Medication vs. stents for heart disease treatment – Harvard Health Publications

What’s the best way to “fix” a narrowed coronary artery? That question was the crux of a multimillion-dollar trial dubbed COURAGE, short for Clinical Outcomes Utilizing Revascularization and Aggressive Drug Evaluation. Its results, presented in the spring of 2007, stunned some doctors and seemed to shock the media, but we hope they won’t come as a surprise to readers: For people with stable coronary artery disease (clogged arteries nourishing the heart), artery-opening angioplasty was no better than medications and lifestyle changes at preventing future heart attacks or strokes, nor did it extend life.

via Medication vs. stents for heart disease treatment – Harvard Health Publications.

Filed under: Aging, Blogosphere, consumers, Death and Dying, Health and Exercise, Health Literacy, Health Policy, Healthcare Reform, Medical Research, News

States’ Policies on Health Care Exclude Poorest – NYTimes.com

It is dumbfounding!   It paralyzes the brain, the heart and almost all hope–without need for audacity.

Ph.D.s, advocates, health professionals, and good old moms and dads come to the agreement that healthcare needs changing and that sick people should get help–especially those who have difficulty getting it.  Presumably, it is logical and reasonable to think that many of these people are what we, all of us for hundreds of years, have called “the poor.”

Yet for as long as there have been those with and those without, those with often have the efficacy to get more and those without, perhaps by definition, get even less–always…

So here we are well into healthcare reform and the NYT is sounding the whistle on the haves once again–millions have been spent and the poor are somehow invisible once again when it comes to targeting the needs of those who are hurting and are having a difficult time getting good, reliable, continuos, patient centered, medical home care!  Go figure… or better yet, go read the New York times…

“The refusal by about half the states to expand Medicaid will leave millions of poor people ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance under President Obama’s health care law even as many others with higher incomes receive federal subsidies to …”

More via States’ Policies on Health Care Exclude Poorest – NYTimes.com.

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Could Statins Raise Diabetes Risk? – WebMD

Drugs have serious, and sometimes fatal, side effects and too often unintended consequences.  But we are sick, and health professionals somehow perform a cost benefit analysis and risk assessment and recommend that we take this drug or that to help us deal with our health condition or else.

Medicine is evolving, medicines are just one variable in a complex medical intervention process and people simply do not behave well or as needed very often.

Like variables that are introduced to repair a broken swiss watch, drugs enter our body system and fix some things yet disturb others.

Medical interventions, as drug therapies, change our blood chemistry and many of the vital functions of our major organs and personal health processes in some way…

As our body systems and organs fail under the weight of heredity, diet, behavior, etc., scientists perform research and through trial and error attempt to produce substances that can be introduced into our sick body systems to address a needed substance or desired cause and effect to make us better.

Our lives and bodies are similar, so research  has some success, in a controlled experiment, showing that symptoms can be changed or controlled.  However, implementing these medical solutions in the daily routine of our unique yet complex lives is another story.

Diet, exercise and behavior in general are also modified when we become sick and our body changes due to powerful drugs we are advised to take.

As each of us goes through life experiencing disease, we benefit from therapies, if we are “lucky” enough to have access to them, in varying ways.

“Certain statins — the widely used cholesterol-lowering drugs — may increase your chances of developing type 2 diabetes, a new study suggests.

The risk was greatest for patients taking atorvastatin (brand name Lipitor), rosuvastatin (Crestor) and simvastatin (Zocor), the study said.

Focusing on almost 500,000 Ontario residents, researchers …”

More via Could Statins Raise Diabetes Risk? – WebMD.

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The Curse of Reading and Forgetting : The New Yorker

For those of you who visit our blog (The Policy ThinkShop) regularly, you must have noticed that we often promote articles from the New Yorker magazine.  Recently a well written article caught the eye of one of our researchers which was written by a young man (IAN CROUCH) about the pleasures and vagaries of reading.  We thought it interesting because the writing seems mature and well thought out and greatly belies the relatively young age of the author.  This juxtaposition of age and naiveté against the well written ideas and use of language by this otherwise young and relatively inexperienced fellow calls into question the veracity of the magazine as a source of reliable information, wit and wisdom for the more discerning reader.

Are we being naive ourselves because this article and its author’s product hint at entertainment and literary skill? They seem to do so without the import and weight that time and wisdom bring to the often important weekly topics that are assigned to young writes today.  These are seemingly hurried assignments by magazine Execs that have to be creative and prolific at a rate only made possible by perhaps young and creative kids passing as the wise and testy intellectuals of yesterday’s paper media.

Read the article below and come back to the Policy ThinkShop

and tell us what you think…

“Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false sense of reading as conquest. As we polish off some classic text, we may pause a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another monster bagged. It would be somehow less heroic, as it were, to bend over and check the thing’s pulse. But that, of course, is the stuff of reading—the going back, the poring over, the act of committing something from the experience, whether it be mood or fact, to memory. It is in the postmortem where we learn how a book …”

More via The Curse of Reading and Forgetting : The New Yorker.

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Apple’s tax arrangements: Biting criticism | The Economist

If you are for regulation you say “Get some rules and enforce them, to stop the crooks!”  If you are against regulations you say “Rules are meant to be broken and the crooks will simply find ways around them.” Could it be both arguments are true?

Apple and other mega technology winners are cashing in on profits by avoiding domestic tax codes offshore.  They are also using sweatshop labor in Asia.  Ironically, their biggest customers are the “occupy generation” of so called young, highly educated and liberal.

“COMPANIES such as Apple and Google are renowned for their ground-breaking technological innovations. They have also put a great deal of effort into reducing the amount of tax they pay on the mountains of cash those innovations produce. Their tactics are now attractiboth arguments are wright?

Apple and other mega technology winners are cashing in on profits by avoiding domestic tax codes offshore.  They are also using sweatshop labor in Asia.  Ironically, their biggest customers are the “occupy generation” of so called young, highly educated and liberal.

 

via Apple’s tax arrangements: Biting criticism | The Economist.

Filed under: Blogosphere, consumers, Crimes and Misdemeanors, News, apple, Apple and taxes, Apple brand; Apple success; Value of Google; social media wars; tech wars; technology competition;

Yahoo: Rough and Tumblr | The Economist

Are you kidding me?  I want to scream Yahooo! and tumble on the floor…

What is this world coming to?  Our use of technology to share thoughts and images is creating billion dollar companies and changing commerce.  The internet economy and the gadgets that support it are impacting what we do, how we spend our money and how companies influence what we do and how we spend our money.

Yahoo is making an aggressive move to stay afloat with the cyber giants allowing it to tumble with the best…

Do you Yahoo and tumble?

“AT A recent conference, Ken Goldman, the chief financial officer of Yahoo, admitted that the internet giant had an aging audience and was looking for things to “make us cool again”. The firm’s senior executives appear to think Tumblr can give it a …”

MORE via Yahoo: Rough and Tumblr | The Economist.

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Vast Oklahoma Tornado Kills at Least 51 – NYTimes.com

Sad tragedy developing right now in Oklahoma as Tornado rips through communities and causes death and destruction.

“A giant tornado, a mile wide or more, killed at least 51 people as it tore across parts of …”

via Vast Oklahoma Tornado Kills at Least 51 – NYTimes.com.

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Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit – NYTimes.com

There may be no more important singular idea than the notion that corporations are persons.  Indeed, they are.

The Koch brothers continue to be the target of media attention and this time they are not strategizing or paying for it.  They are getting a freebee.  It appears that an environmental secretion from their pursuit of wealth function has piled up higher and deeper in the  eye of the media and in the middle of the “pristine” great lakes region.  Oil… of course.  Texas gold, or US black mud… or whatever earth exploiters and investors call it these days.  Environmentalists and world builders are colliding once again as they accuse one another about tree hugging the world on the one hand and exploiting it for  greed on the other.  In the meantime the real lesson at hand here goes unnoticed.

The key and central problem we see on the horizon today is not piles of environmental waste but the proverbial “free rider problem” which is as old as cave metaphors and necessary untruths.   It is big corporate money (to be sure corporate profits in the hands of ideologues) applied to our political discourse.  The NYTs points it out… but what are we to do?

“Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the …”

via Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit – NYTimes.com.

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Meg Jay has answers for all you 20 somethings dealing with the recession and transitioning into your currently uncertain circumstances, Fret no more!

Clinical psychologist Meg Jay has a bold message for twentysomethings: Contrary to popular belief, your 20s are not a throwaway decade. In this provocative talk, Jay says that just because marriage, work and kids are happening later in life, doesn’t mean you can’t start planning now. She gives 3 pieces of advice for how twentysomethings can re-claim adulthood in the defining decade of their lives.

via Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20 | Video on TED.com.

Filed under: News, Life transitions, survivingtransitions surviving in this nagging recession, Twenty something

Manager Uses Urban Dictionary to Defend UFC Fighter’s Gay Twitter Slur — What would Oscar Wilde and George Orwell say?

Educational attainment, the schools we attend, the neighborhoods we grow up in, and the family that shapes us, all represent the context which gives our language meaning, its connotations.  But the dictionary and the official meanings in it is an important shared frame of reference; or is it?  In search of meaning, intentions and aggression, we often find ourselves in front of the proverbial mirror of shame.  There always seems to be plenty of blame to go around when people are mean to one another.  But to complain about UFC culture seems to go beyond reason to a place where words or meaning may no longer hold much substance.

Life in today’s diverse America is becoming quite interesting and the language to explain it increasingly seems to fall short.  Public behavior, especially public behavior tied to corporate profits and corporate values, has ramifications beyond colloquialisms and local vernacular.   Because the spoken word is usually magnified and made more powerful when it is repeated by those who have the means, people who speak to the wrong person (s) or in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, get crucified.  Someone is always ready to listen and to register a complain for all the good people to weigh in and render a collective judgement.  What passes for conversation, if inelegant or far from eloquent, in the confines of comrades and buddies in local corners or man caves, can be quite the consternation in a public setting–even when it is said in a spectacle of violence, and mostly indecency, displayed for the public palate.  Apparently it is ok to beat another human being nearly to death but it is not okay to call them names?  What ever happened to sticks and stones will break my bones, etc., etc. etc.  We have reached the day when the tongue is mightier than the sword and the public sense of decency is measured by what Oscar Wilde himself may have seen as ironic and inane.

Tell us here at The Policy ThinkShop what you THINK???

“UFC fighter Nate Diaz (above) was suspended by the mixed martial arts body on Thursday night for earlier in the week using a gay slur against another fighter. That’s typically where a manager or someone else would step in and get the athlete to apologize and …”

via Manager Uses Urban Dictionary to Defend UFC Fighter’s Gay Twitter Slur.

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Pentagon chief vows to ‘fix’ military’s sexual assault problem | Reuters

The army has relied mostly on brawn for the greater part of its existence.  Its culture has been shaped by a resilient gender segregation that the dependence on male power has perpetuated.  However, today’s army is increasingly computer and technologically driven–gender may be mattering less and less.  Drones are replacing the boys but the boy culture changes much slower than the technology.  The values and psychology of today’s army boys is tethered to the attitudes which their parents have embedded in them.  Those ties cannot be broken.  They can be mediated by rules and incentives (negative and positive), but they cannot be completely eradicated in the average soldier who joins a tradition of male discipline and aggression honored and admired by the women in their lives and expected by their male heroes.

To be sure, today’s army would look like camp scouts compared to the savage herds that define the  history and origins of war itself.   But it is an uncomfortable place for young heroic women who grew up in an age that promises them equality in all areas of their lives.  Ironically, the fight to change the deep male traditions that form our fighting forces may be more difficult than field combat itself where they can pull a trigger or a button and wipe out a dozen men they may not even get to visualize or even hear.  Such is the challenge for today’s army–we have technological power and intellectual power beyond our enemies but the real enemy our army faces today is our inability to get along as fellow patriotic Americans or simply human beings.  Of course, that is also the reason we go to war against other nations in the first place.

“Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered top military chiefs on Friday to redouble their effort to address the problem of sexual assault, saying the frequency and perceived tolerance of the crime was …”

via Pentagon chief vows to ‘fix’ military’s sexual assault problem | Reuters.

Filed under: Blogosphere, Culture Think, Demographic Change, Discrimination, drone attacks, Gender, Gender Policy, Intolerance, News, regulations, Women's rights, Army and gender, gender relations in the Army, Men in the Army, war and men and women, women in the Army

Jason Richwine is Wrong about Mexican Americans

Reblogged from Hispanic Rage:

A recent immigration study by the Heritage Foundation brought to light a controversial dissertation by one its writers, Jason Richwine.  This dissertation essentially concluded that Hispanics (and blacks as well) have naturally lower IQs than their native Caucasian  counterparts, and that this is not a disparity that goes away within 2 generations and may in fact, simply not go away.  In other words, Latin Americans are essentially less intelligent than their native counterparts ( native as in American-born Caucasians, not Native Americans). 

Read more… 652 more words

Filed under: News