December, 2015 | Taking Back Medicine

Month: December 2015

“No WATCHMAN™ For You!”

December 12, 2015 / Rocky D. Bilhartz / 2 Comments

Healthcare insurance deductibles have increased seven times faster than wages in the last five years.

In case you missed the memo already sent to your pocket book, our system is not designed to help anyone afford quality care.

Few understand it. How it works. Who controls it.

Most of us just accept it.

Maybe, it’s because we’ve led ourselves to believe a world cannot exist without having a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to protect it. America’s unregulated $37 billion vitamin and supplement industry may speak to the contrary, but yes, we seem to sleep more soundly believing there is a watchdog on our front porch.

It would be ideological suicide to question what’s really there.

And, so we believe. Me included.

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“Stop Running, Dad!”

December 11, 2015 / Rocky D. Bilhartz / 1 Comment

100 billion neurons are in the brain.

Seemingly, each one makes a minimum of 1,000 to 10,000 connections with other neurons. Something like 100 trillion to 1 quadrillion potential points for data entry. Like having the U.S. Library of Congress up there.

Memories are built from connections. Basically, a lot of handshakes are going on between neurons. The more frequent or powerful the handshakes, the stronger the connections, and the easier to remember something.

The neuroscience of dreaming is equally fascinating. In fact, I’m not certain that anyone really understands it perfectly.

All I know is that my father has appeared in only one of my dreams since his death exactly one year ago. And, in it, we were arguing.

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More Astrological Proclamations From The New York Times

December 2, 2015 / Rocky D. Bilhartz / 5 Comments

I made a mistake.

I don’t buy the New York Times. I told you why. But, someone snuck one of their recent articles into my email. And, yes, I read it.

The article was written by a person with well-known hostility toward private practice physicians. That’s fine. He was giving his interpretation of a study.

The study appeared almost one year ago in a medical journal published by the American Medical Association (AMA). The AMA is the same society who last month, in response to increasing prescription medication costs, recommended that we ban all television commercials for pharmaceutical drugs.

Whatever your take is on this one, I don’t really care. I just wasn’t certain opening up more advertising slots for beer commercials and Doritos would be the answer. Of note, the AMA failed to mention any need to ban the dollars they receive from pharmaceutical ads appearing in their own magazines. (Perhaps, that will be a post for another day.)

Regardless, the New York Times article was about a study that evaluated outcomes of heart patients admitted to hospitals during two distinct periods of time: (1) during days of the year when a handful of cardiologists are away from work “learning” at national meetings, and (2) during similar days when they are not.

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