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Healthcare Logic?
 What is our country coming to? In the good old days, health care was a matter of personal responsibility. You could take care of yourself and reap the benefits of good health, and if you didn't, you would pay the consequences - both physically and financially. Then someone decided that health care was a right. If you are alive, whether you practice good health habits or not, you deserved, and in fact are owed, health care. Yes, in its beneficence, the government (not really, just everyone else) would pay for you - no matter if you smoked and were obese and never exercised and went to the fast food joints every day. As a citizen, this was your reward. Personal responsibility for health then died and the burden was shifted to everyone else. Now we are moving into an even weirder twist on this dwindling spiral of personal responsibility and health. This is known as enforced health care. No longer are you in control of your own habits - and thus your health, and no longer are you just forced to pay for other's health care, but now you are forced to receive it, whether you want it or not, and even if you don't agree that it's healthy for you to get it. How absurd! Is this America? While I am on absurdities, here is another one. This week I attended a course given by the University of South Florida Pharmacology department. It was an excellent course and re-enforced for me of the gap that exists between mainstream medicine and common sense health care and practice. One of the Professors was lecturing on Non-Steroidal Anti Inflammatory Drugs, so called "NSAIDS." These are drugs like Advil, Motrin, Vioxx, Celebrex, etc. They are very popular and sell billions and billions each year both as prescriptions and over the counter medicines. Recently of course their safety has been called into question by the withdrawing of Vioxx - because it has been shown (actually 4 years ago) to increase the incidence of heart attacks and strokes. But dear friends, the danger of these drugs has been known for a long, long time and minimized through advertising hypnosis and brainwashing to such a degree that no one really worries about them, and life goes on as usual. During the course, the learned Professor put up a slide that showed this: "Annual hospitalizations per year in the U.S. due to NSAIDS = 100,000." "Annual deaths per year in the U.S. due to NSAIDS = 15,000." And all yawned and he went on to the next slide. Except me. I raised my hand and said, "How can anyone allow these drugs to be legal? 100,000 people in the hospital each year and 15,000 killed by these drugs!" The rest of the class turned and each gave me a smirk that had written all over it, "what a dumb question. It's not really relevant to life or health care." Was I crazy? So I got very brave and I said, "Professor, can I ask one more thing? Two years ago, ephedra, an herb used safely by and large for thousands of years, was linked to one death by overdose and was removed from the market. Yet, NSAIDS kill 15,000 per year and are sold with impunity. Am I missing something?" He said, "The market is controlled by pharmaceutical companies. If ephedra were one of their big sellers, it would have been saved. Since it wasn't, it had to go. NSAIDS kill relatively few, compared to how many are taken. So no one worries about them. Those are the rules." "Even though 15,000 per year die?" "Yes. Ok if I go on to the next slide?"
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