical Libraries, began modestly in 2007 with a plea for books from a U.C.L.A. medical graduate serving in the Army. It has since been embraced by 30 universities and hospitals, more than a dozen professional organizations and scores of individual doctors and nurses…

Like most others involved in the program, Dr. Maldonado heard about it from a colleague. And word has spread among medical officers stationed in Afghanistan, who act as volunteer points of contact to shepherd books to the libraries…

By Ms. Walker’s estimate, 27,000 medical texts have reached Afghanistan through Operation Medical Libraries, but she adds that the number is probably much higher. Donors can contribute directly by visiting the project’s Web site to find a military volunteer’s address, then shipping the books on their own.

Please, join in. Collect books. Get folks to collect and ship them to the Project.

RTFA. Reflect on the “joys” that fundamentalist religions almost inevitably bring to whatever part of the world is under their subjugation.

Peter Bentley – creator of the iPhone stethoscope app
Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The stethoscope – medical icon, lifesaver and doctor’s best friend – is disappearing from hospitals across the world as physicians increasingly use their smartphones to monitor patients’ heartbeats.

More than 3 million doctors have downloaded a 59p application – invented by Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London – which turns an Apple iPhone into a stethoscope.

Last week, Bentley introduced a free version of the app, which is being downloaded by more than 500 users a day. Experts say the software, a major advance in medical technology, has saved lives and enabled doctors in remote areas to access specialist expertise.

“Everybody is very excited about the potential of the adoption of mobile phone technology into the medical workplace, and rightly so,” said Bentley, who initially developed the app “as a fun toy”.

“Smartphones are incredibly powerful devices packed full of sensors, cameras, high-quality microphones with amazing displays,” he said. “They are capable of saving lives, saving money and improving healthcare in a dramatic fashion – and we carry these massively powerful computers in our pockets.”

Bentley’s iStethoscope application is not the only mobile phone programme lightening doctors’ bags and transforming their practices: there are nearly 6,000 applications related to health in the Apple App Store. The uptake has been rapid. In late 2009, two-thirds of doctors and 42% of the public were using smartphones – in effect inexpensive handheld computers – for personal and professional reasons. More than 80% of doctors said they expected to own a smartphone by 2012.

The trend looks likely to gain pace as younger doctors enter the workplace. Some medical schools issue students with smartphones. In America, Georgetown University, the University of Louisville and Ohio State University are among those requiring undergraduates to use one.

However, experts say they are being prevented from exploiting the technology’s opportunities. Bentley says that he is unable to launch a new range of applications because of out-of-date regulations.

“It’s much easier to develop technology than it is to get permission to use it,” he said. “I could create a mobile ultrasound scanner and an application to measure the oxygen content in blood, but the regulations stop me. We’re not allowed to turn the phone itself into a medical device, and what that precisely means is currently a grey area in terms of regulation. That’s the only reason we’re not seeing a flood of these devices yet.”

Bravo. Maybe it’s time for non-medical geeks to join the medical types in their efforts to nudge the Hippocratic Establishment into the digital age?

To some.