Shaw's Eco-Logic

Wanting to have free speech on a college campus is "delusional"

That according to a DePaul sociology prof who threatens to resign. Talk about your nutso SJW. The problem is: The youth of America is being raised in this insane environment. Full marks for those who see parallels to late 1920s Germany.

Loathsome Phrase of the Day: “Start a Family”

You really have to read the piece to see what a loathsome moron the author is--who BTW is senior managing editor of Washingtonian. Yet, there is hope for society, since virtually all the posted comments are negative--and harshly so.

This HND piece compares the overblown, incompetent management of our Department of Veterans Affairs (and the attendant problems) with overblown, overpaid, and incompetent management of private healthcare institutions.

Naturally, we discuss the absurd "Disney" comparisons made by VA Secretary Robert McDonald, and comment on his less than successful career as CEO of Procter & Gamble. We then segue into some hard-hitting commentary from healthcare reformer Roy M. Poses, MD.

Read the complete article.

This HND piece takes you all the way back to the guy who first discussed stress—endocrinologist Hans Selye. From there, we get a little techie on the "fight or flight" hormones. When secreted more or less continuously, as they are in chronic stress, it's very bad for your health.

Not surprisingly, the CDC has identified workplace stress as a major source, if not THE major source of stress for American adults.

And,of course, we have to include that quote from Nigel Marsh: "The reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like."

Read the complete article.

This HND piece is a sequel to part 1.

FDA is one of those agencies that seems to retain a good reputation—outside the realm of people who are actually familiar with how it works. For most who have had the misfortune to deal with it, it is widely despised.

This article delves into the frankly horrific story of diabetes meds, and then segues into FDA's latest failure—the endoscope-related infections. In a sense, this is failure beyond failure, since FDA was finally starting to kick some butt in this affair, only to completely back off.

For an agency that STILL touts its thalidomide victory form the ealry 1960s (while keeping quite silent on the matter of American thalidomide babies), it's time for big changes.

Read the complete article.

This HND piece will hopefully give more publicity to the amazing, disturbing finding expressed in the title.

The part following "Bronze medal" is the actual title of the bellwether research article, recently published in the BMJ, whose lead writer—Martin Makary, MD—has been an advocate for patient safety and transparency in healthcare for years. The work encompassed extensive analysis of the literature to reach its "understated" figure of 251,454 medical error-caused deaths per year.

As bad as this finding is in itself, matters become even worse when you realize that "the system" expresses little interest in this matter, with cover-ups and denial seemingly the norm. Some authorities believe that every single one of these medical errors could be prevented.

Read the complete article.

Let's face it! The prevalence of chronic disease, and the astounding statistic that 88 percent of Americans over 65 have at least one chronic condition, expose an epic failure of our healthcare system. In this latest HND piece, we cast a big bright light on the subject. Many of us are getting tired of being told that virtually all of these conditions occur because we "are getting older," and beyond taking all sorts of drugs, there's not much that can be done about it.

Oh, by the way, chronic disease [including cardiovascular diseases; cancers; chronic respiratory diseases; obesity; arthritis; and diabetes] is by far the leading cause of death worldwide. Is it too conspiratorial to suggest that since there's way more money in treating these afflictions than curing them, no cures will ever be found?

Some suggest that we can't cure chronic diseases because we are not approaching them in the proper fashion. For this, we discuss the Cynefin Framework, a knowledge management tool, which allows decision-makers to see things from new viewpoints, assimilate complex concepts, and address real-world problems and opportunities. Broad brush, the manner in which we treat acute illness simply does not work for chronic disease—yet, conventional medicine employs the same paradigm.

Read the complete article.