Slashdot Mirror

If you insist
https://www.mja.com.au/journal...

and only care about profits. This is more proof of that.

Doctors = legalized crack dealers

You wouldn't say most patients then are "legalized crackheads", would you? So why then, since most doctors don't give pain medicine to make money (see below) like a crack dealer, nor do doctors give pain medications because they know a large portion (most don't) will become addicts like crack dealers, would you say that about doctors?

There is also a bit of cultural shift - some of it driven by the pharmaceutical industry pushing "pain free" and away from the thought process of our grandparents that some aches and pains were just associated with "growing old". I see many elderly patients with "plain" old osteoarthritis because they tell their docs their knees hurt or hips hurt. Some of it driven by the 5th vital since, Joint Commission, and your doctors "patient satisfaction survey" (HCAHPS):

(1) Did you need medicine for pain?

(2) How often was your pain well-controlled?

(3) How often did the hospital staff do everything they could to help with your pain?

It's a perverse goal. I probably can get your pain to zero. You might end up a drooling heap of drowsiness, but it will be an incoherent zero when I ask what your pain score is....This perverse goal has incentivized over treatment and allowed for much abuse by a small number of patients, some of whom are abusing the system for profit or to get high, and by those with, essentially unrealistic expectations - for some people pain is not zero even when they are in a drooling heap of slumber. Any docs will tell you stories of patients admitted for "pain crisis" who are seriously sawing some logs, dead asleep, literally need to be shaken to be awoken and when asked will still claim their pain score is 10/10 or, even better 20/10 or 50/10...... *sigh*

Most of us come to work everyday to alleviate some suffering and misery. Cure, treat or ameliorate disease. There is no nefarious conspiracy to turn people into addicts. Here are the real factors....and this is by no means an exhaustive list

The association between chronic pain and obesity

Association of body mass index with symptom severity and quality of life in patients with fibromyalgia

Depression and chronic pain

Depression and pain

Pain and Depression: A Neurobiological Perspective of Their Relationship

Back Pain and Obesity

https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2011/194/11/time-rethink-end-life-care

Australia has a universal blood collection program for newborn babies. It is supposed to be for medical purposes only, for testing for genetic diseases, but in 1997 the Western Australian police accessed the database as part of an investigation.

https://www.mja.com.au/system/files/issues/194.../bow11171_fm.pdf

Because it it did, the Sun would be the most evil entity in the Solar System.

Well, to be fair skin cancer is very common in Australia:

Cumulative risks to age 70 years of having at least one NMSC were 70% for men and 58% for women

Source

I've never understood why the United States engages in "free trade" ...

This made me almost made me lose my esophagus (I wasn't drinking coffee). When the US enacts trade barriers is it to prevent dumping, so if NZ fruit are cheaper in US supermarkets than Japanese supermarkets it is clearly because NZ is dumping it fruit in the US (not because Japan could have any trade barriers against other countries). In the latest and most bizarre case, "free trade" means messing around with Australia's public health system.

I have to go through this long ass appeal process and physical in order to prove how lean I am every year.

I'd give them a waist measurement and a hip measurement, tell them to read the following study and tell them to check back in 5 years or you'll get yourself another insurance company. Or why not just take the money you are throwing at insurance companies and reinvest it yourself? You are obviously low risk, unless you have some other ticking timebomb medical condition. In fact, on waist size alone you are low risk. If you are athletic, I bet you have a comparatively smaller WHR than waist size relative to the rest of the population.

http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/179_11_011203/wel10182_fm-1.pdf

People have been. Perhaps not for radiation therapy, which tends not to leave residual radiation, but there are plenty of nuclear medicine diagnostic tests that, by design, cause a person to emit detectable radiation for hours or days afterwards. For most of these tests, the patient is injected with a radioisotope that concentrates in a particular part of the body, which is then imaged. The list of isotopes that get used is really mind-boggling. Most have half-lives measured in minutes to hours, but the amount of radiation emitted after many half-lives, while not medically relevant or useful, is still enough to trigger radiation detectors DHS has deployed. Some of them can be detected weeks after administration (e.g., Tl-201)

Here is at least one article on the subject. Here is another, and a third. Another (which you probably can't find for free, sorry) would be Dauer et al. in the J of Nuclear Cardiology (vol 14, no 4, pg 582) on Thallium-201 stress tests and homeland security.

So, in short, this kind of thing happens.

But if a particular drug isn't potentially profitable enough for a company to pay for the phase III trials, or it would greatly benefit the country (and the world) for it to be available cheaply, is that really a bad use of millions of tax dollars?

The government would probably need to work with a generic manufacturer (the lowest bidder) to produce enough for the trials, after which the patent would be publicly-owned and licensed to whoever will agree to make it cheaply - hydrochlorothiazide costs a few dollars for a year's supply, and I doubt they'd price it below cost. (Enough money is already wasted on marketing already, thank you.)

Not to mention that relying exclusively on industry research might end up costing more in the long run.

896 mg assuming each shot is similar to the 1 fl oz reference espresso in the USDA Nutrient database.

I'd be a bit careful. Depending on the speed with which you drink your coffee, you might be getting close to the toxicity level of caffeine. Unfortunately, there is very little information on what that is and how it relates to clinical effects. I found this paper interesting, though.

http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/174_10_210501/ cannon/cannon.html

I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on Slashdot.

Interesting point about pewter vessels yes they used to contain lead but
http://www.pewtergallery.com/about.html newer pewter vessels are lead free (Britania Pewter).

A little more research brought this page up

http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/xmas98/phan/ph an.html

It seems theres a danger from certain glazes used on pots and Lead Crystal is also a dodgy thing to use.
it seems storing your whiskey in a lead crystal decanter may also be bad for your health.

not something i had taken note of before so thanks for the post.

US News and World Report and Newsweek are both running interesting articles on how personal tape players are a major contributor [US News] to early hearing loss [Newsweek].

Actually this is an AP wire service story also reported on CNN.

You can read the original research at

http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/xmas98/lepage/ lepage.html

While the authors note that noise induced hearing loss related to exposure to personal stereo systems does not show up on routine hearing tests, they claim that more sensitive tests (OAEs) do detect an effect.

Note that their study is retrospective and exposure data comes from self-reporting. [They gathered a bunch of OAE tests and did regression analysis on data from history forms and questionnaires obtained at the time.]

It's an interesting study. Noise from personal stereo systems probably is a risk factor. But this study doesn't quantify the risk and the exposure data is "soft". This is far from saying that "personal tape players are a major contributor to early hearing loss" as claimed.

Nice troll. Even the topic is screed. If you'll read carefully the parent post said that drugs are not very harmful in and of themselves. Not that they were harmless.

The rest of your points have been refuted by others(good job guys) so I won't go into them. I just wanted to point out a study which shows shows how legalizing a hard drug, heroin in this case, can dramatically reduce problems associated with it.

In the UK heroin addicts were maintained on heroin. It was found that these addicts committed fewer crimes, were healthier, and many were able to hold down jobs and significantly better their lives now that they weren't preoccupied with finding a fix every day. Citation

This site contains some interesting facts about peple with objects lodged in their rectums.

This site has some nice x-rays of people with things stuck in their rectums, and a picture of an extracted vibrator.

If you read only one site about people with objects lodged in their rectums, make it this one! It contains anatomical drawings of techniques used to extract different items from people's rectums. A must read for any aspiring goatse men.