In part my statement, “I don’t believe in the germ theory of disease” is meant to be provocative for my position is somewhat, err, nuanced. Consider the following to points:

• 100 people are all exposed to a serious pathogen. Five get sick.
• A number of you at work have a stressful situation at work, requiring serious overtime. For a week or so, along with the stress, you all work long hours and average four or less hours sleep at night. Many get come down with illnesses toward the end and after this time. This is unsurprising.

The problem with the germ theory of disease is the notion that germs cause disease. Germs do not cause disease. Germs are virtually omnipresent. Clean rooms however show that germs, when not present cannot cause disease. That is germs are a necessary condition for disease … and because of their omnipresence, when the real cause of disease occurs … people ordinarily get sick.

The real cause of disease is the failure of your immune system to prevent illness. There are a lot of reasons for that. Mental state, mental and physical stress levels, nutrition all enter in to keeping or failing to keep your immune system working as it should. Recently, I’ve been involved in a discussion in which notions of witchcraft were discounted as relevant in combating disease. However, if we put together realization that there exist communities in which witchcraft is given credence and that mental stress and state contribute to the effectiveness of the immune system one must conclude that witchcraft as a cause of disease, makes perfect sense.

Oddly enough we tend to ignore our immune system. Regarding physical and mental fitness, we have regimens and advice on how to increase, measure, and keep our mental and physical faculties at tip top condition. An athlete can measure his performance metrics precisely. Cyclists for example, can measure and track VO₂MAX, watts/kg, and peak wattage to track and estimate his progress and current fitness. In a few months in the NFL, as another example, will migrate to Indianapolis to put draft prospects through a battery of tests to test fitness to succeed in the football arena. However doctors have no such metrics to measure the fitness of someone’s immune system. There are no “training regimens” to exercise and get your immune system working at optimal levels. In part that is because of the popularity of the “germ theory” of disease. If that catchphrase were replaced by the “immune system breakdown” theory of disease (that is the one to which I subscribe) then one would expect research priorities to be realigned.

The latest advancement in stem cells is that it’s getting safer to convert adult stem cells to “induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells” (basically what embryonic stems cells are).  Adult stem cells are already curing loads of diseases, without the need for destroying embryos.  This is just one less reason to want to rely on the ethically murky embryonic ones.

One of the problems I have with socialized healthcare is that it takes the responsibility for payment out of the hands of the person getting the care and places it in the hands of a massive bureaucracy that has, depending on the system, either a monopoly on being the payer or at least one of the larger ones.  As such, it has an incentive to cut costs, but its incentive isn’t nearly as personal as an individual payer.  The larger the bureaucracy, the less concern for the individual. 

I’ve noted before how this led to the state of Oregon denying cancer medication to a woman, but still gave her coverage for physician-assisted suicide.  It also leads to a British medical ethics expert suggesting that the elderly should take the same route, for the good of society.

Elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives because they are a burden on the NHS and their families, according to the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock.

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are “wasting people’s lives” because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was “nothing wrong” with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be “licensed to put others down” if they are unable to look after themselves.

Her comments in a magazine interview have been condemned as “immoral” and “barbaric”, but also sparked fears that they may find wider support because of her influence on ethical matters.

Lady Warnock, a former headmistress who went on to become Britain’s leading moral philosopher, chaired a landmark Government committee in the 1980s that established the law on fertility treatment and embryo research.

(A tip of the Blogger’s Fedora to Right Wing News.)

The “leading moral philosopher” in Britain is asking people to die for the good of the state.  What an insane world we live in.

I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

Doug’s post below reminded me that I wanted to recycle a post from a few years ago (apologies to those who have read it already). I think it’s topical.

Jessica is the daughter of our friends. Every day, the school bus comes for Jessica, who happens to be the last child on the route. On this particular bus, the kids have assigned seating, and Jessica sits next to the same young boy–day after day. And, day after day, this young, frightened boy cried the whole trip. He was crying when the bus came to Jessica’s house, and he cried the rest of the way to school.

One day, Jessica decided to help the boy. She reached out her small hand, and gently laid it on his arm. The boy stopped crying. The mere touch of another, gentle soul was enough to comfort him. The next day came, the boy was crying. Jessica sat down, reached out, touched his arm, and he stopped crying. This pattern repeated the next few days. She did not have to say anything, her touch was all he needed.

And then, a few days later, something interesting happened. On this day, the boy stopped crying a few blocks before the bus reached Jessica’s house. He knew she would be getting on the bus soon and that was enough to comfort him. She still put her hand gently on his arm, of course. This pattern repeats to this day. The boy stops crying a few blocks before Jessica’s house.

I suppose he can sense where the bus is because of the curves in the road near her house. You see, the boy is blind. He can neither see Jessica, nor her house. He just senses when the bus is almost there.

Jessica’s actions on the bus do not surprise her parents. She has four siblings at home, including a newborn sister. Whenever one of her sisters, or her brother, is hurt, Jessica is there to comfort the child. Offering her gentle shoulder and heart for another’s comfort. That’s who Jessica is–comforter of the hurting. She is also one of the happiest children I have ever seen. There’s always a smile on her face.

Jessica turned five this past February. [She is now eight.] That, in itself, is a miracle. Jessica was born with hydrocephalus. While in her mother, the fluid built up in her tiny brain and damaged it. Jessica also has Down Syndrome. There are many things that Jessica will not be able to do in her life. To some, Jessica should never have been born. Some, having received the news of her condition, as her parents did, by amniocentesis, would have chosen to end the pregnancy, and her life. The reason, I suppose, is that she won’t have much quality of life. She’ll never be a productive member of society. She may not be able to take care of herself. Not much of a life in our modern society.

However, I know one little boy on a bus who knows that Jessica is nothing short of a gift from God.

Maybe the doctor mentioned in Doug’s post below needs to meet Jessica.

One prominent Canadian OB/GYN says “Yes.”  Problem is, he finds that worrisome. 

Sarah and Todd Palin’s decision to complete her recent pregnancy, despite advance notice that their baby Trig had Down syndrome, is hailed by many in the pro-life movement as walking the walk as well as talking the talk.

But a senior Canadian doctor is now expressing concerns that such a prominent public role model as the governor of Alaska and potential vice president of the United States completing a Down syndrome pregnancy may prompt other women to make the same decision against abortion because of that genetic abnormality. And thereby reduce the number of abortions.

Published reports in Canada say about 9 out of 10 women given a diagnosis of Down syndrome choose to terminate the pregnancy through abortion.

Dr. Andre Lalonde, executive vice president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Ottawa, worries that Palin’s now renowned decision may cause abortions in Canada to decline as other women there and elsewhere opt to follow suit.

He says not every woman is prepared to deal with the consequences of Down babies, who have developmental delays, some physical difficulties and often a shortened lifespan.

Well, we can’t have role models diminishing that 90% figure one little bit, can we?  I just find it completely appalling that this sort of “concern” is expressed, let alone by a leading OB/GYN.

Read the rest of this entry

In California, the First Amendment is subordinate to the whims of the judges.  The Associated Press reports:

California’s highest court on Monday barred doctors from invoking their religious beliefs as a reason to deny treatment to gays and lesbians, ruling that state law prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination extends to the medical profession.

What "treatment" was denied?  How was care withheld, as the AP headline claims?

Justice Joyce Kennard wrote that two Christian fertility doctors who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian have neither a free speech right nor a religious exemption from the state’s law, which "imposes on business establishments certain antidiscrimination obligations."

In the lawsuit that led to the ruling, Guadalupe Benitez, 36, of Oceanside said that the doctors treated her with fertility drugs and instructed her how to inseminate herself at home but told her their beliefs prevented them from inseminating her. One of the doctors referred her to another fertility specialist without moral objections, and Benitez has since given birth to three children.

Nevertheless, Benitez in 2001 sued the Vista-based North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group. She and her lawyers successfully argued that a state law prohibiting businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation applies to doctors.

So what we’re really talking about here is an elective procedure, not "care" nor "treatment" of some condition.  And the doctors did everything up to the point where their religious convictions wouldn’t let them continue.  Even then, they instructed Benitez how to do it herself. 

A detail you won’t find here but is brought up in the WorldNetDaily coverage, the case was dismissed when it was originally brought, but liberal Californians can be certain that, no matter the obstacles, their Supreme Court can be counted on to come through. 

But don’t doctors have constitutional rights, too?  Well the California Medial Association used to think so, but they changed their tune "after receiving a barrage of criticism from the gay-rights community."  We have the bullying tactics of the "tolerant" Left connect with the political correctness of the medical community, with the result being a trampling of the Constitution. 

This is what passes for the imprudent "jurisprudence" we find on the Left Coast.  This almost calls for a Constitutional amendment, except we already have one and it doesn’t seem to be working. 

[tags]California Supreme Court,Constitution,homosexuality,First Amendment,religious rights,Douglas Fenton,Christine Brody,Guadalupe Benitez[/tags]

Watch this video for some details into Barack Obama’s position on abortion, specifically his position on what to do with babies born alive after a botched abortion.

Yes, this video does make an emotional appeal, but listen to the facts as well.  This is Obama living up to his reputation as the most liberal of Senators.  Hey, he’s even to the left of NARAL, if you can go that far without falling off the political spectrum.

[tags]Barack Obama,US presidential election,abortion[/tags]

Spurred on by the prior post of Doug’s and in attempt to start something more of a conversation here, I’ll offer some thoughts on healthcare.

Liberals and progressives like to hold forth the ideal that healthcare should be affordable and available to everyone. After all, we’re a wealthy country. However, this is one might say a Juan Ponce de Leon gambit, that is holding forth a search for the fountain of life which alas doesn’t exist. Health care suffers from one basic problem, which is so far insurmountable (although I’ll suggest how it might be surmounted at the close of this little essay). The problem is, of course, that health care is infinitely expensive. The amount of care which might be applied to the dying grows almost without bound if one disregards cost. For almost a decade we have been told that the biological “sciences” have been expanding their capabilities exponentially (Moore’s Law) like the computer sciences except … at an even faster rate (the doubling period of capabilities is shorter). However this hasn’t substantially been, as yet, bringing down costs, just making ever more expensive options tantalizingly available. Cancers which would kill 5 years ago are sometimes defeated today, however at great financial cost.

The elephant being missed is, alas, rationing is a necessity. The question is comes down to, how to ration.  Does the market decide unfettered? Do the knuckleheads in our legislative offices decree how rationing will go down. The conservatives would claim that ability to pay is fairest. The liberals and progressives largely deny the existence of the elephant, which is alas either a lie or some other form of self-induced insanity/delusion.  Read the rest of this entry

(Dan Trabue, in a comment here to my previous post on health care, referenced a think tank paper that predicts cost reductions without a loss of effectiveness with a single-payer system, and took issue with my terming this "socialized medicine".  I decided to put my response up as a post.)

From the Wikipedia entry on health care in Canada: "Health care in Canada is funded and delivered through a publicly funded health care system, with most services provided by private entities."  So in Canada, it’s not government-run hospitals but it is a government funded system.  While the writer of this Wikipedia entry insists it’s not truly socialized medicine, the article at the link to the words "socialized medicine" does concede, "The term can refer to any system of medical care that is publicly financed, government administered, or both", I suppose depending on who you ask.

But who’s in charge of the hospitals or what you want to call it is immaterial, as the outcome is the same.  Britain has government-owned hospitals and Canada doesn’t, but the result is still that bureaucracies make medical decisions instead of doctors and patients.  HMOs were the Left’s bogeyman for years, but their solution is to institute the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, largest HMO/insurance company to make our individual health care decisions.  This makes no sense at all.

From the think tank paper cited:

[The Lewin Group, "a nationally respected nonpartisan
consulting firm"] estimates the proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising total national health spending. It would also save hundreds of billions over time – more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years – in national health spending, according to Lewin.

The Lewin Group is inexplicably closing its eyes to the Canadian system, blue-skying his prediction.  The Canadian system uses both government- and employer-based payment system, utilizing private insurance/doctors/hospitals, and they are in crisis.  They are not saving money (Claude Castonguay, quoted in the original post, notes that rationing and "injecting massive amounts of new money" has not helped).  They most certainly do not serve effectively (Wikipedia cites a study showing 57% of Canadians wait 4 or more week to see a specialist).  And it unfortunately affects everyone (read the Wikipedia article sections titled "Government Involvement" and "Private Sector").

Are you really going to believe predictions on the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a massive government program.  No government program of such a size ever comes in under budget; not Medicare, not Social Security, not the Iraq War, nothing. 

The Lewin Group says that the government could bargain for lower costs, and yet Canada’s are skyrocketing.  They may have gone down at the beginning, but as The Acton Institute’s Dr. Donald Condit notes:

Resource consumption increases when people think someone else is shouldering the cost. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman observed, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” More than 60 years of “someone else” paying for health care has led to medical expense inflation. Our predominately third-party reimbursement “system,” beginning after World War II for employees and after Medicare in 1965 for the retired, has resulted in out-of-control spending. Increasing the role of government will spur unbridled medical services consumption and further harm the underserved. Medical resources are limited. An expanded government role in health care will necessarily lead to rationing, shortages of health-care providers, delay in treatment, and deterioration in quality of care.

Medicaid is a socialized medicine microcosm. In that system, price controls and bureaucracy result in rationing by deterring provider participation and delaying treatment, with subsequent deterioration in quality of care. Affluent individuals are able to access better health care outside of any government system.

And this "Medicare model" is what the EPI plan wants to take the "best elements" of, which they only enumerate later on as the federal government administering it.  How can the Left possibly say they care more for the less-fortunate in one breath, and in the other hold up health care rationing as "caring"?  This makes no sense at all.

Canada’s system currently compares favorably to the US in terms of a couple of cherry-picked statistics, but that’s like judging a pyramid scheme based on the first few generations.  They are losing on other fronts, like a drain of doctors.  And they are now at the tipping point of that pyramid scheme, where the choice is either returning a bigger role to the private sector (what Castonguay called "radical" and what conservatives call "sensible") or sliding further down the slope to socialism.  The Left, not wishing to have their utopian vision challenged, will no doubt push for the latter.

Read the rest of this entry

As the promise of Universal Healthcare continues to be sold to the American public by Democrats, the anecdotes fly. Look here; a case failure of our healthcare system! Look there; another person falls through the cracks!

The problem is, it’s the big picture that continues to put the lie to the selling of socialized medicine. As I’ve noted before, the system in Oregon will deny cancer patients life-saving or -extending medicine, but will gladly pay for life-ending “treatment”. You can decry all you want the profit motive of the private enterprise system, but with socialized medicine the profit motive is just as motivating, with a bigger bureaucracy larger than any insurance company you can name calling the shots.

And as Christians, is this the kind of system that we want to be encouraging? We’d have rationed healthcare (all socialized systems wind up here, sooner or later), equally poor quality, and a respect for life on par with Oregon’s.

But hey, it would be “equal”. Wonderful.

This bit of “hope” and “change”, however, has already been done on this scale. And how has it worked? Let’s talk to one of the founding fathers.

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Read the rest of this entry

Yeah, that’s what I want; permission from the government to pay for the medicine my doctor says I need.  That should never be in question, yet it is in the People’s Republic of England.

Cancer patients deserve to be able to pay privately for drugs without having their free NHS treatment withdrawn, a doctors’ leader said last night.

Baroness Ilora Finlay, president of the Royal Society of Medicine, said Labour’s policy of denying free care to patients who use their own money to buy the latest drugs went to the heart of the purpose of the health service.

Lady Finlay, a doctor who specialises in the palliative care of cancer sufferers, asked:

‘Can we justify spending billions of pounds on the relief of relatively minor conditions and deny patients with life-threatening disease the support of the NHS when they want to bridge the costs themselves?’

Oh no, say the proposal’s detractors.  That would be unfair.

The Government says allowing cancer suffers to pay for some drugs while receiving others free would create a two-tier health service, with patients on the same ward being given different drugs depending on their ability to pay.

But critics say it is ‘cruel and perverse’ to stop people using their own money to better their health.

The NHS has determined what cancer treatments it will and won’t pay for, and even if you could afford it, you’re not allowed to, unless you want to take on the full burden of payment for all your health care, and essentially forfeit the taxes you paid into the system. 

These are the kinds of debates you get into when you let the government run health care.  They pay, so they are in control.  Of everything.  One size does not and has never fit all when you’re talking about wellness.  Do we really want these sorts of debates in Washington?

[tags]socialized health care,England,Baroness Ilora Finlay,Royal Society of Medicine[/tags]

I really can’t add anything to Don Surber’s observations, other than to say that somehow I don’t think we’ll learn from the mistakes we made pillorying politicians who didn’t toe the AIDS funding line.

Question: What lesson does AIDS teach us about the dangers of government-run health care?

Answer: The politicization of health. AIDS was peddled as being able to happen to anyone, when in fact it was transmitted mainly via male homosexual sex. Anyone who dared challenge that was branded a “homophobe” and merrily sent on his way. The Independent reported on Monday: “A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organization has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.”

We also know that embryonic stem cell research is not going to make Michael J. Fox all better and that with a 90% 5-year survival rate for breast cancer in the USA (lower in Britain and other government-run health countries) women would be far better served with pink ribbon money going to lung cancer, which has less than a 20% 5-year survival rate.

But politically correct diseases will get the research money. Sickle cell anemia, yes. The heart disease that actually is the No. 1 killer of black people, no.

[tags]AIDS,health care[/tags]

Don Surber notes that the health care system run by the state of Oregon won’t pay for cancer drugs, but they’ll cover assisted suicide.  Socialized medicine is about the money just as much as "capitalized" medicine is.

One example cited is that of a woman who’s oncologist prescribed a drug to slow the cancer growth, but Oregon Heath Care wouldn’t cover it, though she could take the Permanant Exit Door(tm) with their blessing.  Instead, the drug company gave her the medicine for free.  Surber notes the moral of the story:

Socialists to cancer victims: Kill yourself.

Capitalists: Can’t pay? No problem.

Oh and the capitalists also pay the taxes that finance the socialist programs.

The New York Post has a column up on this topic as well, noting that the health care system that Ted Kennedy would like to see could actually have killed him (well, if he wasn’t a man of means).

Problem is, governments that promise to "cover everyone" always wind up cutting corners simply to save money. People with Kennedy’s condition are dying or dead as a result.

Consider Jennifer Bell of Norwich, England. In 2006, the 22-year-old complained of headaches for months – but Britain’s National Health Service made her wait a year to see a neurologist.

Then she had to wait more than three months before should could get what the NHS decided was only a "relatively urgent" MRI scan. Three days before the MRI appointment, she died.

Consider, too, the chemo drug Kennedy is receiving: Temodar, the first oral medicine for brain tumors in 25 years.

Temodar has been widely used in this country since the FDA approved it in 2000. But a British health-care rationing agency, the National Institute for Comparative Effectiveness, ruled that, while the drug helps people live longer, it wasn’t worth the money – and denied coverage for it.

Barack Obama – and other Democrats – have been pushing a Senate bill to set up a similar US "review board" for Medicare and any future government health-care plan.

After denying this treatment completely for seven years, the NICE (did whoever named it intend the irony?) relented – partly. Even today, only a handful of Brits with brain tumors can get Temodar.

And if you want to pay for Temodar out of your own pocket, the British system forces you to pay for all of your cancer care – about $30,000 a month.

So the lion’s share of the populace is stuck with sub-standard health care, and only the super-rich can get what they need.  I thought that’s what Michael Moore said our system was like.

And the column notes that it’s no better in Canada, where, if they live close enough to the border, they come here for the care they have to wait for over there. 

Socialized health care is simply not delivering for the countries that have it.  The fact is, the US system is delivering better medical care for more of its population in a timely manner than government-run ones are.  Why would we want to change that?

Yeah, I know, that’s a cliche line if there ever was one, but the smear by the New York Times on John McCain is only the latest, and perhaps one of the most egregious, example in this election cycle.  They endorsed him while preparing this story, and now that he has the nomination essentially sewn up, they tossed a bunch of innuendo about him from disgruntled former aides on the front page.  The blogosphere has been all over this story, but Captain Ed gives a good post-mortem on the whole thing today.

So what do we have? We have salacious but completely unsubstantiated gossip, combined with a rehash of at least one old Times smear, placed on the front page of what used to be the premiere newspaper in America. And what exactly does that do for the Times’ credibility for the rest of this electoral cycle? They can’t run anything on McCain now without it being seen in the context of what the Times itself calls a "war" between the Times and McCain. Keller and company declared war on McCain yesterday, and it fired a bazooka of effluvium as its opening salvo. They’ve marginalized themselves for the next nine months.

Ed notes earlier that the Times has done what the Republican party couldn’t; fire up the base for McCain.  Blogger punditry on the Left still wants to milk this for all what it’s worth, but it’s unlikely their words will be taken seriously when trying to prop up rumor as some sort of "I told you so" moment.  Not gonna’ happen. 

[tags]John McCain,New York Times,politics,liberal media[/tags]

And those who need blood transfusions pay the price.

San Jose State University’s decision this week to ban blood drives on the 30,000-student campus over discrimination concerns is drawing a gush of criticism from local blood banks.

Stanford Blood Center officials said they actually agree with San Jose State President Don Kassing that the federal Food and Drug Administration is wrong to prohibit blood donations from gay men.

But in a statement Friday, the center called his decision to suspend campus blood drives for that reason "a terribly misguided tactic that could have a devastating impact on the blood supply, and therefore, patients in our community."

Kassing’s stand — based on the university’s non-discrimination policy — has focused attention on a longstanding FDA rule that many say is overly restrictive. Critics, however, worry it sets a bad example that could exacerbate blood shortages if others follow his lead.

It’s one thing to stand up for your principles, and it’s certainly San Jose State’s prerogative to do this, even though I disagree with the principle.  But to shut down blood drives on campus is just entirely misguided and ignores the very real cost of this particular type of stand.

Gay rights groups on several college campuses, including Stanford’s, have held protests on the issue in recent years. At San Jose State, it was an employee’s complaint last year that prompted Kassing’s office to investigate whether the rule made blood drives discriminatory.

They decided it did, since gay men were being treated differently than other groups of people with similar risk factors.

There is no inherent "right" to give blood, but fair enough; let’s assume some sort of evil "discrimination".  Who’s paying the price?  Certainly not the blood banks.  While we’re never really awash in too much donated blood, they’ll still do their jobs as best they can.  Not the FDA.  How does this really affect them?

No, the folks who are really getting punished for this restriction (and pardon me if the regulations regarding the nation’s blood supply err on the side of caution) are those who actually need the blood.  The patients in hospitals who need it to live and who, I’m pretty sure, are quite happy not to have to worry about AIDS-tainted blood. 

These are "bleeding-heart liberals" who care more about hurt feelings over donating restrictions (and really, that’s the only harm I see here) than they do people whose lives may depend on them.  How revealing.

[tags]San Jose State University,Don Kassing,FDA,homosexuality,blood donations,AIDS[/tags]