Maintain weight at 135 pounds. Check. I have not been above 137.5 since the start of the year. Continuing to use Lose It! as a check on myself (it automatically cuts your calorie count once you enter a weight above your goal weight, even if it’s only by half a pound) has kept me from slipping.

Beat my personal record in the marathon. I’ve signed up to run Chicago in October, and have put together my training plan for the year. I begin next week with twelve weeks of speed-building, including fartleks, tempo runs, hill training, and intervals. The twelve-week spring training program is followed by 18 weeks in which the focus shifts to building mileage. I’m choosing a slightly more difficult plan than I’ve followed in my past two marathons, in the hopes that increasing my weekly mileage by about 10% as compared with last year will improve my endurance.

Run a 5K. Did that on Sunday morning. My time was 25:09 — a little slower than I wanted, but then I had no idea I was going to be running on a course loaded with hills. Note to self: Know thy course! If I’d done a little research ahead of time, I would have known to expect that, and thus not to expect a sub-25-minute time (as well as to do more hill training in the weeks before the race). If I can find one (5Ks are oddly hard to come by in NYC), I’ll try running a flatter 5K before the summer is over, so that I can see what my time on a less roller-coaster-like course would be.

Improve core strength. I haven’t been perfect on this one. I find it easy to throw in ab work at the end of a treadmill session, when I’m at the gym and there’s an ab mat right there. But when I run outside (as I’ve been much better about doing this winter than in previous years), I almost never do ab work when I get home, usually because I just want to get into the shower and de-stink myself. So I think I need to figure out other ways to get ab work at home into my day, especially since I’ll be running outdoors even more now that the weather is finally getting springy.

Go injury-free. Thus far, nothing worse than an annoying plantar wart!

reasonpharm.blogspot.com

Specifically, as I read this excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed, I thought of the lines, “Bow down before the one you serve. You’re going to get what you deserve.”

Big Pharma bowed down to the government, hoping that by playing nice with the bullies, they would get huge profits out of a sweeping healthcare bill that would force more Americans to carry insurance, thus turning more Americans into consumers of medications. Now that ObamaCare is in a shambles, Democrats look likely to turn to the strategy of passing multiple smaller, less controversial bills so they can still say they “did something” about health care.

So now, Big Pharma might just get what it deserves for having worked with Congress instead of proudly standing against it…because you know what’s less controversial than a giant bill that involves lots of new taxes and requirements that affect Everyman? Smaller proposals like putting price controls on Medicare-purchased drugs, allowing reimportation of prescription drugs from countries whose governments control drug prices, and cutting into drug companies’ patent exclusivity on biologics.

The pharmaceutical industry can’t protest that such measures would be a violation of their rights to charge what they please for their medicines without direct intervention from the American government or indirect intervention from a foreign one (which is what reimportation is). They gave up any pretense of caring about rights when they tried to help Congress hog-tie insurance companies to get a share of the loot.

As the author of the op-ed says, “There’s a lesson here for corporate America. Try standing up for the free markets and limited government that have always been the foundation of U.S. business.”

reasonpharm.blogspot.com

Does anyone else notice how ASININE that is?

Who in hell would know more about how good a drug is than the chief investigator of the clinical trial? Dr. Baumann has direct experience with the drug, which is more than any government paper-pusher can say.

The New York Times paraphrases Thomas W. Abrams, head of DDMAC (the division of the FDA that monitors drug advertising and marketing):
But an investigator should not promote any unapproved prescription drug — or an unapproved use of an already approved drug — as being safe or effective if the agency has not yet deemed it to be so, he said.Right. Because the opinion of someone who has seen firsthand what the drug can do doesn’t count, but the opinion of bureaucrats who have never worked with the drug does.

The Supreme Court may have given us a victory for freedom of speech last month, but let’s not forget how the muzzle on talking about drugs is getting tighter and tighter. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies have just as much right to speak freely about drugs as unions and corporations have to speak about politics.

reasonpharm.blogspot.com

I had a mixed reaction to the film, which is about a father of three children, two of whom have a life-threatening and degenerative disease, who teams with a maverick scientist to look for a treatment that could save his kids’ lives. But the mixed reaction was not because the film was half bad and half good. In fact, there was a lot of good: the father’s willingness to do anything to achieve his values, the scientist’s dedication to truth, the fact that the filmmakers didn’t present the children’s situation as the fault of Big Pharma, but rather presenting the metaphysically given difficulty of translating theoretical research into a usable pharmaceutical. I really enjoyed the heroic actions of and the interplay between the two main characters.

What made me truly, truly angry about this movie is that it’s too kind to the government.

The story of a father and a scientist bringing their minds to bear on a difficult problem and making a breakthrough in medicine made me angry…because I am convinced that in the world we actually live in, the FDA would not let such a thing happen. The children in the film would have been dead before the government decided that a new treatment was safe enough to be tested in humans — just ask the families of Anna Tomalis or Abigail Burroughs. Government officials think they are more qualified to decide whether the benefits of a new drug are worth the risk than the patients who will die without those drugs. Maybe they’ll die with the drugs — but if you were a dying patient — or the parent of a dying child — wouldn’t you want to be the one who decides whether or not to take a chance?

Go see Extraordinary Measures, but know that there’s a villain in the real world who doesn’t show up in the movie — and that villain must be destroyed.

reasonpharm.blogspot.com

It’s not a total victory. Here’s why:
I didn’t know until today that Brown voted for RomneyCare in Massachusetts. This guy doesn’t want to be the forty-first vote for the sake of defending individual rights in medicine. He wants to be the forty-first vote so that he can block the Democrats from being able to take credit for any action, and perhaps so that Republicans can propose their own bad healthcare policies.As other astute Objectivist bloggers have observed, we’re still not having a debate in terms of principles. It is only ObamaCare vs. the current system, which is a false dichotomy. The question should be “our current set of controls, taxes, and entitlements” vs. “even more controls, taxes, and entitlements.” The question should be: A free market in health care, or continued tyranny?But here’s why I am excited:
The people of Massachusetts have bought us time — time to turn the debate toward one of principles, time to spread the idea that health care is not a right, and that doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and insurers are not slaves to be chained for the purpose of churning out care for everyone, regardless of whether or not he has earned it.There’s been talk of what would happen in midterm elections if healthcare “reform” was passed over the protests of the American people…but now politicians facing election this year have a concrete example staring them right in the face of what happens when you run roughshod over your constituents. And that, I hope, will scare them out of marching in lockstep with Obama’s demands.I had been discouraged by the House and Senate passages of “reform” bills and hadn’t written a letter to the editor or even posted to this blog much for a while. But now I’m reenergized for activism. I thank the people of Massachusetts for that!

reasonpharm.blogspot.com

You mean, you’ll have it regardless of whether or not the American people want socialized medicine, and regardless of whether it’s right?

Mrs. Pelosi and her power-lusting ilk need to be stopped. As much as I’d love to see Scott Brown win today’s election, it won’t be enough. Even if he wins and the Democrats don’t get away with their slimy plan to pass the Senate bill in the House without amendments, defeating health care “reform” this year is only a Band-Aid. Remember, HillaryCare got killed too. What we have to fight is the idea that people have a right to health care or any other of thousands of services our bloated government currently provides using money expropriated from Americans. That will take much more than a single election in Massachusetts.

reasonpharm.blogspot.com

Nobody in government seems to have figured out that conditions like this exist, though. Both of my husband’s medications can only be obtained by prescription. His doctor is usually happy to write a script with several refills on it, but when he runs out, he has to go back to the doctor and get another script. Never mind that nothing has changed since he got the last script. Never mind that asthma inhalers have a pretty low potential for abuse. Never mind that if he wanted to act like a fourteen-year-old and use his inhaler to get high, it would be his right to do so.

Never mind any of that. He needs a prescription when his inhalers run out. Guess what? His inhaler ran out…and because today is a holiday, no one will write him a prescription. He keeps getting voicemail from his primary care doctor, and when he calls anyone else, they tell him, “We’re closed, so you should call your primary care doctor,” or “Wait until tomorrow.” He won’t die if he waits until tomorrow, but he’ll be pretty damn uncomfortable…for no good reason.

Luckily, I remembered that a drugstore near us has a walk-in clinic whose nurse practitioner can write him a script, so my husband can breathe easier today. But this example is illustrative of how asinine the prescription drug requirement can be. Same for me — I have to go back to my gynecologist once a year to get his signoff on my birth control pills, even though the way to prevent oneself from having a baby has not changed in any substantial way in the more than ten years since I started taking birth control pills. Why? Because bureaucrats at the FDA won’t allow me to purchase them over the counter, and bureaucrats in New York State won’t allow my doctor to prescribe me more than a year’s supply at a time. (For many drugs, the allowed supply is far lower — try getting more than a month’s worth of Ritalin at a time.)

In all the talk of what dissatisfies Americans about our healthcare system, I never hear the prescription requirement mentioned. But the government telling you that you can’t get drugs without a doctor’s approval is just as evil as the government taking your money to pay for other people’s health care, regulating insurance companies, and all the rest. It’s your body — it’s your right to put anything you like into it, and your responsibility to bear the consequences of doing so.

reasonpharm.blogspot.com

I went into this week thinking, “I hate salad.” But eating fresh, relatively unadorned vegetables gets you a lot of nutritional impact for very few calories, so I decided to suck it up.

After four days of this, I think it’s not that I hate salad. I just hate bad salad, and there’s a lot of it out there. You know what I’m talking about: soggy yellowish lettuce, tomatoes that aren’t even close to bright red, gloppy dressing applied in mass quantities to hide the fact that the vegetables are no good.

Instead, I’ve eaten several times at Mooncake Foods, a great little Asian fusion restaurant near my office, for lunch. On Monday I had their chicken sausage/Asian pear salad. Wow! So much better than what I usually think of when I think of salad. The greens were actually green, the chicken sausage popped with flavor, and the pear added crunch and sweetness without a ton of extra calories.

After having a bad salad the next day, I went back to Mooncake yesterday and today — yesterday, for the lemongrass shrimp with greens and today for steak with cilantro pesto and greens. (Each dish came with rice, of which I kept my consumption to 1/2 cup or so.) And you know what? I always thought 1500 calories for a day was practically nothing, but when you eat meat and greens, it isn’t! I’ve had plenty of leftover calories to spend on snacks, which I’ve mostly been using on the delectable dark chocolate-covered almonds sold in one of the office vending machines. And I’ve lost two pounds.

This is not to say that I’m going to quit having quesadillas from Calexico for lunch (ZOMG AWESOME) once the weight comes off, but I suppose being more paleo at lunchtime wouldn’t hurt.

Also, if you live in NYC…Mooncake Foods RULES. None of the dishes I’ve mentioned costs more than $10!

reasonpharm.blogspot.com

What’s to say Bloomie won’t try to get as much of a salt ban as he can? He’ll probably do it the same way the calorie-count postings and the trans-fat ban were done: by imposing salt restrictions on restaurants. NYC can’t force manufacturers of packaged foods to toe the line — most would just quit doing business in the city rather than revamp their recipes and factories to suit the demands of one market’s bureaucrats. But it can tell restaurants to change their in-city operations…or else.

This type of regulation hits chain restaurants hardest. In NYC, calorie-count postings are mandated only for restaurants with 10 or more locations in the city; the majority of city restaurants have only a single location, so the onus falls mostly on fast-food chains. I’m sure our city nanny realizes that if he tries to impose salt restrictions on all restaurants, he’d have a revolt on his hands; in fact, city chefs are already speaking out against Bloomie’s sure-to-later-be-backed-by-force “request.” But he can demonize McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Starbucks, et al., and those chains will likely meekly change their NYC operations if ordered to do so.

They shouldn’t. If individuals want to eat more salt than is good for them, that’s their right, and it’s the right of restaurants to flavor their foods in any way they please. It’s the market, not Nanny Bloomberg, that should decide how much salt is in our food.

reasonpharm.blogspot.com

As the New York Times explains, sometimes these price increases happen when larger pharmaceutical companies sell off the smaller-market drugs in their portfolio, and the smaller drugmaker that purchases the drug immediately raises the price in order to profit from its investment. Or the price increase happens via a third-party distributor who purchases the drug from a pharmaceutical company and then resells it to hospitals and pharmacies. Or, the original maker of the drug might have raised the price.

Chuck Schumer, who I’m disgusted to say represents my state, exhibited the typical attitude when he said, “It is hard to find a good-faith explanation for why drug prices could go up this much. This report will lead to a strong demand for action by Congress.”

By “good-faith” he means altruistic; he means that pharmaceutical companies should continue to innovate and produce drugs, not out of pursuit of profits, but out of brother-love for anybody with a medical condition. But don’t expect the kind of great minds that are needed for drug development to work as slaves or to allow themselves to be punished because their work is more vital to man’s survival than others’.

In fact, although Schumer would like to blast the pharmaceutical industry for seeking “excessive” profits, there’s a much more obvious explanation for why the industry has raised prices, and it’s Washington that is abased thereby, not the pharmaceutical industry.

As the article points out, “drug makers’ labs have been unusually barren, and…without new products, drug makers view price increases as among the only ways to reliably increase profits.” That is, drug companies need to increase prices on the products they have in order to stay afloat despite meager pipelines…but why are those pipelines so meager? You can thank the FDA for that — see my article from the Fall 2008 Objective Standard for details on how the FDA kills innovation.

Senator Schumer, the solution is not action from Congress — unless by “action” you mean action to remove your bureaucratic tentacles from medicine!

reasonpharm.blogspot.com