Anonymous
said…
“I sweat off so much salt during my workouts that I can often see the white stuff on my skin afterwards. I CRAVE salty food after I run. From everything I’ve read, a craving like that indicates that my body in fact needs me to replace the electrolytes I’ve lost — by consuming food or drink containing sodium.”
The other possibility is that your body has too much salt which it why it uses every opportunity to get rid of it — Read more

The blog post upon which I comment is two weeks old, but it’s simply too awful to be ignored.
attacks critics of ObamaCare, saying that we need government intervention to get rid of healthcare waste. The examples she gives are mammograms for patients in nursing homes (who might not even seek treatment for breast cancer should it be discovered); CPR on the very elderly; expensive pharmaceuticals for patients with Alzheimer’s who derive little benefit Read more

– even though healthcare has long been thought to be recession-proof because it is so important to life. The article tells several stories of skipped doses of prescription medication, doctor’s visits put off to pay more pressing bills like gas for the car, surgery deferred until savings are rebuilt.
Though the article makes no comment on what should be done to solve these problems, the average liberal response would be, “That’s terrible! See? We Read more

And I thought New York City was bad for forcing chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus. It is bad, but look what’s happening on the other coast:
, as reported in the
New York Times.
(Typically, the definition of “fast-food restaurant” is nebulous enough that its implementation will be handled by a bureaucrat; forget about knowing whether or not a proposed restaurant will be in line with the law in advance by objective definition.)
Read more

Last week, while at home with my folks for Thanksgiving, my fiance and I helped my niece with one of her homework assignments, as we often do when we are visiting. She’s a very bright kid who loves to learn when an adult is explaining things in a way that makes sense, but she gets bored at school and it’s not hard to see why.
My niece attends the same high school that I did 15 years ago. It’s a public school in a working-class Philadelphia suburb. Read more

, abstinence-only sex education in schools, championed by conservatives, is in jeopardy of losing federal funding now that we have a Democrat in the White House.
The Religious Right loves abstinence-only programs, because living Biblically means no sex before marriage. If they can’t get actual Bible teachings into public schools, at least getting tax dollars to pay for sex education that tells teens that abstaining from sex is the only safe option Read more

magazine contains an article,
about how advocacy groups are not just speaking up on behalf of patients with rare diseases, but putting the money they raise into the research and development of lifesaving and life-enhancing drugs.
Too often, patient groups are lobbying Congress to spend more money on a particular disease. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Having an incurable disease is indeed unfortunate, but it is not a claim check on others Read more

Note: I suppose this post is only related to medicine and health in a very tangential way, in that the person to whom I address my remarks is one of the most supremely healthy people on Earth. But I’d still like to say these things to him, because of how inspiring a person he is.
To Ryan Hall, greatest of American marathoners,
Tomorrow night, the opening ceremonies of the Olympics begin in Beijing, and in just over two weeks, you will be toeing Read more

, Pauline Chen lamented our growing comfort with the role of money in medicine. She refers to healthcare as “the gift of life,” which cannot be reduced to a mere commodity that can be quantified and analyzed. And she cites the example of a man suing his estranged wife for either the return of the kidney he donated to her or $1.5 million as evidence that medicine has become too commoditized, saying that there “should have been outrage over putting Read more

, claiming that her experience in transplant medicine shows that increased government oversight of medicine — an inevitable consequence of government payment for medicine — is not necessarily a bad thing.
Chen cites an example that frustrated her as a young doctor, in which she recommended surgery for a patient who had a small tumor. The insurance company didn’t think the patient needed the surgery and balked at authorizing the surgery. Chen was Read more