The study found that, by some measures, the humanities students made more sensitive doctors: they were more than twice as likely to train as psychiatrists (14 percent compared with 5.6 percent of their classmates) and somewhat more likely — though less so than Dr. Kase had expected — to go into primary care fields, like pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology (49 percent compared with 39 percent). Conversely, they avoid some fields, like surgical subspecialties and anesthesiology.

This is a really interesting idea. I think that there are several things (including the intense focus on the natural sciences and reification of ‘science’—as an ultimate source of all truth and logic devoid of cultural or moral influence—w/o much focus on the philosophy/history of science) about med school pedagogy that do not produce very thoughtful doctors. but, i wonder if thoughtful doctors are really the doctors that biomedicine requires.

also i hate the term ‘hard sciences’ because of the implication of ‘soft sciences.’ generally i use ‘natural sciences’ versus ‘social(/behavioral) sciences,’ but that implies a dichotomy between the natural and the social as though they don’t include each other. so i give up.

I have really grown to love what the NIH/National Library of Medicine are doing here at MedlinePlus: Drugs, Herbs and Supplement sections.

When I am not using it to check trade names/generic names I really like to search various drugs that come up in our study and check out the side effects. e.g: “foamy urine” (this would be totally terrifying even before i contemplated what it was communicating to me about my kidneys). Or, you know, check to see whether or not my symptoms that come with taking over the recommending dosage of various OTC allergy/cold meds are worth paying any attention to.

A study released last week from the journal Pediatrics points to subpar breastfeeding rates in the US when it comes to first six months of a baby’s life. The consequence is a rash of health problems; the list is long and frightening: necrotizing enterocolitis (tissue death), otitis media (ear infections), gastroenteritis (stomach pain), hospitalization for lower respiratory tract infections, atopic dermatitis, sudden infant death syndrome, childhood asthma, childhood leukemia, type 1 diabetes, and childhood obesity.
…And more than 900 babies die a year as a result of these, and the health care delivery system is beset with $13 billion in cost overruns thanks to formula-feeding. All this because, while three-quarters of new mothers start breastfeeding at birth, only 12% of infants are breastfed exclusively for six months, a far, far cry from the recommended 90%…
The problem often is, mothers operate on such slim margins (of time, energy, resources, sanity) and breastfeeding can be a casualty of that balancing act. So formula is on one side of an unfortunate Sophie’s Choice: sanity or breastfeeding. Which would you choose?

I’m not really sure that it makes sense to frame this as an issue of “compliance” (although to be fair I always have a problem with medical use of compliance) while simultaneously pointing to structural and societal factors (not to mention biological or physiological factors that can also make breast feeding difficult) that make ‘compliance’ difficult/impossible.

Lots of good points about structural and economics barriers to long-term breast feeding here, though!

More than 30 activists from Fresno, the Bay Area and Stanislaus County converged outside the downtown Modesto courthouse Monday to protest criminal charges against two people accused of handing out clean syringes and collecting dirty ones from drug addicts in a Modesto park.

Kristy Tribuzio, 36, and Brian Robinson, 37, face up to a year in jail for breaking a law they consider to be immoral.

People held signs reading “Public Health Over Politics” and chanted in favor of dropping the charges. They excoriated local elected officials, pointing to a decision by the county Board of Supervisors in September 2008 to nix legalizing needle exchange over the recommendations of health officials.

“It should be a health issue, not a political issue,” said Dallas Blanchard, 45, whose needle exchange program in Fresno was approved just over a year ago.

“By treating it as a political issue, we’re just allowing people to die,” he added. [via]

[via]

I am not sure that i can even explain how much I love this

Third, the misallocation of aid money creates perverse, possibly lethal, incentives.  Here in Ethiopia the existence of huge amounts of aid money for AIDS chasing too few people with HIV means that there is a kind of welfare state emerging for people with HIV.  It is not perhaps the welfare state we see in many European countries, but it is much better resourced than is available for people without HIV.  As well as free health care, people living with HIV are supported to find work, and their children get free education.  NGOs fall over themselves to get people living with HIV and their families onto their lists.

The result is that some Ethiopians emerge from being told the results of their voluntary HIV tests in tears because they don’t have the disease and so do not qualify for this assistance. The quality of life for them and their families would be better if they did; and their life expectancy could well be higher, given the access to health services that would be unlocked.  There are even rumours here in Addis Ababa that some people are deliberately getting themselves infected, so that they can give their children a better start in life.

[via]

This is interesting, but I am not sure exactly what I think about it yet. more:

Second, we should try to stop earmarking aid; we should make more use of results to demonstrate that aid is effective. The Paris and Accra agendas for aid effectiveness, which have been agreed by all the donor nations, require donors to respect the development priorities of aid recipients.  But there has been almost no change on the ground in this direction.  One step towards doing this is to put in place simple but rigorous ways to measure and attribute results, so that donors can be confident about  (and can explain to taxpayers) how their aid has been used.  If we cannot produce compelling evidence about what aid has achieved, it should be no surprise that ministers and taxpayers want to determine in advance how the money will be spent.

Third, we should stop creating global funds, and merge or close the ones we have got.  The existence of bureaucracies whose raison d’etre is to spend money in a particular sector or in a particular way creates incentives to promote resource misallocation because it protects jobs and institutional budgets.