Shaw's Eco-Logic

This HND piece takes a historical perspective on how government-run healthcare programs can go bad. We start with how von Bismarck's 1881 Health Insurance Law was fine, until bureaucrats made sure that the docs knew who was in charge. And, when the money started becoming more scarce after World War I, cost benefit analysis morphed quite readily into Social Darwinism and eugenics.

Somehow, many physicians joined the ranks of the Nazis, with Mengele being the worst but not the only bad one, and horrific abuses became the order of the day. We examine how this sort of behavior persists to this day.

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This HND piece offers plenty of tips on how to keep your family safe, culled from a variety of good sources. We include a number of interesting links. You might like the examples of old and new "shock" safe driving productions.

Then we get into the matter of emergency communications, and how GPS trackers can keep you informed of the whereabouts and welfare of your loved ones in critical times. To this end, we introduce a new product that needs no other network to cover a range of six miles, with off-grid texting included.

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This HND piece debunks the pernicious nonsense pushed by the prohibitionists that vaping is a "gateway" to smoking. And you thought that the government wanted people to quit smoking. Completely ignoring science (OMG, are they vaping deniers?), they continue to attack e-cigs. Heck, the "enlightened" city of San Francisco has flat-out banned the sale of e-cigs because they know better. So...a city that can't keep human feces and discarded syringes off the streets has a better way. Riiight.

This story brings you the real story, citing numerous studies, and gives the facts behind the findings. As you might expect, the prohibitionists wildly distort the statistics, with all their slicing, dicing, and conflating.

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This HND piece is a somewhat belated follow-up to an article from 2013. In the current piece, we examine recommended sleep durations, the best sleeping positions, and if you can really make up for lost sleep at a later time.

As it happens, chronic sleep deprivation is not benign, and is linked to many serious illnesses. Whether you're a night owl or a morning lark, you do need your sleep!

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This HND piece, written by guest author Mark Goulston, MD, takes a hard look at some of the major causes of the increase in teen suicides and mental health issues, occurring over the last 12 years. Some of these causes include distracted parents; our society's addiction to thrills and instant gratification, which can supplant true familial closeness; and the inevitable adrenaline crashes that occur.

Goulston notes that "Staying distracted from our feelings is not a long-term solution. Feelings must be felt all the way through, in the same way you need to drain an abscess to heal. Ultimately, we must get off the adrenaline high and return to bonding. Excitement can't take the place of intimacy. We have to stop believing that everything is okay when it's clearly not."

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This HND piece examines the practice of aid in dying, aka physician assisted suicide. First legalized in the Netherlands, it has spread quickly, and is currently legal in several states. Despite many safeguards built into the associated laws, the practice is being exposed as rife with abuse.

According to official government stats, there are more than 400 cases of "termination of life without request," not to mention some very dicey reasons for the suicides, that strayed far from the "terminally ill" original qualification. Likewise, similar abuses are being uncovered in the American version of this practice, as well.

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This HND piece reports on the sorry state of the official tobacco control movement. In the wake of a recent large British study which concludes toast e-cigs are twice as effective for smoking cessation than officially-sanctioned methods, officialdom has changed its tactics. Now, they say the e-cigs are no safer than cigarettes.

We interview one of the biggest names in the tobacco control movement—Michael Siegel—who spills the beans on his colleagues. Siegel is unapologetically forthright, and his remarks will open plenty of eyes.

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This HND piece examines the ongoing problems at healthcare institutions—that seem to persist from year to year. We focus on two big aspects: Infection control and flat-out incompetent mistakes.

As to infection control, we analyze—based on the limited information that has been released to the public—the shocking infection control breaches at a Saddlebrook, NJ surgery center. The facility admitted that 3.778 people could have been exposed to Hep B, Hep C, and HIV. And this, over a period defined as January 1 to September 7 of 2018. The January 1st seems a bit arbitrary, doesn't it? And, the September 7th only marks the date that they were temporarily closed down by the state department of health.

Drug diversion seems to be a reasonable explanation, although we're not hearing too much about this. Typically, the gory details almost never emerge in these sorts of breaches, but maybe this one will be different.

As to medical mistakes, while they occur everywhere, it is most disheartening when they occur at marquee establishments run by big names, such as Johns Hopkins. We discuss a few real bad ones.

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This HND piece covers the abhorrent practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), widely practiced in several countries, and now imported into the so-called first world. A cynical observer would conclude that this absolutely destroys the "magic dirt" theory, whereby immigrants from the third world instantly become more civilized once they trod on the soil of the US—or other first world destination.

More to the point, though, millions of little girls are affected by FGM, and it was made illegal via federal law in the US in 1996. Many corresponding state laws followed. Don't you know, though, that the federal statute would be declared unconstitutional by a "conservative" federal judge just a month or so ago. As such, a doctor in Michigan who allegedly performed 100 or so of these procedures had many of the charges against her dropped. Needless to say, this decision was widely condemned.

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This HND piece examines a few practical ways that lives really can be saved. Accidental deaths are a good place to start, and this topic has been in the use quite a bit lately. After all, drug overdoses have now overtaken auto accidents in this category.

We also look at diseases, and list a few proven techniques to avoid being an early victim. The article concludes with ways to cut unnecessary deaths in healthcare settings, and spotlights a new free app that could help.

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