I don’t know why everyone in America is so obsessed with health care reform and why it causes endless debate. It seems obvious that there is a very simple and very fair solution to this endless reform rigmarole: let poor people die.
This may sound sort of harsh but bear with me. I didn’t arrive at this conclusion without a rigorous analysis of the facts and a long hard look at cold hard reality. And it’s this sort of objective thinking that’s really needed when it comes to health care reform. The one thing we must be careful not to do is get emotional about things like life and death to push a political agenda.
Take Jimmy Kimmel for example. On Monday the talkshow host delivered an emotional monologue about his new son, who was born with severe heart defects requiring emergency surgery. At the end of this he urged Americans to support the Affordable Care Act.
Kimmel noted that before the ACA was introduced, “if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you’d never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition. You were born with a pre-existing condition and if your parents didn’t have medical insurance you might not live long enough to even get denied because of a pre-existing condition. If your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make.”
While Kimmel’s story is obviously tragic he’s not exactly qualified to decide important policy issues for America. I mean, the guy is a celebrity, not a politician. Further, it is selfish to suggest that Americans should feel some sort of responsibility for their fellow citizens. It doesn’t matter how sick someone might be or how many pre-existing conditions they might have, if they’re hardworking and motivated they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find a way to pay for themselves.
As Joe Walsh, a former Congressman, tweeted on Tuesday afternoon: “Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn’t obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else’s health care.” Walsh, by the way, doesn’t even want to pay for his own kids’ healthcare – at one point he owed $ 117,000 in child support. Now there’s a guy who truly understands the American values of individual freedom and choice.
Oh, you know what? I give up. There’s no point attempting to satirize the sick state of America’s attitude towards health care – it’s already beyond parody. I mean, on Monday, Republican Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama implied that people with pre-existing health conditions just aren’t living their lives “the right way.” Kimmel’s son may have been fresh out of the womb but he must have done something wrong to be landed with heart problems, right?
And remember when Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz compared heath care to iPhones? “Americans have choices,” Chaffetz explained. “Maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest it in their own health care.” An iPhone costs around $ 800. A simple appendectomy can cost up to $ 180,000. But making your own choices? That’s priceless.
And then there’s the imitable Paul Ryan who reminded us that “Freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need. Obamacare is Washington telling you what to buy regardless of your needs.” He forgot to add the bit about freedom being the option to die when you can’t afford to buy what you want to fit what you need.
Health insurance simply doesn’t work on the free market. It’s not a bloody iPhone. In a free market, it makes no sense for insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. In a free market, it makes sense for CEOs of insurance companies to earn millions of dollars while poor people die.
Health insurance also isn’t efficient on a truly free market. According to the Bloomberg Health-Care Efficiency Index America has one of the least efficient health care systems in the world because it is so fragmented. Only Jordan, Colombia, Azerbaijan, Brazil and Russia ranked lower in the countries assessed.
For decades, Americans have been aggressively sold the idea that a national health care system is a socialist nightmare that runs counter to American values of freedom and choice. This started after the Second World War, when President Truman proposed a universal national health insurance program. His project failed in large part because it was fiercely attacked by the once-influential American Medical Association.
The AMA invoked fears about communism and branded the idea of universal healthcare as “socialized medicine” and un-American. Truman retorted “I put it to you, it is un-American to visit the sick, aid the afflicted or comfort the dying? I thought that was simple Christianity.” Well, it’s not the sort of Christianity that Republicans practice it seems.
You must have been born with un-operable heart defects not to agree with Kimmel’s statement that “if your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make.”
The fact that Kimmel can make headlines for pointing out what should be the obvious – in a supposedly civilized country – is just mind-boggling. The health care debate may seem complex but at its core it boils down to a simple question of who matters and who doesn’t. And it seems very clear that, in America, if you’re poor you don’t matter.
More than two thirds of people living in Mexico, Chile and Ecuador are overweight or obese, costing their economies tens of billions of dollars every year, driving rates of disease and straining health services, according to a new UN report.
While the number of hungry people in Latin America and the Caribbean has halved in the last 25 years, the region is now struggling to combat an obesity epidemic.
Changing diets, including more processed food that are high in salt, sugar and fat, along with more sedentary lifestyles have triggered a rising tide of obesity, experts say.
“The implications for the future of countries are frightening … undernutrition is declining, but overnutrition is expected to become the largest social and economic burden in the region,” the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said in a statement.
The report by the WFP and the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), said over the next six decades people being overweight and obese would cost Mexico an estimated $ 13bn a year, Ecuador $ 3bn and Chile $ 1bn.
Undernutrition, when people do not get enough food, and obesity – itself a form of malnutrition – are two sides of the same coin, and together they inflict a so-called “double burden” of disease on people and economies, the report said.
Undernutrition impairs child growth and brain development, while obesity can led to type 2 diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
“We now witness a worrying trend among vulnerable communities with cases of undernourishment and overweight simultaneously within the same families,” said Miguel Barreto, WFP’s regional director said in a statement.
“Both undernourishment and overweight represent a serious burden for the health of those families, that eventually translates into losses in productivity, and in pressure on the health and education systems in the country where they live.”
According to the World Health Organisation, obesity is an epidemic worldwide, killing 2.8 million adults every year, and obesity-related conditions now cause more deaths than hunger.
In Latin America, obesity is increasingly affecting the region’s poor, particularly women.
In Mexico, a country that faces one of the world’s most acute obesity crisis, 74% of women are obese or overweight compared with 70% of men, the report said.
The report urged food companies to play a greater role in combating obesity.
“The food industry has the opportunity to ensure the production, availability and accessibility of healthier food products,” it said.
Governments should also do more to promote exercise and health eating and place greater controls on food labelling.
The report noted Chile’s efforts to combat obesity, including an 18% tax on sugary drinks introduced in 2014 – one of the world’s highest – along with laws that restrict the advertising of unhealthy foods targeting children.
In 2014, Mexico also introduced a 10% tax on fizzy drinks, and 2016 research by the British Medical Journal found that the sugar tax led to as much as a 12% reduction in sales during the first year it was implemented.
Obamacare will be the law of the land for the “foreseeable future”, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, admitted in the aftermath of the abject failure of Donald Trump or the Republican party to “repeal or replace” Obama’s flagship Affordable Care Act (ACA) after seven years of bleating about it. The colossal and humiliating collapse of the proposals was met with jubilation last Friday by millions of people, especially the poorest and disabled, who were in line to lose access to healthcare if the American Health Care Act had been successful.
Watching the events unfold I wondered: what if there had been a similar sudden downfall of the austerity programme in the UK in those early days when the dire warnings of the harm it would unleash were being shouted from the rooftops? How many people would not now be turning to food banks or battling to access social care if austerity had been stopped in its tracks?
The political rollercoaster in the US as the new health bill failed to garner the necessary votes to be passed in the house (partly because rightwing hardliners wanted an even harsher version) was stunning. The debacle came against a backdrop of months of anxiety and fear at what would unfold if it were passed and, the closer the vote deadline got, the more it hit home how much ordinary citizens would suffer. Across the country, individuals and groups rose to oppose it, highlighting the potentially devastating consequences for access to reproductive health services and the disproportionate impact on low-income women and children. Disabled campaigners worked tirelessly to draw attention to the particular injustices they would face if the law passed. Last Wednesday, more than 50 disability rights activists were arrested in Washington DC for protesting against it.
As longtime campaigner Bruce Darling from the disability rights organisation Adapt explained, many people risked being placed in institutions rather than supported in their own homes if proposed cuts of $ 880bn (£705bn) to Medicaid, the government-funded programme that assists the very poorest and disabled people, went ahead. “Disabled people will die,” Darling told me.
Leading up to the healthcare vote I talked to people who were terrified about the impact of the new act. One of these was Marta Conner, a charity consultant from Virginia whose seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, has Rett syndrome, a neurological condition that severely limits her control over her body and means she needs round-the-clock care, expensive medication and specialist equipment. Conner was like many of those speaking out. She told me she felt “it was important to have our voices heard” because children like Caroline and millions more disabled and seriously ill people could lose a lifeline.
Paul Ryan on failed healthcare bill: ‘This is a disappointing day’
According to independent analysis from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the AHCA would have seen 24 million people lose health cover in the next decade – and sent insurance premiums for older people rocketing. And, just to rub salt in the wounds, it would have meant a doling out of tax breaks to the rich.
Nevertheless, despite the healthcare reprieve, if you are poor or disabled in the US right now, the fight for rights to support and quality care is far from over. For a start, the healthcare debate isn’t going to disappear: health insurance remains prohibitively expensive for many and even with the advances of Obamacare, it is not a universal system.
But there are other reasons why complacency is not an option. The attack on the poorest is coming on multiple fronts. Trump’s “blueprint” budget, which was also published this month, is a source of widespread anxiety. It has been overshadowed somewhat by the healthcare issue, but with clear echoes of cuts in Britain, initiatives that help the most vulnerable could be decimated if Trump gets his way.
In a similarly absurd vein to Tory claims of “compassionate Conservatism” while they slash budgets, preside over soaring levels of child poverty and pummel the NHS, Republicans have had the gall to argue that culling anti-poverty programmes such as after-school nutrition initiatives and Meals on Wheels are acts of compassion towards taxpayers. The question now is, can these radical proposals come crashing down as the healthcare bill did? For the sake of the most vulnerable, let’s hope so.
Donald Trump understood the average Republican voter well enough to disregard the party’s tired orthodoxies and still win the presidency. He figured out that most Republicans could care less about shredding entitlements and adhering blindly to Milton Friedman’s soulless economic agenda, as long as he was bashing immigrants. To this day, Trump still won’t fulfill Paul Ryan’s Ayn Randian fever dream of gutting Social Security and Medicare.
But he does promise to do Ryan’s bidding and repeal Obamacare, a move that is all but guaranteed, if successful, to make a lot more people who voted for him sick. This probably doesn’t worry Trump too much in the short term, since senior citizens in the West Virginian hollows and dead factory towns of Ohio can’t afford dues at Mar-a-Lago anyway. Republicans in Congress, unused to and uninterested in governing, want to tear up Barack Obama’s signature achievement as quickly as possible because that will fill the emptiness of a nihilist campaign vow.
Few rational people think Ryan’s American Health Care Act is anything but a disaster-in-waiting. Swapping a mandate for ungenerous tax credits and eventually killing the Medicaid expansion while preserving the most expensive and popular aspects of Obamacare (not discriminating against people with preexisting conditions and letting everyone under 26 remain on their parents’ health plans), the AHCA will strip coverage from 24 million people by 2026, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
Were Trump a cannier tactician – or just a very different man – he would try to co-opt a beleaguered Democrat party by actually bolstering Obamacare, triangulating to save his party’s historic majority. Imagine if Trump’s team seriously considered the flaws of the ACA and tore a page from the playbook of the most populist Democrats to address them.
We already know there’s an overlap between the people who voted for Obama and Bernie Sanders and those who eventually chose Trump. The desperate working class of this country, white and black and brown alike, are seeking answers as automation and globalization threatens to sideline more and more laborers forever. Trump can gratify his own galactic ego and do some good by actually saving them.
As it stands, Trump’s obsession with pushing Ryan’s catastrophic bill is the best gift an otherwise pathetic Democratic Party could envision. Republicans control every branch of government, two-thirds of governorships and far more state legislatures than Democrats, a level of dominance unseen in more than a half century. But the sooner any version of the AHCA becomes law – no sure thing as Senate Republicans and moderates in the House balk – the more furious the backlash against the party of Trump will be.
Democrats are giddy that Republicans are on the verge of owning a healthcare catastrophe. Smarter Republicans are catching on. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, usually a reliable ideologue, recently said voting for Ryan’s bill would put the Republican’s formidable House majority at risk.
As unlikely as this scenario would be, the Trump White House could heed Cotton’s warnings and change course. Support increasing subsidies for the lower and middle class people who truly find Obamacare unaffordable. Expand Medicaid coverage. Try to entice younger, healthier people to buy insurance or just force them. Discover the unreliable New York liberal lurking somewhere in that tanned hulk and back a cheap public option to compete with private insurers, driving prices down.
Rebrand the effort. Obamacare can become Trumpcare, except Trumpcare will actually work for everyone. For all his business failures, Trump does know something about marketing and reinvention. What’s the best way to stick it to his bête noire, Obama, and punish Democrats for good? Make Obamacare (Trumpcare) better.
It’s easy to snicker about a Republican president doing this. But Trump owes his party little, and its orthodoxies even less. He is a cult of personality, a ringmaster who can command his legions of followers to the end of the Earth, no matter what he says or does. The working class white Americans and Midwestern swing voters who put him in power won’t punish him for making government more generous and welcoming.
Trump can choose the courageous and practical path of attempting to usher in an era of affordable, universal healthcare coverage to a nation in profound need of both. Or he can punish the American people and his own party with Ryan’s dreadful legislation.
It was unsurprising to American women that their new president moved so swiftly to limit women’s access to reproductive autonomy. Less than a week into his regime, President Trump has reinstated a Ronald Reagan policy known as the “global gag rule”.
Abortion wars are, of course, a visible hallmark of American politics, where denying a woman’s right to choose has long been used as a wedge by Republicans to chip white voters away from supporting Democrat candidates. But while a thumping majority of Australians support women’s abortion rights – around 80%, according to reliable polls – the gap between what we say we believe in here and what we legislate is larger than many would imagine.
The danger of balance-of-power politics in our own system of government has made women’s bodies expendable to the politics of placating crossbenchers. Australia even implemented a “global gag” rule of its own when the former Liberal prime minister John Howard did a deal with conservative Catholic senator from Tasmania, Brian Harradine in 1996. Only when Obama overturned a Bush-era gag in 2009 did Labor’s Rudd government finally get around to rescinding Howard and Harradine’s work.
There’s an issue of restriction that also hits closer to home. For a pro-choice country, Australia’s provision of abortion is limited by a hodge-podge of clashing jurisdictional legislation and some old-fashioned under resourcing.
It may surprise many Australians to learn that even though the ACT, Tasmania and Victoria have recently passed legislation that prevents anti-choice activists harassing women around health clinics, only the ACT allows women to access safe, legal abortion-on-demand at any time.
Victoria and Tasmania both provide conditional services based on length of gestation; and South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory make it legal only with certain caveats. In New South Wales and Queensland, abortion remains in the criminal code.
It’s a position both defiant of popular opinion – in Queensland, four out of five voters support abortion rights – and reality. The Australian family planning organisation, Children by Choice, cites studies that half of Australian pregnancies are unplanned, and lists the complex reasons that compromise women’s access to effective contraception (beyond the very real possibility, too, of simple contraceptive failure): lack of agency in relationships, lack of information about contraception, lack of access to it in isolated or rural areas, cost, privacy concerns, cultural dislocation, effects of alcohol or drugs, the imposition of a medical practitioner’s beliefs. Violent relationships. Forced sex. Coercion.
But these considerations have not been enough to either rewrite the law or improve present circumstances in New South Wales, where campaigner Claire Pullen from Our Bodies, Our Choices NSW is one of many agitating for a realisation of rights. Although provision is made for women to access abortion if medical professionals and/or a court determine a pregnancy poses “serious harm” to the woman in question, there are, says Pullen, three barriers to access that remain in the way. “The first one is the legal barrier,” she says, “Since court rulings on this issue in the 1970s, no one’s been charged or convicted with administering or purveying an abortion. But you only need one activist police commissioner for that to end … and we’re due for a whole new set of police commissioners here.”
What this means is women seeking terminations are obliged into seeking referrals, as well as administrative and physical access to clinics that will perform surgical procedures. “The second barrier is geography,” Pullen explains, “Vast swathes of regional New South Wales have no accessible local services – at the one regional clinic in Albury, women patients have been subjected to notorious levels of harassment by anti-choice picketers.”
The third barrier, she says, is resourcing. “There are no public hospitals that officially offer abortion services in this state,” says Pullen, “there are only private clinics. New South Wales has some of the biggest public hospitals in Australia, with excellent ob/gyn doctors and services, but as they don’t get public funds to perform abortions, they’re more or less obliged to refer patients to the Marie Stopes clinic across the road.”
It’s not the only obstruction women face for meeting their healthcare needs. “We could also consider the stigma, the stalking and the public harassment that women endure when they’re accessing these services as a fourth barrier,” says Pullen. “Women outside clinics often face a line of people with graphic and inaccurate signs – they’re handed plastic foetuses by protestors, told they are going to hell and shouted at by fanatics. We don’t have an exclusion zone bill like they do in Victoria, although Penny Sharpe in the NSW upper house is fighting to get one through.”
The situation is similarly dire in Queensland, says Kate Marsh, the spokesperson for Children by Choice in Queensland. The geography of that enormous state combines with its archaic legislation to seriously limit women’s access to abortion providers, whether surgical or medicinal. “The understanding about when abortion is lawful is based only on case law,” says Marsh. “Because there’s no judicial definition of ‘serious harm’, many doctors are understandably reluctant to become involved in providing termination of pregnancy.”
If it seems crazy that the abortion pill – which accounts for almost 100% of abortions in Norway, and two-thirds in the UK, is only used in 23% of Australian terminations – legal restrictions explain why. “For medical abortions – which is the use of the abortion pill – you can only legally access those services if you’re before nine weeks gestation,” says Marsh of present Queensland law. “And outside of [Queensland’s] south east corner, there are only two providers of surgical abortions – in Rockhampton and Townsville.”
This isn’t just bad news for women in Cairns, or the state’s vast west, explains Marsh. “The services in Rockhampton and Townsville only operate one day a fortnight, because they fly doctors up from Brisbane and sometimes from interstate, depending on who is available.
“Even for women who identify their pregnancy early, to be able to confirm it with a doctor, access an ultrasound – and some of these women in remote communities have to travel just to get an ultrasound – and then wait for an available appointment at a clinic, that can push women past the point of the gestational cut-offs imposed at those clinics, which is 15 weeks. There are a couple of clinics (in the south east) that go up to 17 weeks, and there is one clinic on the Gold Coast that goes up to 19 weeks. After that, you’re flying to Melbourne.”
What this means for rural, isolated or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in remote communities is not only dangerous, but medically, physically, existentially disempowering. “It’s very much dependent on your local hospital, the individual personnel who staff that hospital and who you talk to when you get there,” says Marsh. “We have women who have been pregnant as a result of sexual assault, whose local hospital has refused to accept a referral from their GP to assess them.”
While Children by Choice fundraises to provide access to transport for women in these situations, their resources and their scope to help all who need it is limited. Beyond what her organisation can provide, receiving help, says Marsh, is a “postcode lottery” of geographical and economic privilege.
“Queensland health told a parliamentary inquiry last year that just under 300 abortions were performed in public hospitals in 2015 – and the figure for private clinics that same year was around 11,000,” says Marsh, “Women who live in metro areas and who have money, a credit card, or have friends and family to support them – they can get an abortion, no problem. But people who are disadvantaged, or who very young, may not have friends and family they can call on, women in remote areas or women experiencing violence – it’s a different situation.”
“It sounds like a nightmare,” I say to her when she tells me this.
A remarkable new study of the use of Botox in America has revealed that some women suffer a “crack-like” addiction to the process, as they attempt to top up previous treatments.
The number of women aged between 19 and 34 having the cosmetic procedure has risen by 41% since 2011, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Men are also increasingly turning to Botox – they now make up 10% of all users, leading to it being dubbed “Brotox”.
Many younger female users are persuaded by dermatologists that the drug – derived from botulinum toxin, the world’s most lethal neurotoxic agent – will stop wrinkles forming. But Dana Berkowitz, a 38-year-old gender studies professor at Louisiana State University, who has herself used Botox, argues in her book Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America that this expectation is based on a flawed idea of what Botox can do, leading to frequent return visits to the plastic surgeon.
She told the Observer: “It is and it isn’t preventative: it’s complicated. You’re injecting this neurotoxin into your facial muscles to prevent them from being able to move. If you can’t express an emotion for long periods of time, you don’t get certain lines.
“However, the problem is that Botox only lasts for between four and six months, so once you start seeing those lines form again you go back. Women I interviewed talked about it in terms of it being addictive. One said she was ‘crack-like’ about it.” Berkowitz added: “The problem for me is that in targeting younger women the doctors are trying to create this lifetime consumer.”
While researching her book, she read many magazine articles that quoted dermatologists, cosmetic surgeons and beauty “experts” talking about the preventative properties of Botox and the notion of starting early. These included statements such as: “You want to clean up your room before it gets too dirty.”
Berkowitz said: “It’s not the advertisements that are doing this marketing; it is happening in a much more insidious way.”
Botox was approved for cosmetic use in 2002 and 11 million Americans have since paid for it, at between $ 300 and $ 400 a session. Berkowitz interviewed women in their 20s and 30s and learned that many believe the claims about prevention. “I heard things like, ‘I use Botox because it’s a pre-emptive strike’, or ‘my friend is really smart: she’s started using Botox at 22 – that way wrinkles don’t even form’.”
Berkowitz explores the way the multibillion-dollar beauty and anti-ageing industry in the US boosts sales by cultivating feelings of inadequacy.
Many of the women she spoke to first chose to undergo the injections after hearing about a clinic offering it at a discount or going to a Botox party. More women between the ages of 22 and 40 use Botox than do women over 60, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.
Nicole Garcia, a beautician, first tried it when she was 26. She told Berkowitz: “I started using it because my mom actually told me I needed it. I always make this confused face when I am watching TV, and she is the one who noticed it and always pointed it out.”
Myka Williamson, a yoga instructor in New Orleans, was interviewed for the book when she was 31 and had just had her first child. She tried Botox when she was 29 at a friend’s house: “It was a Botox party, so that kind of was a little risky – not doing it at a doctor’s office but at someone’s house. But I was kind of feeling like I had nothing to lose and, you know, it was experimental, and I wanted to try it.”
Williamson had used it once since the party and was planning to have more sessions once she stopped breastfeeding.
While the drug was for the most part safe, said Berkowitz, there had been reports of side-effects, including blurred vision and drooping eyelids, and some of the women she spoke to had suffered headaches. Botox can also be a gateway to other, more invasive cosmetic procedures, such as dermal fillers.
Rachel McAvoy, a 30-year-old meteorologist from Minnesota, told Berkowitz: “I love Botox, but the only problem is that now the attention is taken away from my forehead and I’m starting to notice my parentheses around my mouth. I feel like I want fillers there.”
Berkowitz said that when she began researching her book she was 31 and strongly opposed to Botox. But she changed her mind over the years and had injections herself when she was 34.
She explained: “It was partly because I grew older. Also, as part of the book project, I read hundreds of articles on Botox in women’s magazines, which was the worst thing I could have done for my sense of self-worth.
“I was an active feminist and had stayed away from those. Then I interviewed women my age who told me I was stupid not to have it – and dermatologists, one of whom said I was being negligent.
“It was a very strange feeling to have something foreign taking over your face. The ability to move the top of your face is gone. Then people started complimenting me. It was like having a little secret.”
She said she has experienced both the appeal of Botox and the shame of using it – “not just for being vain but also for what I perceive as a personal failure in adhering to the core ethics of feminism”.
She had it again two years later and decided to tell her students: “I was giving a lecture on bodies and beauty culture and I remember thinking, ‘I’m such a fraud’. Here I was navigating very complicated tensions as a feminist, and so I wrote an essay and had them read it. It opened the door to a wonderful conversation about feminism and body culture. I am really happy that I came out to them.”
Berkowitz, who last had Botox before her wedding six months ago, thinks better role models are needed for women. “The body work that celebrities engage in is so public, for all the world to see – like in the Real Housewives shows and the Kardashians. How do we make ageing become cool?”
Asked to comment on Berkowitz’s argument that the preventative theory of having Botox is flawed, Dr Dan Mills, the president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, who has a practice in Laguna Beach, California, told the Observer: “It is true that the more you wrinkle the skin in one particular way, the more likely you are to get creases there, so I’m not going to say that it isn’t preventive.
“If you started in your twenties and did it your whole life, you wouldn’t have any wrinkles where your elevens [lines between the eyebrows] are. The more you use the muscles, the more you will see the wrinkles, so there is truth to both sides of this argument.”
Allergan, the company that owns the Botox brand name, did not respond to a request for comment.
A terrible superstition holds people around the world in its grip. Ministers of religion, lawyers, architects, men renowned as brilliant scientists, physicians (particularly, physicians), University professors, middle-class people, working-class people, people of all nationalities, are its victims.
I was one for a very long time. I really and truly thought that what my doctor said was gospel and never questioned him.
What is this superstition? It is that health may be obtained and maintained and diseases “cured” by drugs, medicines, and remedies (1). They have not taken the pains to investigate, in an unprejudiced manner, this absurd and dreadful belief.
So, what we have is the physician, nurses and drug stores (by the way we do not have “drug stores” anymore. They call themselves “Pharmacies”. Other medical specialists all engaging in these false hopes.
Frightful suffering and bereavement are the common lots of mankind, except for the few who have released themselves from this superstition.
When a theory of health is presented of the ways and means to “Cure” something or they are going to “find a cure, so give us more money” these stories are heralded as a great triumph of “science”
Yet the first principles of science are violated right in the beginning and in the entirety of such a theory.
If an article is written which lays down in simple words the rules of health, means by which diseases can be obviated and recovery from diseases can take place, very few orthodox journals of high circulation will print it.
Eat the truly good food, breathe good air, drink pure water, exercise, maintain optimistic and pleasant thoughts, and therefore enjoy fantastic health (2). Give our cells the proper nutrition and our immune systems will strengthen. Our immune system will then rebuild our body and we will enjoy the freedom of no illnesses.
There are now millions who are beginning to rebel against what we might almost call the atrocities suffered because of this superstition.
Many who are ill and are being subjected to the remedies and poisons that are administered to them. Drugs in large containers have the skull and crossbones on them but when we get the little bottles as “prescriptions” it is not there anymore.
My mother was told in the 70’s to use an aluminum type product as a cheap deodorant. She did and I believe it was a contributing factor in the way she changed in later years. Aluminum is causing Alzheimer’s.
While drugs may get immediate temporary relief, you will feel and know that the disease is becoming more and more serious.
I do not have final figures but look around. In the early years of 1900, it was almost unknown to have heart troubles. They did not spend time on it in medical schools. All the major diseases of today, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, the list goes on and none were minor. In 1960 one in 20 had arthritis. Now it is 1 in 3.
Same with cancer. Now children are commonly getting it. Heart troubles are killing us faster than ever.
The United States is way down in the world as a healthy nation. Have you ever known of so many people with so many health issues? Baby boomers are filling our hospitals with more sickness.
Give your body what it needs in minerals, vitamins and enzymes and exercise, drink pure water, let no negative thoughts or people into their lives and feed our cells to let our immune system take over the job that God meant it to do.
If our immune system is not getting the proper nutrition we are in trouble.
Will this happen overnight? No, you cannot stop taking the drugs you are on without the consent and help of your doctor. Too many side effects can occur.
You did not get in the condition you are in overnight. You will not get into a state of health overnight. But start now and by summer or sooner you will not know yourself.
Start promoting healthy cellular replication, get strong muscles, have clear breathing, increased energy levels and have body fitness.
Get supplements that are advanced whole food supplements (3). Make an impact on your health today. Feel the results and get VIBRANT HEALTH.
Stop this insane habit of all cooked foods and foods pre-made. We have gotten into the habit of fast is better. Fast is not better. It costs more in dollars when you buy it and cost thousands in medical bills later on. 1. Death by Medicine 1st Edition, by Debora Rasio (Author), Dorothy Smith (Author), Carolyn Dean (Author), (Contributor)
2. Paleo for Beginners: Essentials to Get Started, Paperback – October 29, 2012 by John Chatham
After an election dominated by rhetoric and anti-establishment sentiment more than policy specifics, the upset of 8 November left open many questions as to how President-elect Donald Trump would steer the nation. More questions still were raised when it was suggested that, contrary to his campaign promise, some aspects of the Affordable Care Act might, indeed, be salvaged. Such hopes have been dashed.
Among Trump’s cabinet announcements this week is that of health and human services, for which he has chosen representative Tom Price, a staunch ACA and reproductive choice opponent. While qualified for the position as a long-time physician and member of Congress, much of his political record is deeply troubling in looking to the future of the American healthcare system.
To a long-time observer of American politics, it comes as little surprise that there is ample politics in policy. But that can be troubling when it comes to healthcare. After all, cancer, heart disease and diabetes do not discriminate among Democrats and Republicans. Physicians treat patients of different ideologies and socioeconomic status, and following the Hippocratic oath, they look after the safety and wellbeing of those who are in their care.
To be sure, physicians have their own policy and partisan preferences, though typically they are not (or should not be) on display in an exam room. Indeed, there are matters of healthcare that may well be in contest with a doctor’s partisan politics, such as the virtues of Medicaid expansion under the ACA or access to women’s health clinics that provide abortions alongside cancer screenings. While scaling back the ACA and restricting access to clinics such as Planned Parenthood is a popular talking point for members of the Republican party, many physicians see the benefit that their patients reap from obtaining insurance regardless of preexisting conditions.
Yet Price’s voting history places partisanship above patient wellbeing. In 2015 he co-sponsored HR 3134, the Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015. He has additionally voted against Infant Mortality Pilot Programs (2010), Funding to Combat Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis (2008); Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act of 2007, and he has voted in favor of repeals of provisions of the ACA.
Among the most deeply partisan issues of the recent election cycle was the expansion versus repeal of the ACA which – for all its faults, like the continued underinsurance of millions – expanded the number of insured Americans by approximately 20 million. Price, who practiced as an orthopedist for over 20 years, should know the impact that insurance coverage has on someone’s willingness to pursue treatment for injuries, and the sometimes dire consequences of going untreated due to lack of insurance.
Despite this, he has sought to repeal the ACA, challenging the “stifling and oppressive federal government,” with the GOP replacement plans, which are all estimated to reduce the number of insured Americans. If there were any doubt as to Trump’s seriousness about dismantling the ACA, those doubts have now been vanquished.
Moreover, while opposition to abortion access is a position commonly held among those on the right, the Planned Parenthood clinics that Price has sought to defund provide a range of affordable family planning services that contribute to the physical and economic well-being of the nation. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy estimated that the cost to taxpayers associated with teen childbearing was $ 9.4bn in 2010 alone.
My own research has demonstrated that greater access to Planned Parenthood clinics is associated with marked declines in teen childbearing, with additional effects of curbing sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. These are outcomes that are surely beneficial from both medical and economic standpoints, and yet even as a physician this information has yet to sway Price from his vehement support for defunding the organization. He has even going so far as to dispute that any women struggle to afford birth control.
One cannot expect a cabinet appointee to be devoid of partisan preferences. And unlike the selection of Jeff Sessions for attorney general, Price, for all his staunch conservatism, does not present existential threats to democratic institutions, but rather strident challenges to policy issues.
But the consequences of Price consistently ignoring empirical evidence in favor of widely-used healthcare programs – despite his medical expertise – have both vast economic and human consequences that will be all the graver upon his presumptive confirmation.
This month, Mental Health America (MHA) shared some staggering new numbers related to depression in America. In 2014, the nation’s community-based nonprofit leader in mental health support, recovery and advocacy began screening people for mental health issues using their online, scientifically-based mental health screening tools.
To this date, 1.7 million people took advantage of the screening opportunity.
Most noteworthy, the results of Mental Health America’s screening programs shed a light on the current depression epidemic in America and serve as a wake-up call to the country.
Depression in America
The depression screen is one of nine mental health screens provided online by Mental Health America.
Especially relevant results found by MHA’s depression screening:
About 1,400 people screen for depression every day.
Sixty-six percent of screeners are under 25; 32 percent are under 18.
Fifty-nine percent report to having serious depression.
The youngest screeners have the highest scores compared to any other age group — 37 percent of 11-17 year olds score in the range for severe depression.
Thirty-two percent of all screeners report they have significant thoughts of suicide or self-harm.
Among screeners who self-identify as youth and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, 41 percent score for severe depression.
After review, Mental Health America’s president and CEO, Paul Gionfriddo, emphasized the importance of these recent findings on depression in America.
“The sheer volume of individuals seeking mental health screening and supports is astonishing. But when you couple this volume with these facts — that the depression screening tool is the most common screening tool they use; that most depression screeners are young; that two in every five depression screeners have severe depression; and that the majority of people coming to our screening program have never been diagnosed with a mental health condition — this is a national wake-up call.”
Mental Health Screening Programs
Mental Health America’s screening programs include anonymous, scientifically-based screens for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, anxiety, early psychosis, alcohol and substance use, a parent and youth screen, and a work health survey.
Furthermore, after an individual completes their screening, they receive immediate results, education, resources and linkage to MHA affiliates. Along with the results of their screens, the participants provide MHA with valuable demographic and survey responses that allow the organization to further support their mental health policy and education efforts.
Mr. Gionfriddo adds the need for improvement in mental health services.
“We must demand better mental health services — practitioners, employers, and educators need to offer mental health screening to all children and adults and policy makers must pass meaningful mental health reform legislation that emphasizes earlier detection and integrated services for recovery.”
Plans for the Future
MHA plans to launch a new “Screening-to-Supports,” (or S2S) initiative in the next year. This new initiative will include informational and educational resources. Plus, people will benefit from receiving referrals to services and supports.
In addition, people will monitor their mental health with do-it-yourself tools. And engagement with others who are experiencing similar conditions is included in the S2S initiative.
Gionfriddo concluded as follows.
“S2S will use digital and other resources to help people in need onto pathways to recovery. The reason is simple — because this is what 1.7 million screeners have asked from us. They want help, and we want to respond. This officially may be Mental Illness Awareness Week, but for us and for so many Americans, every day is Mental Health Day. We need to address mental illness in this country Before Stage 4.”
Mental Health Screening Tools
In conclusion, one of the quickest and easiest ways to determine whether you are experiencing symptoms of a mental health condition is to use the mental health screening tools provided by Mental Health America.
Mental health conditions, like depression or anxiety, are real — they’re common and treatable. However, recovery is also possible.
Finally, following a screening, information, resources and tools are provided for you. In addition, you can also discuss the screening results with your doctor or healthcare provider.
Dr Potter who runs the HRC clinic in Newport Beach in California, said 80 per cent of couples from Britain are choosing to have a girl.
It had been feared that allowing sex selection would lead to an imbalance between the genders with fewer girls born for cultural reasons.
However Dr Potter said the women he sees are desperate for a girl having grown up playing with dolls and always imagined they would have daughter.
He told the Telegraph: “Some have only one child but most have two or three of the same gender. The process is driven by the mother who has identified with little girls since her own childhood and has always had a place for a daughter. When they do not have one, it is like a death and they grieve for their little girl.”
Dr Potter’s patients often do not need fertility treatment in order to conceive but go through the process so that the resulting embryos can be screened and the chosen sex transferred to the womb.
The whole process costs around US$ 15,000 and requires a 12 day stay near the clinic.
Dr Potter said: “I think that pregnancy termination as a method of gender selection is not acceptable but I also believe that is it not for me to impose my values on other people.
“I believe women should have reproductive freedom and that should include selecting the gender of their child if they wish. But in countries like the UK where the government pays for some IVF, taxpayers’ money should not be used to people can have a boy or a girl because that is what they want. That is inappropriate.
“I have had patients come to me from the other side of the world who have never been on a plane before and have saved up for a long time, it is really very important to them.”
He said the arguments against sex selection using IVF were mostly ‘absurd’ and focus on it ‘interfering with God’s will’ or somehow sexually discriminating against the embryo.
One in ten of Dr Potter’s patients are now seen for gender selection with the largest numbers of couples from outside America coming from Australia, the UK and Canada. In these countries, most couples want a girl, he said.
Some patients travel from China wanting to have a boy but many also want twins, with one of each sex.
One British patient who asked to be known only as Hayley said: “I’d always wanted a little girl but logistically, we didn’t want lots of children, we only wanted three, so we though we’d go down this route.
“My husband said “you can have one more baby” at which point I said, if I’m having one more I’ll make sure it’s a girl.
“I just think I’ve always wanted a mother daughter relationship. Not to take away from what I have with my sons which is lovely.”
Hayley and her husband Greg already had two boys, Bobby, six and Christopher, four. After searching the Internet, Hayley found lots of couples were looking for the same, and had coined the phrase, ‘gender dreaming’.
She said: “It took a lot of soul searching to go to the US to be honest – it took us a long time and we had to do lots of talking before we decided.
“Dr Potter was fantastic right from the care you receive in the UK. He was reassuring, really professional and everything you could want.”
“Of the eggs we created, we had 6 healthy embryos, 3 girls, 3 boys.”
Hayley chose to have one female implanted, which led to a successful pregnancy.
“I still can’t quite believe it, I’ll believe it when she’s here.
“The remaining embryos are frozen, they’ll probably remain frozen for a while. At some point we’ll make a decision, and I’m not sure what they decision will be.”
“We spent £22,000 on treatment but we never think about the cost, it was worth every penny.”
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority which regulates fertility treatment in Britain carried out a review of sex selection in 1993 and again in 2002. Sex selection for social or family balancing reasons is illegal under the amended HFE Act which came into force in 2009.
Dick Durbin, the second-most powerful U.S. Senator in Washington, is upping the ante and “chiding” a sudden flurry of U.S. companies considering taking advantage of a loophole that allows them to avoid higher corporate taxes here by reincorporating overseas.
Amid mounting Congressional criticism of so-called inversions, the Illinois Democrat, No. 2 leader in the U.S. Senate and close ally of President Obama’s this week introduced his Patriot Employer Tax Credit Act that would offer a tax credit of about $ 1,200 per employee to corporations that kept their headquarters in the U.S. To get the credit, companies would also have to provide their workers with “fair wages” and retirement benefits, Durbin said.
The loophole already costs the U.S. Treasury $ 50 billion a year, Durbin said.
Walgreen Walgreen Co. (WAG), based in the north Chicago suburb of Deerfield, is nearing the completion of its acquisition of European drugstore giant Alliance Boots, and said Wednesday an inversion is still a possibility as the two companies consolidate “cost structures.” Meanwhile, Abbvie (ABBV), the drug business spun off from Abbott Laboratories Abbott Laboratories (ABT) last year, is considering an inversion as well as part of its effort to buy Ireland-based Shire Shire. Abbvie is located a few miles north of Walgreen along the Tri-State Tollway.
Durbin, who said his comments weren’t directed at a particular company, said he hasn’t called Walgreen or Abbvie executives directly but he’s clearly bothered and his rhetoric is taking on a personal tone. “When I run into their executives, I chide them,” Durbin said.
Other global brands based in the U.S. such as Pfizer Pfizer (PFE) and Medtronic (MDT) have attempted an inversion or are working toward one. Other members of Congress such as U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, and lobbies are beginning to call out the companies by name in an onslaught of statements and press releases with Levin saying a Walgreens inversion would cost taxpayers $ 4 billion over five years.
“Walgreens faces several obstacles to undertaking an inversion, including growing political opposition to companies exploiting this tax loophole,” Nell Geiser, associate director of Change to Win Retail Initiatives, a union-backed group, said in a statement. “Will Walgreens—a company which relies on taxpayer supported programs for nearly a quarter of its revenue—risk the mounting political and consumer blow black against tax avoidance?”
Even if Walgreen, Abbvie and others follow through with an inversion, members of Congress say a change to the tax code could be retroactive. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat has said as much, putting companies on notice that any inversions would have short-term benefits if the loophole is eventually closed.
But Congress would still have to come up with a bipartisan effort to change the law and that’s been a difficult feat on a host of issues.
Durbin’s Patriot Employer Tax Credit Act proposal would “grant a tax credit equivalent to 10 percent of the first $ 15,000 of wages earned by each employee—worth about $ 1,200 per qualifying worker depending on the company’s federal effective tax rate,” the senator’s office said.
Companies would have to meet the following criteria:
“Maintain headquarters in the U.S. if the company has ever been headquartered in America, has not inverted to avoid U.S. taxes, maintain or increase the number of workers in the U.S. compared to the number of workers overseas, and does not decrease the number of workers through the use of contractors.”
“Pay at least 90% of U.S. workers an hourly wage equal to 150% of poverty for a family of three,” or about $ 14 an hour or $ 30,000 a year
“Offer Affordable Care Act-compliant health insurance to employees.”
“Pay the difference between regular salary and military compensation for all National Guard and Reserve employees called for active duty and have a plan in place to recruit veterans.”
“Have a plan in place to recruit employees with disabilities.”
The U.S. could save a lot more than $ 300 billion annually if employers adopted approaches that promoted well being, prevention of continual illness and measured progress of “working-age” individuals like they did their financial overall performance, according to a new report.
The examination, created by some properly-known public health advocates brought together and funded by The Vitality Institute, mentioned employers could conserve $ 217 billion to $ 303 billion annually, or five to seven percent of total U.S. yearly health spending by 2023, by adopting strategies to aid Americans head off “non-communicable” conditions like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory concerns as well as psychological well being.
To increase, the report’s authors say firms ought to be reporting wellness metrics like BMI and other worker well being statuses just like they frequently report earnings and how an growing quantity of companies report sustainability. Companies need to be needed to integrate well being metrics into their yearly reporting by 2025, the Vitality Institute said. A link to the whole report and its suggestions is here.
“Companies ought to consider the wellness of their staff as 1 of their best assets,” mentioned Derek Yach, executive director of the Vitality Institute, a New York-primarily based organization funded by South Africa’s greatest overall health insurance organization, Discovery Constrained.
People involved in the report say its suggestions come at a time the Affordable Care Act and employers emphasize wellness as a way to enhance quality and reduce charges.
“Healthy staff are far more productive, resulting in improved monetary functionality,” Yach stated. We believe this will positively influence the health of each employees and the corporate bottom line.”
The Institute brought with each other a commission linked here that consists of some executives from the wellness care sector and other people who perform in academia and enterprise. Commissioners came from Microsoft Microsoft (MSFT) the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation drug and health-related gadget giant Johnson & Johnson Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) well being insurer Humana Humana (HUM) and the U.S. Department of Health and Humana Services.
The Vitality Institute said up to 80 % of non-communicable conditions can be prevented via existing “evidence-primarily based methods” and its report encourages the nation’s policymakers and legislative leaders to boost federal paying on prevention science at least 10 % by 2017.
“Preventable persistent ailments this kind of as lung cancer, diabetes and heart condition are forcing large numbers of people to exit the workforce prematurely due to their own bad well being or to care for sick relatives,” said William Rosenzweig, chair of the Vitality Institute Commission and an executive at Physic Ventures, which invests in health and sustainability tasks. “Yet private employers commit much less than two % of their complete overall health budgets on prevention. This trend will stifle America’s financial growth for decades to come unless of course overall health is embraced as a core value in society.”
Asking yourself how Obamacare will affect your overall health care? The Forbes eBook Inside Obamacare: The Repair For America’s Ailing Overall health Care System answers that question and a lot more. Available now at Amazon and Apple.
As part of the Guardian’s ongoing investigation into American psychological health care, we asked you to assist us illustrate the effects of the lack of entry to psychological health remedy. We obtained an overpowering response.
Right now, we’re publishing five stories that show the individual and materials price that the families and pals of the mentally unwell need to get on when caring for a loved one.
‘My mom texts me daily to make confident I’m nevertheless alive’
I’m a junior at ASU learning Filmmaking and Fine Artwork, and I am living with Bipolar Disorder Type Two Rapid Cycling. I see a psychiatrist and psychotherapist on a weekly basis these appointments are an indispensable portion of my remedy. My drugs are consistently getting adjusted to locate a stability, and psychotherapy brings me awareness of the patterns of my sickness. Medication and professionals, nonetheless, make up only half the arsenal to fight my sickness. My family and buddies are my greatest allies. They revitalize me from the eerie brokenness of depression, and properly preserve me grounded in the electric-fury of hypomania.
I have been diagnosed and seeing healthcare professionals for above 18 months now. My father is a police officer and receives excellent healthcare advantages. I’m still on his insurance plan and he covers the co-payments of the doctor’s visits.
The month to month value of seeing each of my medical doctors after a week, is about $ 400. In addition medicine charges about $ thirty a month. That’s almost $ 8,000 for 18 months. Plus, $ 350 for a ten-day hospital remain right after a suicide attempt.
Prior to I was diagnosed or received any type of remedy I was dysfunctional, indifferent in direction of my long term, suicidal, self-destructive, self-medicating, perpetually moody, agitated, and I increasingly isolated myself from society. Health care treatment offered me the capacity to counter my sickness, my family and pals became the excuse I constantly advised myself to hold fighting the affliction. I’m very convinced that I would not be alive right now if it wasn’t for other individuals looking out for me and exhibiting kindness.
I try not to believe of myself as a burden on other individuals, despite the fact that I am sure it’s correct to an extent.
I’ve value my mother and father a little fortune, and I have seen it affect them financially. They’ve had to change their life-style, to consider care of me, to be there for me. My mother texts me daily to make certain I’m even now alive.
I’m not cured, mine isn’t a story of transcendence. I do not think I’ll ever break out of my mental prison. I do not even know how a lot of much more years of existence I have left, but I can say that I was not forgotten or ignored, my lifestyle was acknowledged by other individuals as getting sufficient worth to at least try and battle. – John, Phoenix, Arizona
‘When my daughter killed herself, I died too’
My daughter had been diagnosed with clinical depression as early as eight many years previous. Living in San Diego, we had entry to exceptional healthcare. We took her regularly to therapists as she was on my superb wellness insurance program. Her depression, with medication, was manageable.
She did properly in school, even however we had a number of problems with her moodiness. She went on to college, graduated, and no longer qualified for my overall health strategy. She received a temp task as a teacher for a 12 months, then was out of a work.
I began paying out for her doctor’s visits and medicine. Right after investing above $ 40,000 bucks that I’d borrowed from my IRA, I was tapped out.
She had to depend on our county’s public psychological health care to get the treatment and meds she essential.
There are some superb and effectively-meaning people that perform for counties in mental wellness, but they are so overburdened and burnt out they can only do so much.
At the age of 33, my daughter committed suicide. I died too.
I was unable to proceed doing work. I wished to function until I was 75, but retired at 72 since I just could not do it anymore. I worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and located myself just sitting and staring at a computer display all day and accomplishing little. That was five many years ago, and my nightmares are now just starting to subside and I can perform fairly nicely now. – Jim Fawcett, Houston, Texas
Open contributions: Mental well being in America: a crisis in care
‘It was a miracle when we discovered my brother a spot to live’
If you would have told me 25 years ago that my loved ones and I would still be caring for my brother, I wouldn’t have believed you. He suffers from schizophrenia and has wreaked havoc on our loved ones emotionally, physically and financially.
When we found him Section 8 housing in San Rafael 12 years ago, it was a miracle and only happened simply because we knew somebody who knew someone.
This 12 months, the Non Smoking Ordinance rendered him homeless. The guy who drafted this legislation told me he ‘just did not think about’ how the law would affect the mentally and physically disabled folks who simply are unable to quit.
The people who owned and managed the housing had been so compassionate and tolerant towards him, and experimented with in vain to get him to stop smoking on the premises ahead of he was kicked out. But he really didn’t belong there. He belongs in institutionalized housing and care.
Now, we are housing him in a warehouse, attempting to care for him. Families must not have to give psychiatric care for their loved ones. It just does not work. I am trying to scrape collectively a loan to purchase him a spot so that he cannot get kicked out yet again.
A man or woman struggling from untreated schizophrenia simply does not have the capability to make decisions on their personal to benefit them. I firmly believe in compassionate but forced medicine followed by care.
Folks never have a clue of the horror you have to go by way of to care for a loved one particular struggling with mental sickness. I can not truly speak to individuals about it since they just never recognize. Essentially, if you are mentally sick in America, you are shit outta luck. – Robert Butlerman, Bay Region, CA
‘In a nation with a greater psychological overall health care, I may well have been relieved by the understanding that my brother was being cared for, rather than the reality that he is dead’
My family members was briefly involved in caregiving for my brother, before he tragically ended his personal lifestyle. Soon after he died, I read his journal and discovered he was living a nightmare: convinced he was in hell, that we had been demonic forces out to get him, and also struggling from visions of self-grandeur.
In his early twenties, he began exhibiting signs of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which exacerbated rapidly and aggressively. To our excellent distress, there was little we could do. John (not his genuine identify) was paranoid and distrustful, and resistant to any form of make contact with from us.
In 2010, the police found John living in an airport. My mom was able to convince him to come home with her, and our household was reunited for Christmas, which would be our final together.
It was heartbreaking to witness him in this kind of a state of misery and to not be ready to support him. On Christmas Eve, in a fit of rage, John threatened to destroy himself if my parents did not give him funds for a plane ticket, we had the wonderful relief of hearing the words that we knew could get him forcibly institutionalized. We known as the police and had been able to have him brought to the hospital by ambulance.
My brother was launched from the hospital right after ten days, which is not even enough time for a proper medication routine to get effect. A mere month and a half following he was launched from the hospital, he turned up at a San Francisco hospital, in which he checked himself in and was discovered to be dehydrated. He was provided some type of remedy and promptly released. From the hospital, he headed directly to the Golden Gate bridge, which he jumped off.
Only due to the fact of John’s hospital go to, from which he was still sporting a wristband, had been authorities ready to recognize his physique.
Even though I would give anything at all to have my brother back, it is terrifying to picture a lot of more years of the anxiety we skilled that Christmas, attempting to continually chase John down and hold him alive. He was suffering horribly throughout that last 12 months daily life was torturous for him, and his inability to care for himself produced every thing even more painful. When he was alive, every single minute of each day I wondered, “Exactly where is he now? Is he in pain? Is he frightened? Is he hungry or thirsty? Is he protected?” I worried about the long-phrase value – monetary and emotional – to my family members to hold him alive. I am no longer plagued by these inquiries. In a nation with a greater mental well being care technique, I may well have been relieved of them by the understanding that he was getting cared for, rather than the knowledge that he is dead. – Amy, Chicago, Illinois
‘I have provided up my own enterprise and we have been through bankruptcy’
I am the caregiver for a mentally ill daughter with severe OCD, PTSD, and depression. I am every day assistance for checking her moods, administering her medicines, and driving her to appointments. I am the 1st line to contact emergency solutions in crisis, or to consider her to the emergency room at the hospital.
She has been unwell for 10 years. She is a university graduate who had been holding down a task and living independently. Our expertise with the psychological overall health program is that it is uneven and inconsistent with help and providers. There is a lack of agreement as to her best treatment and what neighborhood solutions exist.
I left my task so I could provide 24/seven support for the last decade. I have had to give up my very own company and we have been by means of bankruptcy. Some regional providers for “adult daycare” have come available in just the final 12 months where I can get some breaks.
Conservatively we have been out $ 80,000 a 12 months in my lost earnings and $ 60,000 in hers. Remedy and medicine fees for her run approx. $ 2,000 month to month.
I have some factors of depression in my personal existence due to the massive shift in family members life-style and targets. There has been great strain on our marriage, and we have lost some pals who did not realize what we have been going through. My profession is dead-ended and now all I have waiting for me is eventual retirement.
Our daughter lives with us so there is continuous stress in the property. Vacations have been non-existent for years now. We live extremely frugally.
It is very peculiar that there is nevertheless great social stigma connected to psychological health ailments and their therapy. Even even though fantastic strides have been manufactured in understanding brain condition, there is even now a persistent component in society that does not feel psychological illness exists and that individuals just need to have to “snap out of it.” It is viewed as some type of moral failure, as opposed to a brain that has a distinct ailment method going on that can be identified and handled. Thank God for NAMI and the function they do educating the public and supporting families. – Rob, Gresham, Oregon
It’s official: Washington D.C. is the healthiest city in America. That’s large information for the Capitol, and for Minneapolis-St. Paul, which acquired demoted to #2 soon after holding the leading spot for 3 straight many years.
But what makes one particular city a healthy location to live, and one more the opposite? That’s what’s actually exciting about the American College of Sports activities Medicine (ACSM)’s considerably-anticipated 2014 report ranking the healthiest metropolitan places in America.
Exactly where is your city ranked? Read through on to uncover out.
Officially termed the American Fitness Index (AFI), the ranking assesses the “Health and Neighborhood Fitness Status of the 50 Greatest Metropolitan Areas.” It’s a information-crunching behemoth, using a very particular series of measures that get down to the nitty-gritty of how nicely a city serves the recreational overall health and fitness needs of its residents. (For an option actuality check, see America’s 10 Laziest Cities for the cities with the lowest general exercise ranges.)
Morning runners beat the summer season heat in Washington DC, now the healthiest city in America. (Photograph: Wikimedia)
Considering that my prior report on the Leading twenty Healthiest Cities, the AFI has changed some of the elements that go into making its calculations. This yr, for example, a new variable was extra known as the Walk Score, although other variables were eliminated. This tends to make it more difficult to make direct comparisons.
Nevertheless, some critical aspects matter yr after 12 months for illustration, all five of the healthiest cities boasted obesity prices beneath 23 percent and smoking prices below 18 %. (Just 10 percent for San Francisco and 13 percent for D.C.)
And as a snapshot of accomplishment, 81 percent of men and women in Washington D.C. did some sort of physical activity in the final thirty days and fewer than 22 % are obese. Residents’ costs of heart condition, diabetes, asthma, and standard health are also crucial.
But what sets the AFI ranking apart from other national metrics that track personal wellness behaviors is the scoring based on local community and environmental indicators.
“The AFI information report is a snapshot of the state of health in the community and an evaluation of the infrastructure, local community assets and policies that inspire healthful and fit lifestyles,” said Walter Thompson, chair of the AFI’s advisory board.
So there you have it: The crucial to who wins and who loses in this distinct competition is infrastructure. The AFI’s mission is to motivate cities to prioritize the health of their residents and invest and make enhancements accordingly. So a city that just happens to have plenty of gym-going, veggie-consuming residents (consider New York) is not automatically going to price, since the city’s culture and politics are not at function supporting residents in producing health and life-style modifications.
As just 1 illustration of this, let’s look at parks. Very first location winner Washington spends $ 398 per resident on its parks as in contrast with Memphis, last ranked at #50, which spends just $ 26 per resident.
To wit, mentioned Thomas: “Health advocates and neighborhood leaders have come to assume the arrival of the American Fitness Index as an yearly check-up relating to their community’s overall health and fitness amounts.” In other words, Memphis, construct some parks and recreational centers.
Who Won, Who Misplaced, in 2014?
New to the top ten is San Diego, which is ranked the 8th healthiest city, up from 14th last 12 months. Gone from the leading 10 is Hartford, last year 9th on the list, now down to 12th. But the bulk of the cities on the list have been there before, some simply swapping spots with a rival. Since 2013 Boston dropped from 6th to 9th place, Denver dropped one spot from 4th to 5th. San Jose rose from 10th to 6th.
A single point is clear the west is winning the healthful lifestyle war. With the addition of San Diego, 6 of the best 10 cities are now on the West Coast. The Midwest boasts just one particular city in the best 10, the south not one.
Presenters at the yearly Ocean Sciences Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Honolulu in late February said ocean water containing dissolved radionuclides from Fukushima’s crippled nuclear reactors has reached the northern west coast of North America (msn.com).
The scientific neighborhood located it interesting in an academic way. Some individuals in the non-scientific neighborhood were quite worried.
The amount of Fukushima radioactivity in this seawater is miniscule, about a Becquerel per cubic meter of water, or Bq/m3 of quick-lived Cs-134, and poses no concern at all. And never will. By comparison, the EPA consuming water regular for it’s sister radionuclide, Cs-137, is about 7,400 Bq/m3, and for all radioactive resources is practically a million Bq/m3.
But given that we can see a single atom disintegrating, we can detect this trace sum of radioactivity simply, way much better than we can detect toxic compounds like mercury. This Fukushima rad-signature has currently taken its seat alongside that left in excess of from over-ground nuclear exams in the 1950s and 60s as a curious and exciting phenomenon we can use scientifically to track water and air circulation patterns, and to use in forensic oceanography.
But the Fukushima rad-concentrations are nowhere close to as large as that left over from the outdated bomb exams, which is nowhere near as large as that of organic background. In reality, Fukushima’s rad-signature is so lower that we need to have to separate the Cs-134 from the Cs-137 just to know it is from Fukushima. Cs-134 has such a quick half-lifestyle (2.1 years versus thirty years for Cs-137) that it has prolonged decayed away from the outdated tests. The Cs-137 from Fukushima is so minimal it’s completely eclipsed by the leftover Cs-137 from the 50s and 60s.
Rule of thumb – ten half-lives till gone.
Measured in atomic disintegrations per second (Becquerels or Bq) of cesium-134,137 in a cubic meter of water (Bq/m3), the background degree of Cs radionuclides in seawater varies close to the world. The major supply of Cs-137 is historic above-ground nuclear weapons testing from the 1950s and 60s, but some regions have knowledgeable further inputs. The Irish Sea shows elevated levels in contrast to large ocean basins as a result of radioactive releases from the Sellafield reprocessing facility at Seacastle, U.K., and levels in the Baltic and Black Seas are elevated from the 1986 Chernobyl fallout. By comparison, the EPA consuming water normal for Cs-137 is 3,700 Bq/m3. The sum of Cs-134 from Fukushima found off the west coast of Canada was much less than one Bq/m3. Fukushima will not consequence in any worldwide boost in radioactivity outdoors its regional region. It takes water radioactivity ranges from all sources of more than a million Bq/m3 to cause concern. Image courtesy of the Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity and Jack Cook (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) and the MARIS information base from the International Atomic Vitality Company.
We see these signatures all the time from a lot of occasions and sources, and I would be worried if we did not see this Fukushima signature due to the fact that would imply we were not performing our jobs. Or that we did not realize oceanic circulation (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution).
In addition, we’ve been expecting to see this trace radioactivity for two many years. It’s been foreshadowed by trace quantities in fish, and was initial picked up in tuna off the coast of San Diego in the superb perform completed by Professor Nicholas Fisher and co-staff (Proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences).
Considerably worse than radiation, is the biologicals attached to the Fukushima Flotsam floating in excess of from Japan as a consequence of the tsunami. These are being burned, or otherwise biologically sanitized, in an try to cease invasive species from triggering ecological harm (The Oregonian).
Allow me be genuinely, really clear – there is no concern whatsoever that radioactivity from Fukushima could ever harm America. The amounts of radioactivity are as well reduced by the time they leave the location about the crippled electrical power plant. Even if the complete Fukushima website slid into the ocean, it wouldn’t raise Cs concentrations above trace ranges in the ocean at large, allow alone anywhere close to consuming water requirements, this far away.
The global variations of Cs-137 in seawater is superbly described by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, specifically Dr. Ken Buesseler, as observed in the accompanying figure (Cs-137 Ocean Map). Radioactivity in water is measured in units of Becquerels per cubic meter of water, or Bq/m3. A Bq is the disintegration of a single nucleus in a second. It will take 37 billion Bq to make a single Curie (Ci).
The background level of radiation in seawater varies around the world but is really lower, averaging about 14 Bq/m3. It outcomes overwhelmingly from naturally occurring radioactive components (NORM) in the Earth’s crust that attain the ocean right after weathering, notably U-238/235, Th-232, K-forty and their daughter goods. These radionuclides typically drop out as particulates, sorb onto resources close to the shore, or precipitate out of remedy, ahead of they get to the deep ocean, which is why seawater is much less radioactive than soil and vegetation.
Of the man-produced radionuclides, Cs-137 left above from old bomb testing dominates the radioactivity we see in water and soil. In seawater, Cs-137 concentrations common significantly less than 2 Bq/m3. The main supply of Cs-137 is the historic over-ground nuclear weapons testing from the 1950s and 60s, but some regions have skilled further inputs. The Irish Sea displays elevated levels of 61 Bq/m3 as a outcome of radioactive releases from the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing facility at Seacastle, U.K., and amounts in the Baltic and Black Seas are elevated up to ten or twenty occasions background-Cs since of fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl occasion.
The EPA consuming water regular for Cs-137 is about seven,400 Bq/m3. The quantity of Cs-134 from Fukushima located off our West Coast was much less than one Bq/m3. Fukushima will not cause any global improve in radioactivity outside the nearby area close to Fukushima itself, and even that ought to resemble these other regional events right after ten years or so.
Note: Cs-134 is 14 occasions more radioactive than Cs-137, so dominates the Cs activity until finally it decays away to under Cs-137 action, which will be in about the 12 months 2019 since Cs-134’s half-lifestyle is two.one years.
Do you workout at least 3 days a week for half an hour? That is the question asked by pollsters as part of the study for Gallup’s annual nicely-getting surveys. That’s not a good deal, is it? But the results, at least as regards to regional stereotypes, are surprising.
For instance, the states with much more lively residents include a number of, this kind of as Alaska and Montana, with climates that seem likely to preserve residents housebound for lengthy stretches of the 12 months
Meanwhile the states with the highest proportion of sofa potatoes in the nation consist of New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, where the culture typically seems fixated on the most current fitness center and fitness craze.
Where does your state rank – and far more importantly are you helping or hurting it with your action degree – or lack thereof?
Check out the ten least energetic states in the U.S.
Now, for a far more optimistic message: Which state residents are getting it correct?
Vermont
Hawaii
Montana
Alaska
Colorado
Oregon
Idaho
New Mexico
Nebraska
North Dakota
In accordance to the most recent Gallup-Healthways announcement, 6 states have stayed in the leading ten for normal exercising ever considering that Galllup began monitoring this kind of information in 2008. Here, from the 1st batch of data released by this year’s Nicely-Currently being Index, are the 10 Happiest States in the U.S.
For a lot more health news, follow me here on Forbes.com, on Twitter, @MelanieHaiken, and subscribe to my posts on Facebook.
For the past decade, a specter has haunted the foods chain—the specter of large fructose corn syrup (HFCS). HFCS began daily life as a technological response to a industry problem—volatile rates for sugar in the 1970s and early 1980s driven by protectionism and dumping, along with substantial production charges and all the challenge of matching a multi-yr crop to shifting demand. HFCS aimed to stabilize the value of sweetness. It did and in performing so, it conquered the US industry.
But HFCS had, like Achilles, a weakness—actually, two. 1st, as numerous scientists have mentioned, higher fructose corn syrup wasn’t genuinely large in fructose—and it is other primary element was glucose. The sweet spot in balancing fructose with glucose was approximately a ratio of fifty five percent to 45 percent—the very same as honey—and not dissimilar to ordinary table sugar, which has a ratio of 50:50.
The 2nd weakness was timing. The spread of HFCS coincided with the beginnings of the obesity crisis—or far more specifically a point the place individuals had been beginning to tip in excess of the BMI boundary lines from typical to overweight and overweight to obese. This, as we now know from the function of John Komlos, was a prolonged time in the creating: BMI values began to rise—and rise dramatically—in the 1950s, but the sudden appearance of enormous excess weight obtain in the population led some scientists to wonder regardless of whether it may well be connected with this new fangled ingredient.
The consequence was a review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) 2004— “Consumption of higher-fructose corn syrup in drinks might perform a role in the epidemic of obesity”—which noted that “The increase in consumption of HFCS has a temporal relation to the epidemic of obesity, and the overconsumption of HFCS in calorically sweetened drinks may possibly perform a function in the epidemic of weight problems.”
Just as people glom onto miracle diet plans and miracle food items, they also seem for the Darth Vader ingredients—those which use the force of taste to take over our bodies. HFCS was new, it was from corn, it was large in fructose. And it provided a easy remedy to a hugely complicated dilemma of why America was abruptly in the grip of weight problems.
But was this, “important potential hypothesis,” for the obesity epidemic (as the authors of the review wrote) accurate? The level of science is to advance hypotheses, check them, and arrive at some degree of causal validity. Were weight problems and metabolic syndrome a outcome of Americans typically eating also much foods and becoming inactive, or was there some thing to fructose that was distinctly bad—and therefore a key lead to of excess weight gain—as opposed to it currently being one issue amid many? So began a single of the major controversies of the obesity crisis.
In 2008, the American Healthcare Association passed a resolution at its yearly conference saying that there was inadequate scientific evidence to indict HFCS as a exclusive contributor to obesity. At the same time, it also stated that the scientific literature on the problem was quite restricted. In 2012, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) concluded that the research—now far more expansive— provided “little evidence that HFCS differs uniquely from sucrose and other nutritive sweeteners in metabolic results.”
The authors of the unique AJCN review continued to maintain that fructose may well be much more of a issue than sugar simply because of the ongoing study on metabolic variations amongst the two. And they have been joined by pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, who took fears about the effects of fructose and sugar on the population to a total new level. Fructose, he contended in a a lot-watched YouTube lecture, and later a guide, is poisonous—the toxic element of sugar.
It is not unfair to say that this was a place that won Lustig numerous critics and really number of converts between scientists. As Scientific American pointed out, 1 crucial problem with Lustig’s argument is that “concern about fructose is based mostly on research in which rodents and individuals consumed massive amounts of the molecule—up to 300 grams of fructose every single day, which is nearly equivalent to the total sugar in eight cans of Coke—or a diet regime in which the huge vast majority of sugars have been pure fructose.”
Mike Gibney, Director of University University Dublin’s Institute of Foods and Overall health, concurred, “The majority of animal scientific studies used as a lot as 55% of calories from fructose, a predicament, which is impossible to envisage in the human diet plan except perhaps in the make-believe land of milk and honey.”
Lustig also ignored the double whammy of increases in consumption of other food items besides sugar and a decrease in bodily exercise above the past forty years, wrote fitness and nutrition specialist Alan Aragorn.
In a report on the controversy more than Lustig and fructose, David Klerfeld, a nationwide plan leader in Human Nutrition for the USDA, told ABC News, “So a lot of issues have occurred in our environment in the previous fifty many years, from a complete increase in calories to a decrease in activity—it’s absurd to pin the entire weight problems dilemma on a single food this kind of as fructose or even sugar consumption as a whole. Why aren’t we focusing on ginormous portions rather than wasting time looking at single elements?”
And Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Well being (and no fan of soda or the meals market) told TheWashington Publish, “Telling people the dilemma is all fructose is entirely wrong.”
But who exactly was telling people this? Why are we wasting time hunting at single components alternatively of all round diet regime and exercise? The direction of the research, the consensus statements by professional associations, the remarks by frustrated nutritionists—all converged on a easy message. Why did that message appear to be muffled, unheard, untaken?
In accordance to a new research, blame the information media.
Now, obviously not every single information story, for the ones cited in this post from ABC News, The Washington Submit and Scientific American are all hugely informative, and ascend (in my view) in orders of excellence. But when you appear at the news media coverage ecologically, do these kinds of stories drive both journalistic and public comprehending more than time?
