Yes, I’ve been a little AWOL. I am waaaay behind on blogging. It’s just been busy, with work, getting new projects off the ground, traveling, and doing early spring gardening. I hope I didn’t bite off too much this year with gardening, but I’ve got about 200 little seedlings coming up, and I just planted more onions.

So blogging has fallen a little by the wayside, and will probably be somewhat sporadic until Easter. By then I should be more caught up and back to my regular schedule.

I have been ignoring the healthcare reform debate because I just can’t bear to listen to it anymore. It just drones on and on, and the final product–if it passes–is not really going to change very much.

But has anyone heard a peep from our Surgeon General yet? I mean, in the middle of all this commotion with healthcare reform, has she ever made a statement? Does she support the president, the bill, anyone or anything? The only thing I’ve read about her since she was sworn in is that she thinks that we need more minorities in medicine. And when she threw out her statistics, it was obvious that she was talking about needing more black doctors, and not minorities in general.

The real issue is to get more students interested in careers in science and medicine–students of all stripes, colors, size, shapes, and origins. Our nation needs physicians, scientists, healthcare workers in general–we don’t need more lawyers, stockbrokers, MBAs and politiicians. But that seems to be what we are mass producing, rather than people who produce anything of substance.

And with all of the problems in healthcare, and with this big debate over reform going on, is this what our Surgeon General sees as the most pressing problem? That this topic is what she has devoted her first talk to?

Kind of pathetic. I don’t want to write this woman off completely, but hey lady, let us know you’re alive and kicking.

Think before Pink, or better yet, don’t waste money buying stuff you don’t want or need because it has the pink touch to it. I know, I am so politically incorrect to be so negative about breast cancer awareness month, but the whole concept of these “awareness” months is also rather distasteful. Like breast cancer should be ignored the rest of the year.

The pink campaign, as this video says, began with good intentions, but it has mushroomed into a mega marketing campaign, with many unscrupulous companies selling pink products to “raise awareness,” and do not donate any money to breast cancer causes. In other words, they’re cashing in on an illness and trying to increase their profit margin for the month of October by “pinkifying” their inventory.

Cool. Thanks but no thanks. I refuse to buy anything pink in October.

Yes, much hoo-ha over a “new” study which shows that calorie restriction in monkeys gives them that something extra. They age more slowly, look like young babes even though they’re senior citizens, and seem to have escaped the so-called age related diseases. An article in the LA Times is gushing over this discovery like it was the discovery of the proverbial fountain of youth.

But really, this is nothing new. Calorie restriction has been discussed and studies for decades.  The article even says that:

Evidence has been mounting for years that the practice of caloric restriction — essentially, going on a permanent diet — greatly reduces the risk of age-related diseases and even postpones death. It has been shown to significantly extend the lives of yeast, worms, flies, spiders, fish, mice and rats.

A lot of people have also practiced calorie restriction, with varying results, although it is safe to say that the vast majority of healthy centurians are not overweight.

But what makes this study so special? Beats me as to why it is even news.  The article goes on to say that the “study comes as some validation to the cadre of several hundred true-believing Americans who profess to practice caloric restriction in their daily lives.” Well, it may add more evidence, but again, this isn’t exactly a news-breaker. It’s just a repeat of what’s already been studied. This time it was done in primates.

Now, if it was a study with human subjects, and they had some profound results, that would be a different story.  But all this study is doing is confirming findings of other research in non-human subjects, and still unable to answer a multitude of questions about calorie restriction. Should I or shouldn’t I?

And how do we explain this one, this little glitch which somehow allowed hackers to break in and kidnap a significant wad of data and hold it hostage until ransom is paid?

Kidnapping is getting exotic these days. It used to be people snatched and held for ransom, and now its data. Changing times.

This is from Bruce Schneier’s blog:

On Thursday, April 30, the secure site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) was replaced with a $US10M ransom demand:

“I have your shit! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.”

More details:

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site’s homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.[...]

Whitley Ryals said the state discovered the intrusion on April 30, after which time it shut down Web site site access to dozens of pages serving the Department of Health Professions. The state also has temporarily discontinued e-mail to and from the department pending the outcome of a security audit, Whitley Ryals said.

Photo courtesy of Stock.xchng

To continue my post from yesterday, about the brand new face of nabeepchen.com. First, that awful blue background is gone and my old graphics are back, albeit slightly different.

Next, as I said yesterday, I am consolidating the topics a little more and trying to stay on track. Of course, I may stray every now and then, if something juicy pops up that doesn’t quite fit neatly into any of the categories above.

If you notice, there is a new category called “Careers.” The healthcare industry is booming, despite any of the chitchat of economic downtown. People are getting sick, the rate of chronic diseases has never been higher, and unless our new president does a major coup and forces the agri/chemical/oil/biotech industries to clean up their act and remove toxic crap from our food and environment–and completely revamps the FDA by removing the parasites currently in control–then the high rate of illness will continue.

Healthcare reform is another issue in and of itself, and if dramatic reforms do ever transpire, that may change the job market. But even so, the job market will still remain strong, and the opportunities in healthcare go far beyond physician and nurse.

So this is a new area which I would like to address and expand upon, and offer real information about different fields.  Go beyond the nonsense, for example, that you would find in Johnson & Johnson’s Discover Nursing website, which makes nursing seem like a Hallmark card. Where people find that they can “be myself” by working as a nurse. I promise, I will try not to make you gag.

Another new topic is that of nomads. Healthcare nomads roam the earth in search of jobs, and also medical care. Travel jobs, either short or long term, are available to nurses, doctors, etc, both in the U.S. and abroad. On the flip side, patients are traveling abroad in search of less expensive care, whether it be cosmetic or life saving. Medical travel is a rapidly growing industry that shows no signs of slowing down. Unless something miraculous takes place within our own healthcare system–like everyone suddenly being endowed with terrific, comprehensive and inexpensive coverage–medical travel will continue to blossom.

So stay tuned and let me know what you think.

If you’ve been reading the news, you can see that President-elect Barack Obama is putting together a very impressive team to help him lead the nation. A team of knowledgeable, intelligent and experienced people who can help him erase the damage of the Bush era, and give our nation back its greatness.

His potential choice of the surgeon general is Dr. Gail Rousseau, a neurosurgeon who was an early Obama supporter and hosted a fundraiser for him at her home in 2003. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I would prefer that he select someone with a broader expertise in public health. I don’t know anything about her, but neurosurgery seems very limited–it is something that is highly specialized so I don’t know how that translates into being the public health advocate for the nation. True, the Surgeon General doesn’t have much power, but again, neurosurgery is extremely specialized and unless this woman does a lot of advocacy and research in her spare time,  I can’t see how this is the best choice.

Of course, it is nice that a woman is being considered, and if confirmed, she will be only the third woman to fill the slot. And of greater interest, is that she was a surgical nurse before going to medical school.

Yes, a nurse.

I know that nurse purists will be outraged that this woman dared to leave the sacred calling of nursing and attend medical school, but that’s the reality. Nurses leaving nursing, for any number of reasons. And while I’m sure the nurse purists will scoff at her as a traitor, I think that it is impressive that she rose from nurse to neurosurgeon to possibly being confirmed as surgeon general.

Then again, one of our most effective surgeon generals was Everett Koop, who was a pediatric surgeon, but yet he stepped up to the plate to battle the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s (which the Reagan administration did its best to ignore, but that’s another story).

Anyway, there may be other contenders, but the reason I even posted this was because of her nursing background.

George Bush just keeps on giving. The man is history, and has exactly 1 month and day left as president in this country. But you know, its Christmas, and GWB is the gift that just keeps on giving.

His latest idiocy and insult to this country is the “conscience law” which allow health care providers to refuse to dole out treatment that is contrary to their conscience. The major problem with this law is that it is so broad that virtually anyone working in health care can invoke it. For example, a receptionist who feels that sterilization is morally wrong can refuse to schedule an appointment for a man to get a vasectomy. A nursing assistant can refuse to give a bedbath to a gay man, or change his bedpan if she feels that homosexuality is wrong and the man is a sinner and doesn’t deserve to be cared for.

The list is endless. But what is missing from this scenario is the patient. Healthcare is supposed to evolve around the patient, not the provider. If you work in healthcare, you better get used to people coming at you from all walks of life.

When I worked in the NICU, we had many families that made my flesh crawl. Like the 27 year old woman with a 14 year old daughter giving birth to her 10th kid. All with different fathers, on welfare–well, you get the picture. I’d personally like to snip her tubes, but the best we could do was counsel her, and take care of her baby. Get social services involved to make sure that the baby whose life we worked so hard to save would be cared for.

From USA Today:

Under the rule, which takes effect mid-January, anyone from the brain surgeon to the pharmacy cashier can opt out of participating in care to which they have a moral or religious objection. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt described it as a rule to protect “the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience.”

The Family Research Council calls the rule “an early Christmas present to pro-lifers” which will “reinforce the rights of doctors, pharmacists, technicians, and even receptionists …

Protecting the right of all health care providers to make professional judgments based on their moral convictions is foundational to federal law. The next administration will inherit these rules, and we strongly urge President-elect Obama to defend them. True tolerance would allow the choice of conscience to be defined by individuals — not the government.

Are these people daft or what? Health care providers are supposed to make decisions based on standard practice, science, and the needs/wants of the patient. Not their moral convictions, which should play no part in any healthcare decision making because they can be in direct conflict with what the patient wants.

Well the Family Research Council must be drinking spiked Kool-Aid if they think that Obama is going to defend this assault on healthcare. Hopefully Congress will block it immediately, so that Obama doesn’t have to deal with it. Senators Clinton and Murray have already introduced a bill to repeal it.

Women seeing reproductive health care, gay individuals and couples dealing with emergencies or even routine treatment, even people who see vaccines or antibiotics for their babies will face health care roulette on all fronts. Who knows the beliefs of the triage nurse in the ER?

What the defenders of this law don’t realize is that it can affect them. Their brain is focused on abortion or emergency contraception, but little do they know that they can be a victim of moral conscience. Gee, what if a nurse invokes her Jehovah Witness status and refuses to give them blood? Maybe they can bleed to death? Or if the pharmacist refuses to fill their prescription for a drug he considers “objectionable” such as a painkiller, and he’s the only open one in town. Tough luck, kiddo, you’ll have to suffer all night.

People who are carrying around too much moral baggage should not be working in health care, or at least, choose a niche where it won’t be a problem.

Under this law, even a cashier can refuse to ring you up, if they don’t like what you’re buying. Gee, they think deodorant is immoral, hiding the natural scent that God gave you. Oh my, you should not be buying tampons–how icky.

Merry Christmas, George Bush. How about giving the nation a present and resigning now? Just remember, what goes around comes around. Wait until you’re sick, and the health care team refuses to care for you, saying that it is against their conscience to care for a mass murderer….

Photo courtesy of Clipartguide.com

So now what does a snowy scene have to do with anything? By the way, this is how the world looks outside my front door.

We are having an unprecedented cold spell, with below freezing temperatures and lovely snow which will not turn black and sotty as it does in the city. True, I may be less than enamored with with the snow if I had to drive somewhere, which leads me to the subject of the day.

I only worked one year as a nurse in a climate where weather conditions could hamper travel. Other than that, I worked in Florida and California. I was fortunate during my brief interlude in sunny buggy Florida not to bump heads with any hurricanes, and working in California was also benign, weather wise.

But I was thinking today, as I took a walk in the winter wonderland, in my bright red snowboots and red gloves, what I would do if I had to report to work at a hospital? Well, it wasn’t much of a brain bender–I would not show up. The roads here are minimally cleared, although it gets better as you get into downtown. But without chains, I surely would not attempt to drive in my neighborhood. Since heavy snow is quite uncommon, most people tend not to keep chains in their garage or have a set of snow tires. Many do have SUVs, but some of those were even slip-sliding today.

How devoted do hospitals think that nurses are? Do they expect you to risk your life to get to work? Really, do they get their knickers in a twist if you call in and say, sorry, I am snowed in? I understand that patients need care, but still. Of course, hospitals could hire transportation to come and pick up nurses (and bring them home) in inclement weather, but that will be the day….

So I’m curious–what do they expect? Do they threaten you if you call in? Would I get fired if I explained that the roads are not cleared, they are slick as glass beneath the snow, and that the bus has reverted to “snow route” meaning that I would have to walk a mile and a half in below freezing temperatures with heavy snowfall to get to the bus stop?

This is as bizarre an opening paragraph as I’ve ever seen. This article is about nurses and smoking, and a study that was done to examine the “devastating” effects of cigarettes on this population.

From the UCLA News Staff:

A new UCLA School of Nursing study is the first to reveal the devastating consequences of smoking on the nursing profession. Published in the November–December edition of the journal Nursing Research, the findings describe smoking trends and death rates among U.S. nursesand emphasize the importance of supporting smoking cessation programs in the nursing field.

So what are the devastating consequences of smoking on the nursing profession? Does smoking somehow affect women who are nurses differently from women in general? Does working as a nurse change the physiology of the human body?

The article says absolutely nothing about these devastating consequences, lest readers were biting at the bit to hear how cigarettes were somehow an underlying cause of the nursing shortage. Or that nurses had higher rates of lung cancer, smoked more than other women, or something, anything, to back up this lead in.

Here’s another profound quote:

“Nurses in the study demonstrated behavior patterns similar to women in the general population,” she added. “For example, the younger nurses in the study began smoking before entering the profession, a pattern reflected by American women starting smoking at younger ages in general. Being a nurse did not make these women immune to nicotine addiction.”

“It is encouraging to see that fewer and fewer nurses are smoking, but we can’t declare the problem solved,” said Michelle Larkin, senior program officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the UCLA team’s research. “The devastating effects of smoking are all too real for those nurses who still smoke. We need research to learn about the factors that lead them to smoke and more resources to help them quit.”

is tomorrow. It is almost 30 years since the first published document about AIDS appeared in MMWR in 1981, a short little article about 5 gay men with strange problems afflicting their immune system. Of course, it was not the first time this strange syndrome had appeared, but the first time it appeared in the scientific literature. Thus, June 1981 has been marked as the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

According to UNAIDS estimates, there are now 33.2 million people living with HIV, including 2.5 million children. During 2007 some 2.5 million people became newly infected with the virus. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 and are killed by AIDS before they are 35.

But as we get ready to mark World AIDS day, some experts are saying that the epidemic is overblown

Interesting article and some points to consider. The different viewpoints are all valid, but it all adds up to the same thing--money. How should we best be using scarce resources?

One good use of money would be to increase salaries of nurses and physicians in developing nations so that these people have some incentive to stay and work in their homelands. While brain drain is talked about, nothing seems to be done about it.

According to a new Gallup poll, nurses are the bastion of respect and honesty. Those babes in white are to trusted above anyone else.

PRINCETON, NJ — For the seventh straight year, nurses enjoy top public accolades in Gallup’s annual Honesty and Ethics of professions survey. Eighty-four percent of Americans call their honesty and ethical standards either “high” or “very high.”

This year’s results are based on a Nov. 7-9 USA Today/Gallup poll rating the honesty and ethics of workers in 21 different professions.

Nurses have topped Gallup’s Honesty and Ethics ranking every year but one since they were added to the list in 1999. The exception is 2001, when firefighters were included on the list on a one-time basis, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. (Firefighters earned a record-high 90% honesty and ethics rating in that survey.

It is nice to be so trusted, but where does trust get you? Trust without respect is meaningless, particularly in the workplace. Patients often treat nurses like they are the “hired help,” like the nurse was their private servant.  And they treat nurses like they are the upper class and nurses are lowly working class drudge.  And of course, some nurses reinforce that image by not sticking up for themselves, and demonstrate to the patient that they are nothing more than servant labor–by grabbing a mop instead of calling housekeeping, or washing down the shower!

Administration also has little respect for nurses–I don’t know how many nurses talk about punching a time clock. Gee, we’re supposed to be professionals and instead, playing Laverne and Shirley? At least factory workers tend to be union members, which is more than I can say for nurses.

But in the words of Aretha Franklin:

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Find out what it means to me.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Nurses need to add that word to their vocabulary, and demand it.

This was another ditty that I’ve had hidden in my draft file for several months, and unfortunately, I don’t know what happened to the link. But it amused me, to think that educating oneself to work as a nurse suddenly became as indelible as skin color. Or ethnic background. Or eye color (although contact lenses have changed that).

Is a nurse always a nurse? Is it something that hangs around your neck like a ball and chain no matter what else you do in life?

Apparently, even if you scrub yourself with Chlorax and steel wool, and incinerate your license, and drop your nursing gear into a crater on Mars, you are still a nurse. First and foremost.

Nurses may add JD, MBA, or EdD to their names, but while they may not work in a clinical setting, they are still nurses.

“Whether working with computers in nursing, in forensic investigations, as a pharmaceutical sales representative, or as a quality assurance coordinator, each nurse brings something special, something compassionate, some healing touch to someone, somewhere,” she says.

I think that the person who wrote is one of the starry eyed beings who thinks nurses are angels of mercy, and getting an RN license is akin to a pair of silvery winger.  You’re still a nurse first and foremost, no matter what else you do? Please, spare me the sentiment before I start feeling  queasy.

If a nurse returns to school and becomes an MD (I know, sacrilegious), does he/she still consider himself/herself a “nurse first and foremost?” Or a physician? I think the answer to that is obvious.

If a nurse becomes an expert sculptor and opens a pottery studio, does she apply the “healing touch” to all of those vases and urns? Does she tell her customers that she’s really a nurse underneath those clay stained hands, and just dabbling in pottery? And is making pottery for the healing experience?

Yes, you can see where this is going. What is it with nurses, that they must cling to these adages. Take the case of Clara Barton. She is widely considered to be a nurse, especially among nurses who proudly add her names to the ranks of the historical nurse elite. And they will bristle if you tell them otherwise.

But truth be known, Clara Barton was a school teacher. Then a patent clerk. And when she took her wagon full of supplies out onto the battlefield, she had no training as a nurse and did so out of frustration. She saw supplies sitting in Washington DC, while soldiers were dying a few miles away. So Barton being a strong minded woman took it upon herself to bring those supplies out to where they were needed, and ended up assisting in the battlefield. But when the war ended, so did Barton’s “nursing career.” She spent the next several years locating missing soldiers, and then established the American Red Cross.

So now, Barton is an interesting case. She had 2 careers before her stint as a nurse, which was by far the shortest career of all. So should we say that Barton was first and foremost a teacher? Wasn’t she still a teacher then, when she headed off to madness and mayhem in the war zone? Or still a patent clerk? Or do those jobs not count?

She lived for almost 91 years and spent 3 of them doing her “angel of the battlefield” stint. And if there hadn’t been a war, it is highly unlikely that Barton ever would have ministered to the sick and injured. She was a teacher–founded her own school, the first woman to hold a clerkship in the patent office, and then the bulk of her life was dedicated to the Red Cross. She was also involved in the women’s suffrage movement, and the early civil rights movement for black Americans.

But first and foremost, Barton is a nurse?

If someone spends five years working as an accountant, then becomes a nurse and works in the field for 2 years, and then goes on to become an English teacher for the next 25 years, is “nurse” the shining moment of her life? The height of her identity, the pinnacle moment?

You know what I think. What do you all think? Does nursing override everything you’ve done before and afterwards, like indelible ink?

I have a number of articles that I have sitting and fermenting in my draft box…some of them beginning to near retirement age. But with the election, and then spooning more work on my plate, and then revamping my website (yes, my official memo about that is coming), and then updating Windows this weekend–well, poor blog. Gets ignored and left out. Plus there’s my other blog (www.moneyfaithandchocolate.com) that is really being ignored, and I have great plans to start yet another blog.

This is an interesting little story from the NY Times about scrubs. It’s a short piece and designed primarily for reader input. It asks the interesting question:

Should hospital scrubs be worn in public places?

That’s one of the questions asked by my Well column this week, which looks at the role clothing may play in the spread of germs by health workers. The issue of scrubs on the subway and other public places has been raised often by readers of the Well blog.

“I cringe every time I see a medical professional on the subway in their scrubs, which is a regular occurrence,” writes reader A.K.

I don’t think wearing soiled scrub clothes poses a threat to public health, unless you work in a level 4 biosafety lab, or just emerged from a cholera unit. My problem with scrubs is that they have lost their purpose.

When I first started working in NICU, the hospital supplied the scrubs. You wore them, then dumped them in the laundry bin, where they were washed with hospital detergent. Then it came about that alot of hospitals required nurses to wear their own scrubs. So these scrub clothes were worn into work, ie, like outside in the street, then worn in the unit, and then worn home. And who knows how many times they were worn before washing? The only place that maintained a strict protocol on scrub clothes was the OR. Fortunately…

Scrubs are now commonly worn by nurses all over the hospital. There’s nothing wrong with that, except the scrubs that they are wearing in places that are supposed to be a little ultra clean (aside from the OR) are no better than a regular uniform. Like the NICU. Shouldn’t nurses, doctors, etc, be wearing scrubs that never leave the hospital? That are washed in the hospital after one use, and washed with whatever disinfectants that are used to clean hospital laundry? Doesn’t that make sense?

With all of the excitement over the election, and my usually hectic schedule (I finally sent my last two change of address cards–never mind that I moved 11 months ago), this entry sort of got pushed to the back of the pile. But a reader contacted me and asked me to read an article she had written, and to comment on it. And if I liked it, to please mention it on my blog.

Well, I do. It is a great article about those little details of nursing that most of the “experts” like to omit. It zooms right in on what the problems are in nursing, the real problems. And in looking at these real problems, it is impossible to just shrug the shoulders and say, “Well, we can solve the nursing crisis if only we offer more scholarships.” Or “Let’s try to get more minorities/men/three headed elves into nursing.” Or “We just need to turn out new nurses faster, and once we mass produce them, we’ll glue them into place on the job.”

You can read her whole article at Right Here! But here’s the first paragraph–and you can see why I like it so much…

Why Are Nurses Still so Underpaid?

The Mission-Critical Sticky Factors in Nursing

The nursing shortage is a veneer for other nursing-specific problems that really go under-reported. We tend not to hear about them because they lay bare a few disappointing truths about nursing often only known by insiders.

• First, nursing salaries stink—period.
• Second, nurses as a whole are uninspired when it comes to furthering their education or moving up the “healthcare ladder.” The rest of the world thinks it’s a novel idea, but nurses think little about it.
• Third, the nursing shortage doesn’t get any better when you try and put new nurses into the pipeline simply because it’s an open-ended model—as fast as you drop some new into the stack a slew of very experienced – the real valuable human resources – go tumbling merrily out the back side, relieved to be free and onto OTHER CAREERS, OTHER upward ladders.

These are huge factors in the nursing profession in one way or another and each poses a real world “sticky” problem.

Healthcare is  still a priority for President-elect Obama (ooooh, doesn’t that sound wonderful), but getting the economy going is the number one priority. Still, it does sound like there is going to be a push for healthcare reform, and soon.

No one has taken any polls or surveys, as far as I can tell, but I am curious if healthcare professionals tended to vote more Dem or Repub, or if they were just all over the place.  Of course, the election was skewed somewhat by the presence of Sarah Palin–she was one of the greatest boons to the Democratic party.  Just the thought of her being the vice president to a 72 year old president whose had cancer 4 times….but I digress.

It would be interesting to hear the views of healthcare professionals weigh in on this, especially as the new administration moves forward.  But I am curious if the respective healthcare plans played any part in votes cast by doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, etc.

And Yes We Did!

Congratulations to the new president and vice president of the United States. Now is the time for change, especially in healthcare. May the day come when no one in this country will be forced to declare bankruptcy because of medical bills; may the day come when no one in this country will be forced to forgo necessary medical care because they can’t afford it/their insurance won’t pay for it/they can’t get insurance.

One of the oddest points in a very odd and nasty presidential campaign (and sorry if I offend, but the bulk of nastiness has been spouting from the lips of the McCain/Palin campsite), is the attack on science. Granted, I know that Sarah Palin has been quoted as believing that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together only 6,000 years ago, and wants creationism taught in schools. I haven’t investigated whether or not she actually said that–about the dinosaurs–but that philosophy has been attributed to her.

But Palin, who has tried to make herself seem like an “everymom” and constantly derides the evils of the intellectual elite, appears to be profoundly ignorant of science and scientific research in general. Granted, John McCain has promised to increase funding for cancer research, so I don’t know if he shares Palin’s overall disdain or ignorance of the subject. But it is worrisome, if the duo is elected, to have someone sitting in the VPs chair, who thinks that scientific research on fruit flies is being done because of an overwhelming interest in the personal lives of the little critters.

From the Chicago Tribune:

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France,” and winding up with a folksy, “I kid you not.”

I supposed that stating that the location of this research was supposed to emphasize how silly it was, that sharing data and working together with scientists living in friendly nations is somehow bad. Or makes the research spending worse than it actually is.

But what is ironic is that Palin has been touting the virtues of small town America, and how wonderful these places are. But I guess its okay if the farmers living in these small towns and rural areas, ie, the real America, have their crops devastated by fruit flies. Yes, fruit flies are one of the most destructive critters to agriculture, and the maligned research was studying that very issue. But even it was explained to her, I doubt that she’d get the message. She clearly stated during the VP debate that knowing the causes of global warming was not necessary in order to stop it and reverse it. So I guess that studying fruit flies to try to control their destructive behavior is a silly endeavor. Just control them, stop them, fix it. Who needs to do research? Just get a can of Raid and “spray, baby, spray.”

The second part of her ridiculous statement has to do with genetics. Scientists have been using fruit flies for over 100 years to study genetics, and much of our knowledge stems from–ahem–fruit fly research.

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully “cultured” in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation.

This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It’s especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

I rest my case. As I said, McCain has said that he will restore funding to NIH for cancer research. I read his plan for cancer care, and it plainly states that. But as for other scientific research, well, I don’t know where he stands. He hasn’t said anything about the fruit flies, nor has he jumped in to smooth over Palin’s inane comment about it or clearly state that scientific research is a priority.  Or explained how important fruit fly research is to farmers the world over, including those that live in those cute little pockets of real America, and no matter how “Pro-American” they are, their crops will still be destroyed by fruit flies run amock.

I fear that if McCain/Palin are elected, scientific research will take a hit, or at least they will make an attempt to curtail funding. Afterall, McCain did say that initially, all govt spending will be frozen, other than defense, veterans, and “vital programs.” What constitutes vital, I’m not sure, but it sort of contradicts his pledge for cancer research funding, and certainly doesn’t paint a rosy outlookfor other research.  And that is something that should be of concern to all of us.

Perhaps we could say that the stress of campaigning got to her, you know, when she was pressed to string together nouns, verbs and adjectives into a coherent sentence. Or asked if she believed the Earth was round, or if it was prudent to learn the cause of global warming before trying to solve it (you know, if your car stalled, it’s kind of hard to repair it unless you know what’s broken). But at any rate, Sarah Palin, aka my gal from the tundra, has truly flipped her lid.

Here is just one of many media reports about her strange interpretation of the Troopergate investigation results. This one is from CNN.

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin denied Saturday that she had abused her power as Alaska’s governor, a conclusion reached by a state investigator in a report released the day before.

“If you read the report, you will see that there was nothing unlawful or unethical about replacing a cabinet member,” Palin said as boarded her campaign bus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “You got to read the report.”

Perhaps she is just delusional? Or doesn’t know how to read proper English with all those words strung together in coherent sentences. Perhaps she is hard of hearing? Perhaps she is just hallucinating, or believes that she lives in an alternate reality? Or maybe if she thinks that if she lies enough, others will forget what has been plastered all over the media waves and come to believe that dear sweet Sarah did no wrong.

Palin violated state ethics law by trying to get her former brother-in-law fired from the state police, a state investigator’s report for the bipartisan Legislative Council concluded Friday.

“Gov. Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda,” the report states.

Can it be clearer? We really don’t need a VP who experiences mental health lapses, thank you.

With the financial crisis having reached its peak (hoepfully), and a bail out (if that’s what you want to call it) getting the finishing touches, it seems that both Obama and McCain have shifted back to the “regular” stuff. Not that the financial arena is safe and secure, but everything else has been thrown to the wind, and people still want to know about other issues.

So healthcare is back. Today their battle over the big H is splashed all over Google news.

Some good articles on CNN, and Newsweek.

While neither candidate is offering a universal system of health care, it does seem that Obama is closer to the mark. McCain’s plan sounds like Bush’s idea of privatizing Social Security–give people tax credits and let them choose. Sounds all well and good, that people should have a choice, but in reality, how much of a choice does one actually have?

Regulation of the health insurance industry is pathetic, and I fear that a McCain led government would make it even more “free market.” In other words, continuing to pander to the wealthiest corporations.

A regular nurse, maybe even a hokey mom or a pitt bull with lipstick (but one who sounds a lot more coherent that Caribou Barbie, who is in dire need of lessons in English language syntax) penned a nice opinion piece about the healthcare positions of the two candidates.

The gap between the rich and the poor is widening. This gap and current structure of our health care system has affected the health of all Americans. If we do have insurance, we are paying higher deductibles and in some cases, have to get permission from our insurance company to access the care we need. Our employers are unable to provide raises and invest in expansions due to the rising cost of insurance premiums.

Here are a few examples of the annual compension packages paid to CEOs of some of the major insurers: United Healthcare $8.3 million, WellPoint, Inc. $5.2 million, Cigna $4.7 million (Atlantic Information Services, April 24, 2006). Can you see where I am going with this?

So the next time you get an insurance raise, and they give you the usual corporate “bleeding heart” whine about growing medical costs, ask them about their CEO’s compensation package.  Should $8.3 million of your insurance premiums really be going to line this guy’s pocket, especially when after paying your exhorbitant premiums, they still demand a copay of 25%?

Do either of our candidates have a plan to streamline insurers and force them to be accountable? Or to force them to insure everyone who wants it, even if they had their tonsils removed 25 years ago? Or were treated for acne in 1962?

Despite the shortcomings of both candidates, this nurse feels that Obama has more of grip on reality, and on a plan that is more workable.

Studies by the Tax Policy Center say the Obama plan would reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 18 million in 2009 and McCain’s plan would only reduce the number of uninsured by 1 million in 2009. In my opinion, the McCain plan falls short of most Americans’ expectations. The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not have a universal healthcare system.

Healthcare has fallen a bit by the wayside, in lieu of the more urgent financial crisis.  But it is still important, and it is a chronic issue that is going to be waiting for us after the dust clears.