Health Care Fun

A couple of recent stories from the realm of big health care:

Did you know Dr. Jarvik isn't actually licensed to practice medicine? Wonder if Pfizer did, before it signed him up to promote Lipitor. I also did find myself wondering (just because I'm a cynical SOB) if there's any reason why two Michigan legislators are on Pfizer's case -- couldn't possibly have anything to do with Pfizer's abandonment of Michigan? Probably not.

Scarier (who actually pays attention to pharmaceutical ads, after all?) is this story about harvesting organs for transplant. I can't tell from the reportage what I really think about it, but it sounds like the doc (who could get eight years in jail if convicted) did bend a protocol or two.

More Snow

On the off chance you're interested, this is what things looked like from the front door this morning, with snow dog and snow woman returning from their walk.

The end of civilization as we know it

More Americans giving up golf ... told you so, in fact in 1999, as this old WCA item demonstrates.

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CAN WE AFFORD IT?

There's big money in it, high-profile real estate deals to be done, and a glitzy, glamorous image being presented. People who take part are encouraged to think of themselves as "players" and to spend money right and left. There are magazines, TV shows, and web sites, all trying to give it a positive spin. But underneath it all, there's a tragic story of addiction, loss, and human pathos. Join us tonight when Wood- Charles brings you, "Golf: Clubbed Into Submission."

To some people, golf is still connected with gangsters and the underworld, a legacy of the prohibition era, when golf was illegal throughout the United States. In fundamentalist Islamic cultures, golf is a creature of the devil, inextricably linked with an incident in the 12th century, when dissenting sects in Afghanistan attacked each other with putters. And most Southern Baptists at least claim to shun golf, on the grounds that it leads to dancing.

But lately, perhaps as part of America's general moral decline, perhaps due to our increasing exposure to violence in the media and the lack of stable, two- parent families, more and more of our impressionable adults are turning to golf, some briefly, losing no more than a few weekends and a few thousand dollars in equipment and clothing , others losing livelihoods, homes, marriages, and their sense of self worth. The question has to be: can America afford it?

Golf can be subtle or all-consuming. Two case histories serve to demonstrate the range of ill effects otherwise (more or less) rational people can suffer.

One such history, that of Mr. Ken P., illustrates the middle path. Mr. P. describes himself as a social golfer. He plays one or two games a week, "just to relax," and truly believes that he can quit anytime he wants. However, in the last year, he's left his high- prestige career in the tape software business and is supporting himself with a meagre living in the fastener trade, which he supplements by hustling restaurants for free chicken wings.

More alarming is the story of Tom K. After a lifetime of abstemious behavior, he was introduced to golf by a relative. Within months, Mr. K. had lost his job, and so had everyone who worked with him! While this is admittedly not typical, it illustrates the devastating effects golf can have

What can be done? Golf courses are springing up everywhere. As the rust belt cities of the north try to rejuvenate their aging centres, golf courses look like a quick answer. In Detroit alone, dozens of dilapidated casinos in the downtown area are being bulldozed to make way for golf facilities. Mayor Mel Farr is actively backing the golf initiative, swearing that it will bring employment and revenue to the city. But many worry that all it will bring is tacky landscaping and desperate Mason shoe dealers, hoping against hope that they'll beat the odds. Others propose a conspiracy theory: golf is a minority plot to get mainstream whities hooked on something that will break up their families, enslave them to corporate interests, and divert their attention from more subtle attacks on American values like Lilith Fair and the Teletubbies.

How can you tell if you or someone close to you is involved with golf? Experts say that there are several warning signs: always being short of money; strange tastes in shoes; and a tendency to buy up large tracts of land in the northern lower peninsula. If you think you may have a problem with golf, the American Medical Association suggests trying something cheaper and less time-consuming, like getting a Ph.D. in Particle Physics or restoring vintage motorcycles.

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The Wood-Charles News Service has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern and Golf Resort in sunny downtown Ann Arbor, where everyone is trying to promote a new euphemism, "Dumber than a Kansas School Board."

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Vaccinations and children's health

Two separate items regarding the claimed link between vaccinations and bad health outcomes: a while back, based on toxicology data for methyl mercury, there was concern that vaccines preserved with ethyl mercury might cause health problems (the use of ethyl mercury was or is being phased out in the US as a result.) This reasoning from one form of mercury to another was simply because we didn't have enough toxicology data for ethyl.

Now a study from South America, where ethyl mercury is still used in vaccines, demonstrates that children excrete ethyl mercury much faster than methyl -- in about 11 days as opposed to 70. So weak science, at best, was allowed to generate another vaccination scare.

Meanwhile and more directly, a third study (and the largest so far,) shows no link between the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.

Why do I care enough about all this to use up electrons on it? Just because I'm fascinated by mythology, urban and otherwise, plus a concern that the more people who are allowed to use personal beliefs to avoid vaccinations, the more the diseases in question will continue to be a problem.

Twelve-year old rubbish

Resurrected from the hard copy archives and lovingly turned into a PDF, it's a marked-up copy of the 1996 Wood-Charles Holiday Kommunication, an Ann Arbor / English phrase book (no final version appears in our files.) Long before babelfish and so on, we were doing translation of obscure dialects, and this is as obscure as it gets. Click here for the document - you'll need Adobe reader or some other PDF renderer.

The humor of some of this may escape the casual or non-Ann Arbor-oriented reader -- the jokes about how do I get to Zingerman's, for example, are simply based on the fact that the famous deli lies at the nexus of the most illogical set of one-way streets in the western hemisphere. And the stuff about jazz is from an era when there was a kind of open mike night going on at a club in town, and the cast of characters was colorful and amusing.

One year and counting

Today (Feb 19th) is the anniversary of our somewhat rude surprise ... "Sir, we have your MRI here, and you should go back to the hospital ... now." But a year is a year, and things (as everyone is tired of hearing me say, I'm sure) could be so much worse. I could be the guy in charge of trying to shoot down the satellite, for example. Or Musharraf's campaign manager.

Raising dogs vs children

I was thinking about this the other day -- the fundamental differences, in terms of philosophy and other things, between raising a good dog and raising children.

First of all, faith. You do not have a right to inflict faith on your children -- faith is a fundamentally adult series of choices, and never one that should be imposed before the age of reason. But with a dog, you must impart the simple religious message: "I have opposable thumbs, I can open the refrigerator, therefore I am God." Any sensible dog will accept this willingly and behave accordingly. You may be only one in a pantheon of Gods, but that's a detail.

Diet: it's wrong to make vegans or breatharians or something like that out of your kids, but you have a duty to feed your dog a well-designed diet, since a typical dog will eat whatever is available, until it's gone, to the detriment of waistline and eventually, joints. Leftovers are not a dog concept. So you need to decide what your dog will eat, when, to the extent you can. The dog will attempt to thwart you in this, but still, the duty is there.

Education and career: nothing is sadder than the parent who obsesses about the children's future to the extremes that we see these days. If you've decided already that little Ashley (age 6 months) is going to Harvard Law School, you're a nut basket. On the other hand, 6 months is a fine time to decide that Spot will probably not make much of a retriever, based on complete, head-cocked-to-one-side incomprehension when you throw a tennis ball. Consider a career in agility, or perhaps train him as a professional couch potato. Ball-focused dogs are a lot of work, anyway.

Handy lash-up

I put this lash-up of cooking gear together a while back -- I like the results and thought you might, too.

The basic concept is that you assemble a large cast-iron sautoir or sauteuse and a footed rack that will fit in it. The resulting combination becomes a quick way to produce a steak and "fried" or "roasted" potatoes meal with a minimum of hassle and cooking pans. To make it work:

Pre-heat the oven to 450 degrees. Cut up the potatoes (any shape - doesn't have to be the slices shown here) and boil them for 10 minutes. Drain and set aside. Heat the saute' pan, without the rack, to about 350 surface temperature (you do have a infrared surface thermometer , don't you?), and sear your steak on both sides. I typically sear it for 4 minutes a side -- leave it longer if you want more carmelization.

Turn off the burner and remove the steak from the pan. Add the potatoes, and set the rack on top of them. Place the steak on the rack, and put the whole thing, uncovered, in the oven. Check internal temperature of the steak at 10 minutes and at intervals thereafter. When it's as done as you want it (130 degrees will coast up to medium rare with 10 to 15 minutes resting time), remove the steak to a platter to rest and the potatoes to a serving dish.

The mechanism is pretty simple; a steak (or cote de boeuf or even rack of lamb, for that matter) will render fat while it's finishing in the oven this way. Instead of it sitting there in all that oil, deep-frying itself, this method keeps the meat up above the pan surface and lets the potatoes benefit from all that flavorful juiciness.

TSA blog ...

Moderately interesting if text-heavy community effort by the Transportation Security Agency. According to the Times Article about it, they wanted to provide a place for people to vent about TSA procedures, delays, etc. Might be worth a look if you travel a lot -- e.g., the note that the recent thing about confiscating laptops, demanding passwords, etc. is a Customs procedure, nothing to do with TSA at all.

Eat, drive, eat, drive ... fry?

Looks like we'll have to choose, not only between food and fuel but between biofuel and warming. As noted below, schemes to convert to bio fuels not only raise food costs, they increase the release of greenhouse gases. Industry groups disagree, of course, but the guy who did the reasearch says, "The comparison with fossil fuels is going to be adverse for virtually all biofuels on cropland."

My interest in this, by the way, is somewhat personal, since my family actually owns some cropland, here in Michigan, some of which is currently and very unprofitably being used to raise standard food grain crops -- corn and soybeans. Time may come when I have to make a decision about my tenant and what he's growing. I'm thinking white truffles ...