America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobbying organization for the health insurance industry, has blasted President Obama’s proposal to create a government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers. In a press release, the organization stated that “A… Read full post »

In a sane society, the absurdity of “screening” for depression would immediately be apparent. You mean, you don’t know how you feel? And if you really don’t know, doesn’t that mean you need to spend some time in open and honest consultation with yours… Read full post »

Poker players call it the “tell” – a subtle, nonverbal signal that your opponent is holding a really good hand – or a really bad one. Recently, the health care industry dropped its poker face just long enough to let us all know just how lousy the hand they’… Read full post »

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Enjoying the sort of adulation usually reserved for rock stars, Michael Pollan., author of In Defense of Food spoke to a standing-room-only crowd of about 900 last night at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.

Pollan elaborated on… Read full post »

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

 Those simple words, which constitute the opening line of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food could revolutionize the way we eat. Pollan’s book is a manifesto against the modern Western Diet and its companion i… Read full post »

According to this story in the Baltimore Sun, on the 25th of February of this year, police stormed the home of Andrew Leonard, a 33-year-old chemist residing in Medfield, a leafy neighborhood in north Baltimore. Leonard and his wife were watching television and relaxing after attending… Read full post »

 Just before I left for Africa for the first time, my mother told me the story about the time she gave up on religion. Her father had been born in the old country in 1891. He left home at the age of eleven (people grew up faster in those days)… Read full post »

On December 1, 2008, Lorain County Sherriff’s deputies stormed the home of John and Jacqueline Stowers of LaGrange, Ohio, where they run a natural foods co-op called the Manna Storehouse, which distributes locally produced food, including grass-fed beef and lamb, free-range… Read full post »

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The author Ivan Illich coined the term “social iatrogenesis” for the process by which the medical profession destroys public health by eroding people’s ability to cope on their own with the aches and pains and dysfunctions to whi… Read full post »

Imagine a society in which the drug lords enjoy crab imperial, champagne, expensive cigars, and accommodating women -- while in jail. Actually, if you are a US citizen, you don’t have to imagine it – you already live in it.

According to this article in the Baltimore Sun, fe… Read full post »

Lately, for no particular reason, I’ve found myself in odd moments thinking about my Grampa – Thomas Aloysius “Hap” Coburn of Manasquan, New Jersey.

He actually wasn’t a blood relative of ours. Both of my grandfathers died before I was born. Tom Coburn mar… Read full post »

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The style “bioethics philosopher” ought to denote a watchdog of the medical profession, but all too often they act more like lapdogs, trying to convince the rest of us that further… Read full post »

The controversy over the risks and benefits of cancer screening has been given renewed impetus with the publication of a letter to the editor of the Times of London concerning breast cancer screening. Since this letter is not available online to non-subscribers, it is worth quotin… Read full post »

Reading this article in Discover magazine about life extension made me think of my Uncle Walter, simply because he was the absolute antithesis of the ideas presented therein.

Uncle Walter married my mother’s sister, my Aunt Nancy, when I was a little boy. He had grown up amid cru… Read full post »

Commentators like to opine that we are a “thinness-obsessed society.” They couldn’t be more wrong. A short walk down almost any crowded street in America will reveal the truth: we are a fatness-obsessed society. Americans are fatter than any other major nation in… Read full post »

When I was a boy, we actually had a kindly old family doctor, straight out of Central Casting. I still remember him fondly – tall, thin, white-haired, gentle-voiced, Henry Heller, M.D., General Practitioner.

He took a year off from his practice to go to Viet Nam. When he re… Read full post »

Accupuncture chart from the Ming Dynasty 

According to this article in the Washington Post, a movement is afoot to defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which was established in 1992 by an act of Congress to study so-called “complementar/… Read full post »

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Here’s an article by Len Doyal, Professor Emeritus of Bioethics at the University of London, who argues that doctors should have the right to kill us when they judge that our lives are no longer worth living.

In fairness to Profes… Read full post »

Is this a good enough reason to drive a spike through a child's eye sockets and into his brain?

“He objects to going to bed, but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming. He turns the room lights on when there's broad sunlight outside. He hates… Read full post »

It is my contention that medicine has become the modern-day substitute for religion.

With the loss of the belief in an afterlife, people have pinned their hopes for life everlasting on the medical profession. And, like true believers of all stripes, they tend to get upset when you ask… Read full post »

There’s been a lot of discussion abouth health insurance on Open Salon, ever since Cindy Ross’s eloquent post put a human face on the problem. It’s not my intention to chronicle everything that is wrong with our nation’s train wreck of a health care system.… Read full post »

According to this article in the Baltimore Sun, Maryland lawmakers and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield have introduced a proposal to force uninsured state residents to shell out $3,000 apiece every year for health insurance, whether they want to or not. Residents who refused to pon… Read full post »

(N.B.: My thoughts on these matters have been influenced greatly by C.S. Lewis’s essay, “On Vivisection.”

I used to think the animal-rights advocates were the biggest idiots on God’s green earth. How, I used to wonder, can anybody be against “saving… Read full post »

Here’s an article BMJ about a study which followed every single patient listed for a heart transplant in Germany in 1997. The study found NO DIFFERENCE IN SURVIVAL RATES between those who actually received a heart transplant and those who didn’t.

Why wasn’t this… Read full post »

(Don’t worry – I won’t subject you to the requisite pun about “designer genes.”)

The Fertility Institute of Los Angeles will begin offering parents the opportunity to select the physical characteristics of their children. Using a technique called Pre-impla/… Read full post »