Bookworm on Jul 01 2008 | Filed under: Barack Obama, Britain, England, Government, Medicine
I heard on Dennis Prager today a call from a British man who pointed out that, in the 10 years of Tony Blair’s socialism, every major institution in Britain declined. And the more the government meddled, the greater the decline. Today’s British papers offer yet another example: The dental portion of the National Health Service [...]
Bookworm on Jun 30 2008 | Filed under: Medicine
We all know the story of penicillin’s discovery: it arose from a lab accident when Alexander Fleming noticed that an accidental mold was killing bacteria. That coincidental discovery changed the modern world. It looks as if we can be seeing another pencillin moment, with an accidental fungus leading the way in the fight against cancer [...]
Bookworm on Jun 08 2008 | Filed under: Barack Obama, Britain, England, France, Health, Islam, John McCain, Medicine, Muslim violence
Britain’s Telegraph has three interesting articles, and the London Times one:
Read about the vast difference between Britain’s and France’s socialized medicine. I’d certainly like to know what accounts for the difference before I start making changes to the American system. Color me skeptical, but I bet Obama, who shows himself to be remarkably [...]
Bookworm on Jun 02 2008 | Filed under: Media matters, Medicine
If you stop at the first paragraph of this AP article, you might think that Teddy Kennedy is the only person on earth who has ever faced a cancer surgery as daunting as the one he underwent (emphasis mine):
Bravery in the face of cancer? Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has given it new meaning. Few things [...]
Bookworm on Jun 02 2008 | Filed under: Barack Obama, Britain, England, Health, Hillary Clinton, Medicine
There’s talk of Obama giving Hillary the green light to socialize American medicine if she’ll walk away from the primaries. Melanie Phillips gives us a good example of why the renewed specter of socialized medicine should worry us:
To the Labour Party, the National Health Service is the talismanic proof of its own moral superiority.
Time and [...]
Bookworm on Apr 22 2008 | Filed under: Health, Medicine
Many years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a medical student on his neurology rotation. He related what was, to me, an amazing story. The patient he saw that day was a fairly young man who had suffered a major stroke, resulting in an almost complete loss of speech (aphasia). [...]
Bookworm on Feb 28 2008 | Filed under: Britain, England, Health, Medicine
One of Obama’s (and Clinton’s) many sins is the desire to nationalize medicine, so that the government gets to decide who deserves treatment and who doesn’t. Britain, as always, serves as a useful horrible example of what can happen under such a system:
A 61-year-old grandmother has been denied vital heart surgery for being too [...]
Bookworm on Feb 09 2008 | Filed under: Britain, Medicine
Britain’s health care system is again having problems. This time, the problem is that physicians are over-prescribing painkillers, causing addictive behavior — and doing so despite strong official guidelines to the contrary. This could just be a medical trend, but one does wonder if it’s also because doctor’s in Britain are no longer very good? [...]
Bookworm on Jan 12 2008 | Filed under: Britain, England, Medicine
One of the most striking things about the Jewish Bible is the respect it demands for dead bodies. As a result, Jewish ritual holds that the dead cannot be mutilated in any way and must be interred as quickly as possible — preferably within 24 hours of death. Desecration is anathema to the [...]
Bookworm on Jan 01 2008 | Filed under: Britain, Health, Medicine
Britain’s ailing national health care system continues to try to heal itself, usually at patient’s expense. I don’t know about you, but this proposal doesn’t strike me as something that’s going to result in improved health care:
Millions of people with arthritis, asthma and even heart failure will be urged to treat themselves as part [...]
Bookworm on Nov 18 2007 | Filed under: Medicine
When it comes to managed health care, the law of unintended consequences just keeps rolling along. The news out of England today tells the story of a woman who has been barred from New Zealand, where her husband has already moved, because she is “too fat.” Apparently in the conflict between politically correct [...]
Bookworm on Oct 12 2007 | Filed under: Medicine
Back in 1981, during a summer break in college, I got a job working as a medical transcriptionist for a couple of research virologists in a local hospital. Their past secretary had been a disaster but, because of union rules, they couldn’t fire her. Fortunately, for them, she got pregnant and went on maternity leave. [...]
Bookworm on Oct 10 2007 | Filed under: Medicine
Gotta pick up the kids, so no comment here. Read and draw your own conclusions.
Bookworm on Sep 18 2007 | Filed under: Health, Hillary Clinton, Medicine, Vaccinations
Drudge proves himself to be a good sport by linking to a Joe Klein post at Time Magazine’s website, in which Klein savages Drudge. Drudge is probably more than a good sport, though. He’s smart, too, because all that the post does is make Klein look like an idiot. Here is Klein’s [...]
Bookworm on Sep 18 2007 | Filed under: Children, Medicine
First there were wrongful birth lawsuits tied to botched abortions. Now there is a wrongful birth lawsuit tied to over-enthusiastic in vitro fertilization:
SYDNEY — A lesbian couple are seeking damages from their doctor after one gave birth to twins after fertility treatment, rather than a single baby.
The women, who cannot be named, are suing Robert [...]
Bookworm on Sep 17 2007 | Filed under: Fred Thompson, Freedom, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Medicine, Privacy
More than twenty years ago, I attended a speech that famed legal scholar Arthur Miller gave, in which he decried the fact that the zone of privacy surrounding ordinary citizens was shrinking rapidly with the dawn of the computer age. What he pointed out then is even more true today: unless you step [...]
Bookworm on Sep 15 2007 | Filed under: Britain, Medicine
Austin Powers poked great fun at British teeth, so I don’t think I’m saying anything to outre when I point out that the Brits haven’t traditionally been known for their high quality dentistry. Indeed, when I lived there, people were taken aback by my insistence on an annual cleaning. The dentist who did [...]
Bookworm on Aug 30 2007 | Filed under: Africa, Britain, Medicine
Despite the fact that we live in a vaccine age, Britain is facing an outbreak of measles, a disease can cause life long damage to its victims:
Parents were urged today to give their children the MMR jab before they returned to school after figures showed measles cases have more than trebled in the last 11 [...]
Bookworm on Aug 21 2007 | Filed under: Britain, Medicine
Doesn’t Britain have that wonderful, wonderful, incredibly just too wonderful socialized medicine that Michael Moore wants American to adopt? If it does — and I think that, perhaps, it does — Moore might want to check out this story, which blames problems, in part, on those lovely, lovely, lovely waiting lists that just seem [...]
|
