AlphaMale

OMG, nearly one in 10

First sentences from two Associated Press news articles this week.

First sentence from news article #1: 

In a spectacular turnabout, hospitals are treating almost all major heart attack patients within the recommended 90 minutes of arrival, a new study finds.

So what percentage of hospitals are STILL screwing up the care of people with severe heart attacks, probably costing some of them their lives? Nine percent. That's 9 percent, or almost one of every 10. After a years-long campaign to persude them to get it right.

So here's the headline found almost everywhere:

Hospitals giving faster heart attack care

First sentence from news aricle #2:

INDIANAPOLIS — Nearly one of every 10 midsized or big employers expects to stop offering health coverage to workers once federal insurance exchanges start in 2014, according to a new survey from a large benefits consultant.

And what percentage of midsized or big employers expect to drop health coverage under Obamacare in 2014? Eight percent. That's 8 percent, or "almost one of every 10." Buried well down in the article is this sentence: "A large majority of employers in both studies said they expect to continue offering benefits once the exchanges start."

So here's the headline found almost everywhere:

1 in 10 companies will drop health coverage

And America's news readers think that hospitals are doing a great job with heart attack patients, but the sky is falling on our company health insurance, thanks to President Obama.

My problem with all this:

Reporters can and do slant a story's message by how they write the lead. And editors are almost all too busy to read the story critically, and one editor somewhere writes a quick-and-dirty headline based on the first sentence, and everybody in the online world picks up that headline, usually word for word. And that becomes gospel fact.

This is scary.*

*Give hospitals credit for improving. In 2005, more than half of them were not following the standard guidelines for treating severe heart attacks.

*If I were that AP health insurance writer's editor, I'd fry his ass for writing a deceptive lead that he must know will be treated as pure truth, rather than the oversimplified crap that it is. (I'd do this if I weren't too tired to care, which could be the AP's problem.) But give him credit for ultimately writing the facts.

 

Dogs can sniff out early-stage lung cancer

Sniffer dogs can be used for early detection of lung cancer, according to research published in the European Respiratory Journal.

The dogs found 71 out of a possible 100 lung cancer cases by sniffing samples of a patient's breath. They also could dependably rule out lung cancer in 93% of the cases they were tested on -- 372 out of 400.

Earlier studies showed that dogs could also detect prostate, breast, ovarian and bowel cancer. Current diagnostic tests often fail to detect cancer in the earliest stages and at the same time expose a patient to the harmful effects of radiation, as a reporter mentions in Science Daily, where the dogs story is reported.

I bet the dogs, no matter how good they can become at cancer detection, no matter how low-cost the detection program, will never be used commercially. You can't patent the dog's sniffing ability, so you probably can't find a way to make a billion from canine cancer consultants.

I'd love to be proved wrong.

Dramatic improvement in survival

Say you're over 70, and you have lung cancer. You can live a little longer if you take a single kind of chemo treatment, and the complications, such as losing all your hair and feeling like you're sick with the flu all the time, are relatively mild.

Ah, but you can do better, say some French researchers. They say you can "gain significant benefit" from aggressive, double-barreled chemotherapy. You can do every bit as well as the young people who have lung cancer.

Sure, the toxic side effects are more common. But we're told that survival rates are much higher. Even a skeptic refers to a "dramatic improvement in survival" for those getting the heavy-duty chemo. How dramatic?

Well, on average, you live six months on regular chemo, 10 months on the double whammy.

You can't expect to live a year, no matter which you choose.

It's very expensive, you can be sure. The side effects can be terrible. But you just might manage to hang on for another four months. This is what's called dramatic improvement.

 

The Number 3 Killer

For 50 years, strokes have been the third leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease and cancer.

We've been told that COPD -- lung diseases -- would take over the third spot by the year 2020. Now we're told COPD, a condition that most of us Alphas share, rushed into third place 12 years early -- in 2008.

Thanks to the smoking boom 30-40 years ago, especially among women, lung disease is rising fast as a killer. But did it suddenly speed up?

No. Turns out, we're just counting differently. David Mannino is among the lung specialists who say deaths from COPD have been under-counted for many years. He's quoted here.

Vitamin D and the U.S. government

Vitamin D: I start with the maximum. Then I double it.

During the winter, once a week, I take a 50,000 mg capsule of Vitamin D. I do this even though I live in the deep South of the United States, where I could just go out into the sunshine between 10 am and 2 pm for half an hour two or three times a week wearing shorts or swim trunks and get all the Vitamin D I need.

I could do this, but like most people, I don't.

A committee of the Institute of Medicine, which describes itself as "an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public," has just recommended slightly higher levels of Vitamin D supplements.

The recommendations are ridiculously low, as are the recommendations the U.S. government has been suggesting for years.

The committee says nobody should take more than 4,000  of Vitamin D a day. Too much can cause kidney stones, they say. I take nearly double that amount, all winter, every winter. There's no chance this will cause me to make kidney stones. There's an excellent chance it will help my immune system to fend off colds, the flu, and the lung exacerbations that increase in people with Alpha-1 during the winter.

Elena Christofides, MD, is appalled by the new recommendations. I agree with Dr. Christofides.

Thank you, Dennis Pollock

Dennis Pollock was in Washington in 2007 for a "Genetics Day on the Hill" when he decided to pay a visit to US Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma -- Pollock's home state.

Pollock wanted the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act passed. GINA provides some basic health insurance and job protections for people with genetic conditions like Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency. Alpha-1 caused the lung disease that forced Pollock to have a lung transplant in 2004.

Coburn had placed a hold on the GINA bill. Any senator can keep a bill from a vote on the Senate floor by the unofficial but all-powerful weapon called a "hold." GINA had widespread support, but the bill was never going to make it to a vote as long as Coburn had it on hold.

Pollock had no appointment, and nobody in Coburn's office wanted to see him. Eventually, he met with an aide who told him the senator would keep the hold on the bill. Period.

"I thought that was arrogant," Pollock said. "I was so frustrated."

He left, and from the steps of Coburn's office building, he got on his cell phone. He called about 10 members of his Alpha-1 support group back in Oklahoma, and asked them all to get 10 of their friends to join in calls to the senator's office.

Within 45 minutes he got a call from Coburn's office. "They asked me to tell the Alphas to stop calling. They were getting so many calls, they couldn't get anything done. I said, 'Will you release the hold on the GINA bill?' They said no. I said, 'Then I won't stop the calls.'"

The Oklahoma Alphas kept up the calls and emails for months. Eventually, Coburn released the hold. The Senate passed GINA 95-0. Dennis Pollock was in the room when President Bush signed GINA into law on May 21, 2008.

Coburn said his concerns about GINA had been resolved, and that's why he released the bill. Maybe so.

But I think it's at least as likely that the Oklahoma Alphas changed the senator's mind.

Dennis Pollock died Monday.

And I'm just saying, Thank you, Dennis.

 

Health info for the disabled

The US Centers for Disease Control has a new web page on Disabilities and Health.

Lots of information on staying healthy, the CDC work on disabilities, and latest news on staying healthy with a disability and CDC programs for the disabled.

Read about it here, or follow the link.

Why the kids keep killing themselves

Young workers keep jumping to their deaths at Foxconn, the huge Chinese factory where they make many of our most popular electronics -- the current hottest being the iPad and iPhone.

Plenty of online pundits claim this proves that life at the factory is intolerable.

Fake Steve says, with the standard sneer of anonymous online commentators today, "Ask any cop or shrink who deals with this stuff. Jumpers want to make a statement. Jumpers are trying to tell you something."

Yes. They're saying: Me, too.

Q: Why are they doing it?

A: They're imitating each other.

That sounds callous, and much too simple to be true, but it's the most important reason.

Cluster suicides are examined in Robert Cialdini's book Influence: Science and Practice. The book reports the convincing research and insights of David Phillips, a sociologist at the University of California in San Diego.  

Cialdini describes the principle of "social proof" -- people, especially when they're unsure of themselves, follow the lead of others similar to themselves. They do this with scary precision:

Suppose an unhappy Chinese worker named Liu, age 23, lives and works with huge numbers of others like himself, in a factory town far from home, and some of his peers kill themselves. What are the chances of Liu doing the same? Turns out, it's dramatically higher than you might imagine.

If the suicides are sensational, say by leaps from the 8th floor, the likelihood of Liu killing himself in exactly the same way is frighteningly high. Suicides feed on each other. (So do homicides.)

Copycat suicide: Research by Phillips showed:

-- Immediately after a suicide story makes the front page of newspapers or the top of TV news shows, fatal car crashes and plane crashes increase dramatically in the area where the story is publicized.

-- There are many signs that these are copycat suicides. If the suicide victim dies alone, the wrecks are single fatalities; if the story is about murder-suicide, the car wrecks will involve multiple deaths.

-- If the sensational suicide involves a young person, the fatal car crashes that follow involve young people. If the suicide involves an older person, it's older drivers who die in the crashes.

Cialdini believes that "media officials need to think deeply about how, and how prominently to present reports of (suicides and) killing sprees. Such reports are not only riveting, sensational, and newsworthy, they are malignant."

 

Obama's losing the health care reform campaign; there's only one way he can win it now

The Obama administration is losing the battle on health care reform where it counts most -- in what the American public is thinking and fearing.

Is it because this administration's health care reform plans are terrible, and deserve to lose on their merits?

Maybe so. I don 't think so.

I think it's because the administration took far too long to treat the health care reform campaign the same way, with the same tools, as Obama's election campaign. For months, this has been a propaganda war. Exactly like an election campaign.

When someone claims "death squads" are part of Obama's plans, there must be an immediate "truth squad" response. When someone makes a more reasonable criticism, that needs  to be answered, too -- reasonably, and rapidly.

Reality: Propaganda wars are conducted primarily on the Internet these days. Obama won the election by understanding this, and executing an all-out Internet election campaign better than it's ever been done.

The administration is trying to do that now.

Right here -- on the Web --  is where this battle is being decided.

Carry your oxygen aboard the plane

This time next year, people who need supplemental medical oxygen will be able to carry a portable oxygen concentrator aboard any airline flight in the United States, or any flight beginning or  ending in America.

It's been possible to do this for a few years now -- but only on certain airlines, and it was entirely the airline's choice to allow carry-on oxygen or not.

Now it will be mandatory: Airlines must accept DOT-approved oxygen concentrators.