Kirsten Mortensen's blog

In the wake of my BPA-in-a-can upset I blogged about here, I made a big pot of homemade soup for my daughter’s lunches.

Then it occurred to me: what if her Thermos food jar is BPA lined?

Phew! My FUNtainer Thermos food jar is BPA free.

Good news: it’s not. I just got an email from a Thermos spokesperson I found on their website stating “Our FUNtainer line of food jars and beverage bottles has always been BPA-free, and continues to be as well.”

I’m so glad!

Now I just need to perfect my soup recipe. I’m trying to copy my daughter’s favorite choice from the now-on-my-boycott-list Hain line of Imagine soups: tomato-based broth, meatballs, navy beans, orzo.

My first attempt bears some similarities, she says, but that’s about as far as she was willing to go. Tough customer.

Back to the ol’ cutting board . . .

Frank Wilson, in his lead to a blog post titled Americans regard themselves as citizens, not subjects (YES!!!!), offers this quote by Lord John Dalberg-Acton (the fellow who also coined “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”):

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

THAT’s what I’m talkin’ about.

That’s the spirit that animates the American political ideal.

More: it’s the measure against which we should hold up any of these stupid laws our politicians want to pass. I.e., does “healthcare reform” advance our country to its highest political end?

Ha ha ha.

It does NOT.

Wilson goes on to make the point from which he takes his blog post’s title:

Americans regard themselves as citizens, not subjects. They may respect their government, but few feel servile toward it, and most are wary of it.

Exactly.

So here’s the “contrast” bit: how do we explain this move by The Commonwealth of Massachusetts to impose, among other things, forced vaccinations and/or quarantine in the event of a “declared emergency”?

That is NOT liberty.

That’s the government treating us as subjects.

You watch, too. New York will be next.

Horrible. Horrible.

Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. Spot on.

Yes, we need to take care of our poor. But we can’t do it at the expense of our overall standards of care and, equally important, our standards of healthcare service.

Click through & read the piece to see what I mean. From someone who’s actually experienced healthcare services in both countries.

And consider this. As noted in this 2007 Congressional report comparing healthcare costs and outcomes among the 30 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD):

The United States has the third-highest percentage of the population that reports their health status as being “good,” “very good,” or “excellent.”

(Perhaps Washington should have considered that before it proposed swapping out our system for one that would require some pretty significant trade-offs?)

And as for our healthcare spending, from the same report:

90% of the variation in health care spending across the 30 OECD countries may be attributable to GDP per capita.

Yes, the U.S. is an outlier, the report notes. Our spending is even higher than would be expected, given the GDP per capita factor. (Although with a sample of only 30 countries, being an outlier might be statistically meaningless . . . ?)

But even so:

1. We spend what we do because we are rich enough to be able to afford it. We have the money.
2. Being a relatively free market economy, we’re permitted to spend money as we wish.
3. And we’re happy with the results: we consider our health status good to excellent.

To me, that sounds like a system that is working pretty well. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, individuals sometimes have bad experiences. Yes, it doesn’t force the majority to kick in yet more money to care for people who are less well off, who don’t have legal status, etc.

But one of the reasons people are getting so upset is that the vast majority of us are satisfied with what we have.

Washington has overstepped. It’s misread the problem. It’s misread the needs and character of the American people.

Let’s hope this becomes a teaching moment that will result in a truly fundamental change in the relationship between the federal government and this country’s citizens . . .

I have an piece in the August issue: Much to do About Migraine.

After more than 2 decades of living with migraine, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can nearly always head them off. The article describes the tricks I use. (My fave standby? Tincture of cayenne =-O)

I’ll post a link to the article once it’s been transferred to RHL’s website, but in the meantime, if you’re in the Rochester, NY area, look for a print copy in your local supermarkets, healthfood stores, athletic clubs, etc.

Pick up a copy. It’s free :-)

I’ve held off blogging about some of the assertions being tossed around about the House healthcare bill. I wanted to wait until some of the dust had settled.

But I see that Investor’s Business Daily is standing by a claim it made last week that the bill would “outlaw private insurance.”

IBD, facing challenges from folks who say it overstated this point, has been busy checking its claim since it first ran that editorial.

It’s confirmed that the claim is correct.

Private insurance would no longer exist, because all insurers would be required to operate within a federal government-controlled health insurance “exchange.”

The government, through an unelected health choices commissioner, will set premiums, dictate benefits, determine deductibles and establish coverage. Exchange participants will be required to insure anyone who asks to be covered and to accept all renewals. [Republican Rep. Paul] Ryan believes the weight of the mandates will mean only five or six providers will be able to survive and sell coverage in the exchange.

Washington Dems are claiming that this “exchange” will be a health insurance market. But as the article states,

A true market is the sum of the voluntary choices of consumers and sellers acting on their own, free of government coercion. A market cannot be created or managed by one man or woman, or a team of bureaucrats, even with the help of a large staff by Washington standards working around the clock.

Anything that is primarily steered by the hand of the government rather than the price signals that free markets so efficiently process on a daily basis would be an agency of the state.

I am sick to my stomach about this bill.

Yes, people get sick, they get hit upside the head with huge medical bills, and that’s an awful thing.

But to think that this administration uses our fear to corral us into a healthcare system it alone defines and controls –

A system that will decide what kind of care we will get, which procedures and therapies are “approved,” which are banned.

It’s a nightmare.

How is it that a country that prides itself on personal freedom is prepared to submit to such a nightmarish power grab?

When did we become such sheep?

My uncle sent me this link and I’m glad he did: a piece by Atul Gawande, published in the New Yorker, that compares health care in McAllen, Texas with health care in El Paso, Texas.

He chose McAllen because it has some of the highest per capita healthcare costs in the country: $15,000 per Medicare enrollee in 2006.

El Paso’s healthcare costs are about half of that.

Gawande rules out a number of variables that you’d think might account for the discrepancy.

[P]ublic-health statistics show that cardiovascular-disease rates in the county are actually lower than average, probably because its smoking rates are quite low. Rates of asthma, H.I.V., infant mortality, cancer, and injury are lower, too. El Paso County, eight hundred miles up the border, has essentially the same demographics. Both counties have a population of roughly seven hundred thousand, similar public-health statistics, and similar percentages of non-English speakers, illegal immigrants, and the unemployed.

Nor can the high costs of healthcare in McAllen be attributed to better care:

[T]here’s no evidence that the treatments and technologies available at McAllen are better than those found elsewhere in the country. The annual reports that hospitals file with Medicare show that those in McAllen and El Paso offer comparable technologies—neonatal intensive-care units, advanced cardiac services, PET scans, and so on. Public statistics show no difference in the supply of doctors. Hidalgo County actually has fewer specialists than the national average.

Nor does the care given in McAllen stand out for its quality. Medicare ranks hospitals on twenty-five metrics of care. On all but two of these, McAllen’s five largest hospitals performed worse, on average, than El Paso’s. McAllen costs Medicare seven thousand dollars more per person each year than does the average city in America. But not, so far as one can tell, because it’s delivering better health care.

So what’s going on?

You’ll have to read the whole article to see how Gawande lays out his case, but bottom line: physicians in McAllen have decided to make money, and they’re doing it by consistently erring on the side of delivering “more” care — even when “more” doesn’t do anything for the patient.

Example:

Seeing a patient who has had uncomplicated, first-time gallstone pain requires some judgment. A surgeon has to provide reassurance (people are often scared and want to go straight to surgery), some education about gallstone disease and diet, perhaps a prescription for pain; in a few weeks, the surgeon might follow up. But increasingly, I was told, McAllen surgeons simply operate. The patient wasn’t going to moderate her diet, they tell themselves. The pain was just going to come back. And by operating they happen to make an extra seven hundred dollars.

How’s that for a gotcha?

Now that the gotcha’s out of the bag, tho, the real reckoning will come. Because the next question is: who’s going to tell the physicians to stop?

If we go with nationalized healthcare, it will be a government bureacracy.

Today, it’s often private insurers.

Without insurance in the picture at all, it’s the patients.

Pick your poison.

As a small-l libertarian, I’d just as soon do the picking myself. But that takes a measure of metaphysical chutzpah that most people, apparently, don’t care to acquire. Because when faced with decisions about medical care, the plain truth is that there often isn’t a “right” answer. For example. Suppose you’ve got a cancer that’s been pronounced terminal. Do you elect for oncology when the odds are it will at best only prolong your life for a few months? And live with the side effects?

Most people would rather abdicate responsibility for choosing — let a doc do it.

In my opinion, that’s what’s really at the heart of the healthcare debate. We don’t want to be sick, we don’t want to die, we don’t want to be frightened — and we want someone else to protect us from all of those things.

It’s an existential question, but we’re debating it as if it were a policy issue.

Which is why it is, and will remain, unsolvable.

And will also, in the meantime, become increasingly muddled.

Quite the show . . .

Anybody who knows me also knows: I’m the first to applaud efforts to get rid of toxins, particularly in our food and — most certainly — in anything our kids might put into their mouths.

But we now have another textbook example of why we can’t entrust Congress with this responsibility.

They’ve passed a law mandating that all products sold to kids 12 and other be tested for lead and phthalates.

Sounds great, right?

The problem is, the law is written so broadly that nobody can sell second-hand children’s clothing any more. Anyone who wants to will first have to test every article.

Can you imagine how expensive that would be?

“We will have to lock our doors and file for bankruptcy,” said Shauna Sloan, founder of Salt Lake City-based franchise Kid to Kid, which sells used children’s clothing in 75 stores across the country and had planned to open a store in Santa Clara, Calif., this year.

I know my posts of late have been dripping with disgust for our politicians, but I’m sorry, it’s warranted.

Really, is it too much to ask for them to read their stupid laws before they vote on them?

And while I’m at it, activists who push for legislation on these things — I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but you need to learn a lesson here, too. Even if this law is softened in some way, it will still have two consequences that I bet you will hate to see.

1. More stuff — including perfectly safe stuff–will be sent to landfills instead of being reused/recycled and

2. Toxic stuff that’s of any value, but that can no longer be sold second hand here, will be shipped overseas where laws are more lax.

That twinge you feel is your conscience . . .

$88,000 a year sound like a good figure?

Because–as I posted last summer–that’s what we spend annually to fluoridate our water in this county.

I’ve been fuming about that figure again lately, and not only because we’re facing the prospect of unprecedented tax hikes, thanks to the poor fiscal management of our pols.

There’s also, this, now: A new round-up, courtesy of the Fluoride Action Network, of 23 studies to that link fluoride consumption to lower IQ.

Much of this research was originally published in China, but the FAN is translating it.

Meanwhile, the National Research Council, which has reviewed a handful of these studies, says “the consistency of the collective results warrant additional research on the effects of fluoride on intelligence.”

Yeah, well how about discontinuing mass fluoridation of our water until we know for sure, folks?

It’s almost enough to make you believe the conspiracy theorists who think the government is deliberately trying to make people stupid.

At the least, it’s a clear window into how these agencies view their responsibilities toward the American people. They’re not going to err on the side of protecting us from brain damage. What do they care if our kids’ IQ loses 5 or 10 points? They’re collecting their salaries, and seeing their names published in prestigious medical journals, and being invited to speak at all the right conferences.

Nice people. So glad they’re in charge.

Several blogs, including Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, and JustOneMinute have picked up Nicholas Kristof’s Dec. 4 piece in the NY Times that calls attention to the problem of iodine deficiency in third world countries, such as Pakistan.

I’ve just been reading this 2006 paper by Stephen A. Hoption Cann, PhD, published by the American College of Nutrition, Hypothesis: Dietary Iodine Intake in the Etiology of Cardiovascular Disease which states that the “proportion of the US population with moderate to severe iodine deficiency (<50 µg iodine/L in urine) has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years.”

That’s right here at home, people.

I posted in August about my own experimentation with iodine supplementation. Today I typically take 25 mgs/day — thousands of times the RDA — and the results have been incredible. Now that winter’s here, for instance, I’ve noticed I don’t get cold as easily, and my skin doesn’t feel dry and itchy like always has in past winters. And of course, the fibrocystic breast tissue that was with me since my 20s is completely gone.

I’m a believer. I’ll never stop taking the stuff.

I just hope other people catch on & start taking it too.

What I find most fascinating about the whole subject is that iodine is so critical to so many of the human body’s biochemical systems that you have to wonder: how pervasive is the impact of our epidemic of iodine deficiency?

Obesity is an obvious candidate for thought. It began taking off in the United States during during the late 1980s. That corresponds pretty closely to the 20-year timeframe cited in Cann’s paper.

Some of that is probably because we no longer get any iodine from bread. The FDA “explicitly approved bromate for . . . use in bread through the standards for bread and rolls promulgated in May of 1952.” One of the flour conditioners potassium bromate displaced, with the FDA’s blessing, was potassium iodate.

Another likely factor is that we’ve been instructed to reduce salt intake. When we’re urged to cut back on salt (which the National Research Council was doing as far back as 1989, and probably further — I remember my grandfather being told not to eat salt in the 1970s) then we’re not necessarily eating enough iodized salt per day to get even the RDA for iodine.

Then there’s this: does the salt you sprinkle on your pommes frites provide as much iodine as it’s supposed to? See this e.g. (translated I think from French — but you’ll get the gist):

Iodine content of reference iodized salt was 38.53?6.92 on June 1997. After the salt was stored at room temperature with a relative humidity of 30 % -45% and in sealed paper bags for three years, iodine content changed to 18.25 ??4.72. Thus 52.63 % of was lost in approximately 3.5
years. This means that standing time and storage conditions is very effective storage of iodine in food.

Cooking conditions is very effective on the stabilization of iodine. In the case of oxidants in diet loss of iodine is more effective, 82% of iodine may lost during the high temperature cooking oxidized medium. So it is advised to consume iodide to put the food not before the cooking after the cooking. On the other hand, if consuming of iodide not advised to people who have problems with their thyroid, long term treatment at oven with an mild oxidant may loss 81% of iodine and 55% of iodine without an oxidants.

Less obvious is iodine’s role in other bodily systems that aren’t obviously linked to the thyroid.

Like heart disease, for instance.

That Cann paper I linked up top explores the correlation between low iodine levels and cardiovascular disease. Talks about selenium as well, another nutrient that’s deficient in our diets.

Here’s a taste:

Uotila et al. [18] made the observation that subjects who died from coronary sclerosis often had goitre. In order to further examine this phenomenon, 250 Finnish subjects who had died from coronary heart disease were age and sex-matched to controls who died from other causes [19]. The risk of death from coronary heart disease was found to be significantly higher in individuals with goiter (odds ratio (OR) = 3.53, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.43–4.99). It was noted that the average thyroid weight was higher in those dying from coronary disease. Moreover, among the coronary disease cases with goiter, there was a lower average age of death and a higher average heart weight. Due to the low iodine content of foods and lack of an iodization program at the time, endemic goiter was common in Finland, particularly in the east.

Well worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Good Sunday eve reading ;-)

The point Kristof tries to make in his NY Times article is that nutrient supplementation makes for boring public policy. He is referring to foreign aid/humanitarian policy, but the same is true right here at home. We’re happy to pour billions of dollars into breast cancer research, for instance (the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation alone has spent $1 billion over 25 years). And there’s nothing wrong with that. But where’s the enthusiasm for using iodine supplementation to prevent breast cancer? It’s not there — not on anything like the pink-ribbons-everywhere scale of mainstream breast cancer campaigns — because it’s such a prosaic and unpatentable approach.

But think about it.

Iodine supplementation may well be an very inexpensive way to address a whole range of very costly health issues that are faced by a huge majority of Americans.

What would become of the “healthcare crisis” if that proved to be the case?

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at The Enterprise Institute, has written an article about a new study on the placebo effect.

The study, by the National Institutes of Health, surveyed practicing U.S. internists and rheumatologists about whether they prescribe placebos. It was published in the British Medical Journal. Half of the MDs surveyed say they prescribe placebos. More than two-thirds say they think prescribing placebos is an acceptable thing to do.

One way to “read” the study, of course, is that MDs are leading patients down the proverbial path. Prescribing sugar pills. But as Satel points out, the reality is a bit more complex:

[O]nly a handful of the almost 700 physicians who completed the survey claimed to use inert substances such as sugar pills or saline. The vast majority offered innocuous over-the-counter products, sometimes called “impure” placebos, such as vitamins or Tylenol, though 13% used antibiotics and another 13% used sedatives. By offering an actual pharmaceutical, doctors stand on firmer ground in telling patients that what they are prescribing is a medication whereas describing a sugar pill as medication is much harder, perhaps impossible, for most to justify as a matter of conscience.

The other important factor is that the research “targeted” internists and rheumatologists — whose patients, in Satel’s words, typically suffer from “chronic illnesses, such as fibromyalgia, that are notoriously refractory to care.”

In other words, these are docs who are unable to help a significant percentage of their patients.

So they’re “prescribing” vitamins or Tylenol or sedatives.

Satel then goes on to discuss the psychological implications of placebos: that even sugar pills bring short term relief if patients believe they’re therapeutic.

But (she notes) there’s a risk as well. If patients begin to feel they’ve been duped, their trust in their physicians, and in the medical profession itself, will be lost.

What Satel doesn’t say is that the loss of trust has already happened. Or is, at least, in the process of happening. Which is why so many people gravitate to alt medicine.

To tease it out a bit more, the most important element at play, here, is the doctor’s fallibility.

Imagine what it must be like to be an MD facing a patient you do not believe you can help.

This person wants to trust you; this person believes you are his only hope; he needs you to stop the hurting, to ward off Death, to restore him to the full and happy life he’s watched slip away.

And you can do nothing. You know you cannot help; you are stumped. There is no drug, no therapy that has shown to reliably erase this condition. Any that have shown promise, you’ve already tried, and they’ve failed. You are stumped. You know it, even if you don’t quite dare let that thought form in your mind as you sit there in the exam room, facing the poor wretch. There is nothing in your bag that will make things better, no wand you can wave.

But you can’t say it. If you say it, everything crumbles. Saying it means you admit your fallibility, it means you admit how tiny and precarious your understanding is, how close to you is the drop-off into the pitch-black gulf of your ignorance. To say it is to let your patient fall off into that gulf, both of you helpless to save him.

So instead you — the MD — reach for what is, in fact, your OWN placebo. In the lingo of the study, you reach for “[A] medicine not typically used for [your patient's] condition, but [that] might benefit.”

The placebo makes YOU, the doctor, feel better. It gives you the illusion that you do have some control, some authority; it relieves you of having to speak aloud the unmentionable.

Most likely you can also discern at least some relief in your patient. The tension in that exam room is eased.

Your relationship with your patient, and your profession, is intact.

You can continue to practice, because you have proven again that you always have at least some answer. And it might help. It might relieve the symptoms, it might make the patient feel better, and who knows. The patient might even get better, maybe for reasons out of your control, but in the meantime, you’ve done something.

The patient, meanwhile, has gained a slightly better grip on hope. It might not last very long. Maybe only until the physician leaves the room. Or until the symptoms worsen again, and it becomes clear that this “medicine not typically used for your condition” isn’t really helping you at all.

Of course, this isn’t an ideal situation, by any stretch. Our study into the mechanics, and then the biomechanics of the human body have improved our ability to patch it together — and a godsend that is in many cases. But there’s still so much we cannot do.

There’s still so much we don’t understand. By some estimates, the human body comprises 10 trillion cells; each cell comprises trillions of molecules (for instance, there are 10,000 different proteins in a single human liver cell, and millions of molecules of each of those proteins). And each cell is perpetually busy, moving molecules about, assembling them, cutting them up, generating signals for other cells, reacting to signals it receives. All this at speeds we would call “lightening” if we could perceive it.

It’s unimaginably complex. Throw out those drawings you made in high school biology — the circle with the nucleus in the center and maybe a mitochondria or some other “organelle” alongside. That was a cartoon. It wasn’t even close.

The best minds in alt medicine (many of whom are not practitioners, but lay people with an aptitude for chemistry or who have used their own “incurable” illnesses as a catalyst for studying biochemistry) have grasped the implications of this complexity, and are humbled by it. They realize what mainstream practitioners dare not admit: that the drugs we purchase from pharmacies are crude instruments at best. Big, foreign molecules that blunder about in our cells, changing things, yes, which sometimes does bring relief from our symptoms, yes — but also knocking about like the proverbial bull and inevitably, at times, disrupting cellular processes that are better left alone. Causing “side effects.”

Alt medicine, at its best, looks instead to juice the body’s own inherent healing processes. It’s such a simple and logical concept that it amazes me that people dismiss it, but they do. They do. People laugh at the notion, for example, of “detoxification.” Quackwatch, the smarmy online bastion of mainstream medical fanaticism (run, btw, by a man who is himself a quack in the truest sense of the word), calls detoxification “an elaborate, manipulative hoax,” for instance.

But who can argue that the body’s cells know how to eliminate “waste” — molecules which are of no use, and which if retained would be dead weight at best? Of course cells “know” how to do that. They do it all the time. So the question becomes, what processes do cells use to eliminate waste molecules, and are there ways to support those processes, so that cells become in effect cleaner and better able to function?

You can argue that there are effective ways to support given cellular processes, and ineffective ways, but the basic premise is unassailable. As is the premise that nutrients — those molecules our cells have used, for billions of years, as their natural building blocks — are the basis for fundamental health. Cells need nutrients to survive. Not just calories. Much more than just calories. Nutrients — all those oddball molecules that do things like make an tomato red or a piece of salmon savory. Those are the things our cells reach for when they need to patch something up or build an enzyme or produce a secretion.

Meanwhile, mainstream medicine hopes our understanding of biochemistry will eventually become so sophisticated that we’ll be able to craft molecules that deliver “cures” — meaning, molecules that alter certain cellular processes without disrupting others. So one day, a pharmaceutical sales rep will stroll into our MD’s office, open his briefcase, and hand out samples of the pill that cures fibromyalgia.

When that happens, the placebo can be tossed away for good.

And so our mainstream practitioners mark time, and wait.

And roll their eyes when people lose faith in them, leave their offices, log onto the Internet, and type “alternative cure” in the google keyword search.