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There have been a lot of reports of people getting neurological injuries on coasters already.

I wonder how much more they can push these things before the human limits are reached (at least the human limits the insurance companies will allow!).

Probably the biggest problem in medicine today is lack of sleep of interns, nurses, and doctors. No joke. So many of these people lack sleep and it is killing us all.

Long Hours, Little Sleep

Sleep Deprived Medical Residents Ask for Limited Work Hours

Fatigue, Sleepiness, and Medical Errors

Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US, Causing 250,000 Deaths Every Year

The original letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is online.

I work at a major corn distributor (food being an essential supply during potential siege or embargo, and breakfast being the most important meal of the day)

Ah, yes. We're in immenent danger of having a simultaneous land(two borders), sea(two coasts), and air embargo that'll threaten the food supply! Gasp!(before anyone quotes the recent dock worker lockout, think back- did it actually affect you in ANY way? And it lasted for weeks? Hmm, funny thing! BTW, we're talking about access to food in general. Not your favorite cereal. A cereal, PERIOD.)

"and I can tell you that I hope to have my hands on these sometime this month, before Christmas or President's Day at the very most. It should speed up our processes considerably to not have to be tied to "wired" networks. It's a fun time to be in IT, and this cloak-and-dagger stuff just makes it better."

Try this on for size. It's more like "it's a fun time to be in an industry that just got a $170 Billion With A Capital B "aid package".

I know I'll rest better at night knowing NSA encryption is helping the industry keep our food safe with proper inspections and regulations so that, oh, say, 27 Million pounds of food infected with deadly bacteria doesn't have to be thrown out.

Stop worrying about fucking terrorists breaking into your grain silo's encrypted network, embargos, and "seiges"...

and start worrying about things like sending billions to an industry that can't even deliver safe food to our supermarkets yet constantly argues for reduced government inspections and regulations

My guess is that the gent I quoted works for ADM, which is busy pushing things like, say, ethanol, which costs a fortune to make and cars can't run on above single-digit percentages. In fact, its a program everyone(save ADM and farmers) admit is completely failed. Yet ADM(and farmers) continue to get money from the government to produce it.

Oh, and then there's the millions upon millions of pounds of dried milk the government paid for, sitting in warehouses, doing absolutely nothing. I think I read it would take the entire US months to drink it all?

Upset about high food prices? Thank your local congressman. Your tax dollars are helping make YOUR FOOD MORE EXPENSIVE.

There is even recent research that even suggests that children exposed to pets (and the inherent uncleanlyness) have lower incidence of asthma and allergies down the road.

It's glaringly obvious that those who have the greatest need for the web's convenience are not being considered in important public services such as airline ticket sales, even public sites such as this or this or this that make slashdot look clean. How is an automated reader supposed to get through those tables of images and how long will person have to sit before CONTENT happens? News, tickets, medical and law information, job hunting, whew, I'm glad I'm not blind. Imagine having to use the phone to get the info you need - you can't it's not there.

Responsiblity is not hard to place. Flash and ActiveX and other nasties like that don't work and should not be used for important public sites. The designer that ignores this, and your simple advice, or who the manager who forces the designer to do the wrong thing anyway are responsible. It's that simple. Keep up your good work, the credit is just as easy to place.

Although it's another side of health care, why not take a look at the AMA's page on HIPAA? Much of the advice is geared toward small practitioners, and as such would be useful in helping you figure out where to start.

So, what might cause Asthma (Which may be leveling off as we speak), childhood Diabetes, increased incidence of autoimmune disorders and cancer, and increased incidence of autism?

It isn't vaccines! The science doesn't stand up. If you think it's vaccines, we'll agree to disagree, okay?

I blame the chlorinated carbon molecule.

Organochlorines have been absent from the earth, in any appreciable amounts, since before the appearance of multicelled life. They are immensely stable, but nothing natural creates them - for energetic reasons, they are purely synthetic. They have unique (powerful, TOXIC) chemistry that we can "exploit but never control", in the words of Pandora's Poison author Shalini Ramanathan. This is an excellent book if you're interested in which feature of our 20th century lifestyle is raising disease incidences.

According to the JAMA article that this data comes from, and my own searches of Pubmed, there's only been one randomized trial with surgery, and that was also comparing vs splinting. There have been few rigorous studies of the effectiveness of 'conservative' treatments like splinting. I'm pretty surprised by this! My understanding is the surgery actually fixes the problem (at least for strictly defined carpal tunnel syndrome, where the pinched nerve is in the wrist) since the ligament that is pressing into the nerve is actually cut back. To cite a personal example, my mom had carpal tunnel way back in the late 70s when no one had heard of it and has been fine since she got the surgery in about 1980. I think it's very very rare to have repeated surgical treatment.

Well, you're absolutely right, with the guns people are allowed to purchase now, your average citizen would stand no chance against artillery or light armor. You might want to consider, though, how likely it would be that anyone would order domestic artillery or light armor strikes, no matter how difficult the situation. But it's late at night, and I don't feel like arguing that point right now, so I'll move on.

Firearms are tools, Period. They can be used for self-defense, for crime, or in some historic events, revolution. The history of the US, and the history of Switzerland, and now even Israel, show that honest folk are the majority, and the more of them that go around armed, the less crime there is, or the lesser the impact of it. (armed Israeli citizens where instrumental in stopping a recent machine gun attack at a shopping plaza. Armed El Al employees stopped the July fourth attack at LAX, not any US cops or TSA employees)

So if you think that Concealed Carry Permit holders should be licensed like drivers, I agree with you, provided they are licensed exactly like cars.

1. There are no restrictions on the possession or use of an automobile on private property. You can let your twelve year old son drive your F-350 across the family farm if you care to. The F-350 need not be registered or insured, though you'd have to pay taxes on it. The same should be true for guns- no restrictions on the possesion or storage of any reasonable firearm on one's own private property. (I happen to think reasonable is anything short of Anti Aircraft Batteries. Think it's crazy? The swiss allow their citizens to own anti aircraft guns. Your line may be different.)

2. Licenses are issued without question to all who qualify.

3. Associated costs are not so high as to prevent those who may need to defend themselves the most- poor inner city folk, for example.

4. A Concealed Carry Permit in one state is valid in any other.

5. There are no waiting periods associated with purchasing guns, nor any limit to the amount of guns one may purchase.

6. Operating or brandishing a firearm while intoxicated would definatly be illegal.

As for the brady bill saving lives- the Journal of the American Medical Association seems to think they haven't done a thing: "Our analyses provide no evidence that implementation of the Brady Act was associated with a reduction in homicide rates. In particular, we find no differences in homicide or firearm homicide rates to adult victims in the 32 treatment states directly subject to the Brady Act provisions compared with the remaining control states."
Full text here

Based on that, I would have to say that the Brady Bill hasn't stopped any domestic disputes from turning into murder, Unless you find the AMA to be less than authoritative in matters of public health.

I personally think that waiting periods are actually more dangerous to women, as if they know they are in imminent danger from an estranged husband or boyfriend, they are unable to arm themselves. A woman with a gun can stop an attacking man. A woman without a gun stands much less of a chance, as most men are physically stronger and larger than most women.

Quoting Jacob Sullum from reason online (only because he says it well)Supporters say a waiting period allows potential murderers time to "cool off." But anyone who leaves the scene of an argument, drives to a gun shop, buys a weapon, loads it with ammunition, and returns to kill his interlocutor can hardly be said to be acting in the heat of the moment.

I was going to post alot more, then I realized you're in support of handguns for self defense, so if I prattled on, it would be pointless.

GM doesn't just make crops more plentiful or disease resistant, it introduces a new species. This can cause all sorts of problems. GM plants can destroy biodiversity, become unkillable mutant superweeds, and give corporations more IP power. As an example, I believe there was an old Slashdot story (I searched but couldn't find it) about a Canadian farmer who was being sued because genetically modified seed blew off of passing trucks and cross-fertilized his field.

This doesn't mean that GM is bad, or that Kona coffee growers aren't more concerned with the purity of their brand than their crop, just that we should proceed with care.

• Medicine is a field which requires certification. Writing code is not a profession in that sense. There is no body analagous to the American Medical Association or the IEEE that regulates best practices, standards,ethics. There is no journal of the American Coders Association
• Certification is a tricky business for technical, rapidly changing fields; any sysadmin aware of the SAGE Certification program should know about the long, hard road to determining what makes a certified sysadmin.
• Most coders don't even participate in the Association for Computer Machinery, the first computer professional organization.
• The low barriers to entry for coders make regualtion damn near impossible. It's a lot like the repeated attempts to unionize sex workers: there's always another eighteen year old waiting in the wings to take the work and do a miserable job. I have way more respect for the average sex worker than coders - competetion makes them good at what they do. Most coders get paid either way. But that's a different rant.
• Who determines the public good? This is ostensibly the work of the government, but occasionally falls to non-governmental organizations like the AMA. This is not a job for the self-righteous /. community. Is spyware harmful? I think so, but most people either aren't aware or are indifferent. This isn't a technocracy, which despite what some readers might think is a good thing - technical people can't govern any better than anyone else, and frequently do worse.

• Nice idea, but you can't get there from here.

  Some days it's horribly obvious that too many /. readers really don't know any serious computer professionals. These aren't new issues, but they've never been brought to the attention of this community.

The facts, as has been documented here and elsewhere, are that reputable scientists are trying to move publication of peer review journals into the future. They know their peers, and can organize themselves on line. If it becomes too much for them, some profesional society will step in and organize it for them but the restrictions on publishing elswhere and great cost of dead trees will become a thing of the past. The internet provides a low cost means of ditributing information and it will be expoited.

One very good example of this is the Journal of the American Medical Association, now online and mostly free. The New England Journal of Medicine is not as available, but is online. The physics people have been doing this for a long time, and everyone is following. Science and peer review will not die with the outmoded dead tree journal publication industry. Abusers like you will be weeded out, as will greedy publishers who abuse their reputations to try to make a few extra bucks.

Have a nice day.

The facts, as has been documented here and elsewhere, are that reputable scientists are trying to move publication of peer review journals into the future. They know their peers, and can organize themselves on line. If it becomes too much for them, some profesional society will step in and organize it for them but the restrictions on publishing elswhere and great cost of dead trees will become a thing of the past. The internet provides a low cost means of ditributing information and it will be expoited.

One very good example of this is the Journal of the American Medical Association, now online and mostly free. The New England Journal of Medicine is not as available, but is online. The physics people have been doing this for a long time, and everyone is following. Science and peer review will not die with the outmoded dead tree journal publication industry. Abusers like you will be weeded out, as will greedy publishers who abuse their reputations to try to make a few extra bucks.

Have a nice day.

Yeah, here's your embryo. MURDER! MURDER! I can see a face in that right cell!

If you can find an original Pernkopf Anatomy Atlas and compare it with versions currently in print, you'll see that this is exactly what happened.

Here's a more detailed article on the issue. It's a bioethicist's nightmare.

When was Scientific research ever unbiased? Be careful how much you believe in what you read. [1] [2]

So, dig this: suppose the time-frame of compulsory education has been hiked up for the purpose of keeping children off the job market longer, so as to not devalue labor and thereby devalue the labor system.

Suppose the compulsory educational system, which is economically (and therefore ideologically) linked to every other industry, is regearing to keep the middle class from further expanding and gaining power.

Suppose that, with all the psychological research that's been done, someone actually thought ahead and said, "Okay, if we can institutionalize middle-class children within the first 2 decades of their life, we'll be able to not only increase the size of the prison-industrial-military complex, but also to grab more power for ourselves and our friends overall" Just the same way some retailer once said, "Let's hire some of these behavioral psychologists to figure out how to organize the store in the most influential possible way[s]."

The net effect of our compulsory school system is obvious: 23% illiteracy in America, 13% prevalence of social phobia, Major depression (18.9%), generalized anxiety (14.8%), and the 'Suicide Rate Among U.S. Teens Keeps Increasing'.

And I nearly left out the continuous rise in teenage violence...

You see, the problem is, as Adam Yauch is quoted in the last link, that "Being on either end of a violent situation, whether you seem to have come out with the upper hand or whether you don't seem to, it doesn't resolve anything. It escalates the problem. Hatred leads to more hatred. Violence leads to more violence." Violence is not by any means limited to its overt outbreaks; it is a sadist/masochistic cycle which perpetuates itself. Our "educational" system suffers the Disney syndrome: the violence of management over the tenderness of interaction.

"Nature once had a chance to run riot in South Florida, producing jungles and swamps; now nature must submit to control. " And nature (which, yes children, is very much alive in each and every one of us) is pissed.

________________________________________________ __

American Society for MicroBiology
The ASM believes that labeling on the basis of process is not scientifically warranted. Genetic modification has long been used to enhance the production of plants and animals for food. Indeed it is doubtful that there exists any agriculturally important product that can be labeled as not genetically modified by traditional breeding procedures or otherwise. Biotechnology as practiced in agriculture today is part of a continuum of ever more refined attempts to breed better plants and animals for food or show.

American Society for Cell Biology
Many individuals and groups have raised concerns about the safety of transgenic BT crops despite the fact that the bacteria that naturally produce BT have been applied directly to crops as a form of organic pest control for over 40 years. Transgenic BT crops have passed rigorous testing in the US, Canada, and Japan, and they have been found to pose no threat to other insects, animals, or humans. The primary alternative to BT is large-scale spraying of pesticides which kills both beneficial and harmful insects and has other negative environmental consequences.

National Academy of Sciences
http://www.nap.edu/books/0309069300/html/

Since the National Academy of Sciences is the nations premier scientific organization, they best represent the current scientific consensus in the field, so I will quote from their report, first stated in a 1987 white paper and reitterated April 2000:

• There is no evidence that unique hazards exist either in the use of rDNA techniques or in the movement of genes between unrelated organisms.
• The risks associated with the introduction of rDNA-engineered organisms are the same in kind as those associated with the introduction of unmodified organisms and organisms modified by other methods.
• Assesment of the risks of introducing rDNA-engineered organisms into the environment should be based on the nature of the organism and the environment into which it is introduced, not on the method by which it was produced.

References:
carbonated beverages linked to bone fractures in teenaged girls
ditto
an article disputing the above

FWIW, I did a search at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on 'repetitive strain injury' and it came back with 3418 documents. It may not exactly be proof, but it indicates something the AMA seems to take seriously.

I am a medical student. Not a doctor. By law, I can't prescribe jack shit and I am no more qualified to give medical advice than an aborginal tribesman.

I *can*, however, tell you that carpal tunnel as suffered by geeks is usually a stress injury, not a degenerative or autoimmune cartilage disease as found in arthritis. What's the difference? Use good ergonomics and geek carpal tunnel often goes away, never to return. Arthritis can be relieved, but is currently always progressive. Stress injuries can be healed. Degenerative processes generally can't.

That means that you definitely don't *need* glucosamine; you can heal just fine without it. However, there's still the question of whether or not it'll help you heal. The literature, at least as far as I can see right now, doesn't contain any data on glucosamine for acute injuries like this; the studies are all for arthritis. In arthritis, it does seem to help, though that's not proven. If taken in reasonable doses, it should not harm you.

It is worth considering the placebo effect, which is really very powerful. If you think glucosamine will help you, you are very likely to experience some improvement. Therefore, if you have the money to spend and you truly believe it might help, it may well be worth your while to try it. (The best part about the placebo effect is that it'll work even if the supplement you end up buying isn't really glucosamine (which is a big problem with most natural medicines, BTW)).

I have also done you the courtesy of looking up some existing non-surgical therapies for CTS; you may wish to ask a doctor about them. Steroid injections have been indicated to help reduce the inflammation where aspirin and ibuprofen can't, although some studies indicate that this is only temporary relief. At least one clinical trial has shown that certain yoga postures can have a beneficial effect. (The postures are in JAMA, November 11th 1998. The AMA may still have that issue available online.) There is weak anecdotal evidence for vitamin B6 helping; could take that along with the glucosamine. (Again, assuming you don't start taking massive doses and assuming you use good biomechanics, this can't hurt.)

Executive Summary: Can't hurt, small chance of helping, here's some other stuff to check out, try not to get scammed, and USE BETTER ERGONOMICS!

An interesting thing to do next time you register software or give information to a web site is to misspell your name slightly and keep a record of how it was misspelled. Make a list of variations and which site you submitted to. In a few weeks/months when you get junk mail addressed to you with a variation of your misspelled name, you will know which site is giving away your info to others. Probably a good reason to NEVER give out your real info ever again unless absolutely necessary.
Bored? You can spend hours at Nedsite looking for info on yourself and long lost buddies. I imagine trying to opt out of being in all these different databases would take more effort than it's worth. Might as well get used to the idea that there will always be ways for people to find you on the net if they know how/where to search. People in certain professions don't even have an option of opting out - take a look at Lawyer Search or Doctor Search. I also wonder where these guys: Birthday Search got their data from.
Information is indeed begging to be set free - including your own.

If you're referring to this, it is worth pointing out that, despite being widely cited by religious groups, the study really isn't all it's cracked up to be. About 1000 patients at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo were randomly assigned to be prayed for or not. The prayers were for "a speedy recovery with no complications." There was in fact no significant difference between the recovery times of the experimental and control groups. The researchers nonetheless managed to concoct a scoring system by which the experimental group did 10% better than the control group.

I wish the original poster had provided that link. (Come to think of it.. IS that the study he was referring to?) I was about to reply with a "I'll believe it when I see it" message. It's interesting that even the researchers are actually admitting that the difference is statistically insignifant.

Not that mention that I find the whole idea of using a (somewhat arbitrary) weighted score rather suspect.

Some studies have shown that hospital patients who are prayed for will statistically do better than patients who are not prayed for.

You may die from hitting your head with a brick. Since it is only a maybe, it is ok to do it. Not! I found no research that found smoking marijuana to be healthy to the general public, but I did find cases where it was unhealthy.

I do not have a problem with drug research about marijuana, but I do mind letting it be used for entertainment.

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