Lord Obama bin Biden for Galactic Chancellor!!!

I give in. The pomp and circumstance are just simply too much. I'm only human. Resistance truly is futile. Obama's sarcastic and dismissive brow-beating last night finally stole my last ounce of strength. I must embrace the dark side.

And Darth Biden. Those teeth! Those amazingly white, shockingly gleaming teeth! So beautiful. So dangerously sharp...

And speaking of teeth, I never did see Michelle's all night. Did they wire her mouth shut or something? Or maybe Obama the Great did one of those things where he choked her without touching her - the Dark Side really is powerful.

They will stop at nothing. They've already stooped to calling McCain a "senile...old man". They've called the majority of our fellow citizens "clingers" to guns and God. Now Gov. Palin gets her turn. It's almost too easy - Obama Khan will probably leave the dirty part to Joe - calling her a "typical white broad". Of course her five kids will likely have to suffer, too. The stakes are just too high.

Let's just surrender now. We are ignorant and poorly-educated. Not all of us poor kids get to go to Harvard, you know. Only the "special" ones.

We welcome your Pax Obama, O Great One!!! We salute you!!! We await the glorious coming of the New Age you promised us!!! May the Earth begin to cool as you gloriously predicted!!! Indeed, We are the ones We've been waiting for!!! I see it so clearly now. Your wisdom, it burns my tiny brain, your Eminence...!!!

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...Oh my goodness. Even I underestimated the depths of depravity to which some of the lefties are stooping about Palin and her children. I just checked in on HotAir...unreal.

I wonder if His Eminence will repudiate the comments. If not, it should be the duty of all decent, moderate Democrats to jump ship on him. This is beyond "swiftboating". This is beyond dirty. I'm starting to think there really is a Dark Side involved here.

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Breaking News in the Class War: Obama bin Biden Invades Denver

In a typically dreary and narcotic lefty speech, Senator Joseph Biden accepted the nomination of the American Communist Party for the vice-chancellorship of the country of Unitedstates. In the speech, he lamented the current state of American affairs. As he put it, never before in his lifetime had so many people been prevented from participating in the "American Dream". With his elderly mother nodding her approval from the cheap seats, he promised to change things.

What I did find surprising is the failure of the assembled members of the Democratic Socialist Peoples' Party to rise up with a groan of fury and rip him limb-from-limb for this open threat to their agenda. I mean, seriously. Restore the American Dream? The Socialists have worked so hard, and they had just about killed it. Plus, why would he bring up such a topic just when people had almost forgotten all about it?

Maybe he actually means it. Is that possible? I had always figured him for a typical liberal panderer, but maybe he actually aims to restore the American Dream. If so, we'll know soon enough. For those on the bottom of the "social ladder", he will demand that they go to 12 years of school before becoming eligible for social welfare, and will begin speaking in very direct and pointed terms about the destructiveness of single-parent homes, teenage births, drug culture, failure to learn English, and crooked local politics. This will be his first step in restoring the American Dream to those who, in his words, "need it most".

He'll likely then turn his attention to the nation's small-business owners, whose presence and success drives the nation's economy. He will likely publicly celebrate the most successful ones, praising their enormous incomes as a well-deserved reward for all their hard work, and encouraging others to follow their example. He will probably drop the tax burden on them and lower the capital gains tax rate so that their investments can be even more profitable for them, and so that they can hire more people - the people who had previously been living in miserable, unemployed squalor, until Senator Biden's brave stand for the American Dream. Now those people, too, are on the road to growing more powerful and independent. Maybe someday they, too, will own their own business and make it big.

He will have much more work to do, of course. This is only the beginning of restoring the American Dream. He will have to work to encourage large corporations to do business in America rather than moving overseas. He'll probably do this by lowering their exposure to frivolous lawsuits and by decreasing their tax burden, or at least by simplifying the tax law. When he does this, those companies and corporations won't "send jobs overseas" any more - they won't have to. They'll be able to hire Americans - probably some of the same ones that would have spent their previously uneducated lives waiting on the next hand-out or participating in the drug trade - that is, until Joe Biden came along and saved the American Dream for them.

Of course, this is all just speculation. I'm sure the Honorable Mr. Biden has much better ideas than mine. Or, I suppose, he could just continue to do what he's spent the first several decades of his career as a politician doing - the complete opposite of everything I suggested.

He could just keep on tacitly encouraging entire generations of the poorest Americans to stay uneducated, unmarried, untrained, and unintelligible. He could just continue to tell those people that none of that is their fault and that they should continue to trust him to fight all their battles for them, if they will just continue to blindly vote for him. He might just continue to support labor unions and trial attorneys as they make business nearly impossible for American companies, and then continue to smear the companies that move to countries where free enterprise is still a valued system. And, as Vice Chancellor, he may just continue to make it harder and harder for small businesses to begin and even harder to survive.

Or maybe I just have him and his agenda all wrong. Maybe a nation of dependent, uneducated, hopeless drones just working from check-to-check and always looking to the central government for their very survival is his picture of the American Dream that people are being robbed of. I guess maybe to him it means people who might as well save their energy instead of taking the risk of starting their own company because it only exposes them to greater legal and financial risk with no real hope of reaping a reward.

But I guess I could be wrong about Joe Biden. Maybe he's got the guts to save the world after all.

So there I was, without my foil hat...!

I awoke Friday morning with a sick feeling I couldn't quite put my finger on. I didn't feel ill. It was more like being "pre-ill" - that almost-but-not-quite sick feeling you get right before the fever hits. I continued feeling strangely all the way to work. I hadn't been aware of the total solar eclipse until I pulled up in the parking lot. Without a better cosmic excuse, I just chalked the weirdness up to that. As the day wore on, however, I began to wonder if it might have been something else.

Have you ever heard about how animals act before a natural disaster? Dogs before the "Christmas Tsunami" were said to inexplicably flee inland. Traditional lore in West Texas describes the bizarre behavior of pets hours, sometimes even a day or two, before a devastating tornado. I believe that this weird feeling I had Friday morning was the human equivalent. Everything in me said "Stay home!". I wish I'd have listened.

It started out very well - nice and easy until about 9:30. Then the gates opened. And it wasn't our typical mix of patients, either. It was as if every single disgruntled person in the world was trying to push their way into our waiting room. I had threats of lawsuit. I had to dismiss two patients within 10 minutes for being obstinate, malingering, and making false accusations against me. I had more lies, more threats, and on and on. It lasted nearly all day. By 4 p.m. I was nearly down for the count.

Somehow we made it through. I just wish I understood what caused this to happen - solar eclipse, mind-control rays gone mad...? Something was definitely up. I guess I'll know what to expect next time.

Scientists Report 30% of U.S. Adults are Disabled; Other 70% Exhausted

This is a perfect example of the reason I view "Evidence-based medicine" with a suspicious eye. The first reaction is one of interested surprise - "What? 3 out of 10? Amazing! I never would have thought..."

For me at least, there is a second thought process that begins to form when I hear these seemingly unbelievable reports: I begin to assess whether that information is consistent with common sense. Those who preach the religion of Evidence would call that inappropriate, unscientific, or even "allegorical" (that is the new term for idolatry in the Church of Evidence).

Think about it. How many people do you know? How many people are you in contact with? Would you say that 30% of them are "disabled" in some way? I know literally hundreds of people as a result of my work as a doctor. There is no way that 3 out of 10 of them are disabled.

So, then, what does this mean? Am I horribly mistaken? Is there a vast unknown number of Americans with disabilities out there? Have I simply missed them somehow? Or has some sort of error been made in this study?

Errors occur from time to time, and are dealt with by the scientific method itself. Unless of course, the study does not lend itself to scientific methodology. Errors can be of basically two types - (a) errors in data collection and (b) errors in conclusions regarding the data. At the very least, I believe the author of this study is guilty of scientific error. Fortunately for her, her study can not be subjected to scientific scrutiny. Her interpretations of the data indicate that there is something missing - some piece of the puzzle undefined. So much so that a dedicated physician, diligently attempting to find how this study might impact his practice feels left out of the inside joke. So I continue digging...

The author is Barbara M. Altman, Ph.D. A former employee of the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, Dr. Altman, a psychologist by training, has a long history of research dealing with the disabled. She seems especially interested in the relationship between disability and occupations. In fact, she seems to be a bit of a revolutionary in this field. She supports a new and controversial definition for disability that, as the review of her textbook puts it, "focuses attention on the dual themes of theory and methodology that must form a basis for studies of impairment and disability". It goes on to describe the general aim of the book:

"Issues discussed include: critiques of current concepts of disability; the fit between sociological role theory and the concept of disability; the operationalization of different definitions of disability; conducting surveys with people with impairments; the reliability and utility of several qualitative research methodologies as applied to impairment and disability. Overall, the papers in this volume represent the beginning of a resurgence of interest in social science theories and methodologies within the study of impairment and disability".

Allow me, if you will, to define this for those of you as-yet untrained in the language of Psychotripe. Dr. Altman and her co-editor wish to redefine disability. No longer is it merely the (they would say seriously inadequate) definition which deals with concrete, objective, verifiable facts of inability to perform a certain task. Now this highly-charged social phenomenon of disability is placed into the nebulous universe of the psychologist, where definitions are impossible because nothing has actual meaning. If you read the methodology for the study, you find that Dr. Altman unilaterally uses the broadest possible sense of the term "disability". In her world, disability includes "feelings that interfere with productive work". Under this ridiculous definition, I and the ever-diminishing number of us who actually get up every morning and go to work and make a living are clearly, perhaps permanently, disabled.

Here is the problem. It is fine if Dr. Altman wishes to destroy any useful meaning for the term "disability". In fact, I support her right to live in a self-made universe without meaningful definitions. That will not be enough for Dr. Altman, however. As evidenced by her much-publicized recent study, this will grease the skids for vast increases in tax monies spent to care for this new onslaught of the "disabled". Those of us who are too busy paying for all those leeching off the system already will once again be harnessed with a new yoke.

If we are going to use "Evidence-Based Medicine" as the new standard for practice, I demand that we at least exercise some controls on what constitutes evidence. I barely scratched the surface of this article and found what appears to be a deep, dark, festering core of liberal social engineering, propaganda, and dishonesty. How many other "studies" could be similarly debunked?

Well played, Montezuma. Well played.

In the not-so-stunning latest chapter in the Salmonella saintpaul scare, the FDA announced Friday that it appears that food grown in the United States has been given the all-clear. Jalapeno and serrano peppers from Mexico seem to be the culprits. At latest count, over between 1500 and 2000 U.S. citizens had been made ill by the peppers.

Where is the outrage? Is this the price of our new global economy? Are we to get used to the fact that in order to bring greater prosperity to our hostile neighbor to the south, we may all get an entirely preventable illness at some point? Are our children to bear the burden of these slip-ups in food security? And what is the point of the millions of tax dollars we spend annually for the FDA to exercise draconian tactics on our own U.S. food companies if we are allowing in human-waste-contaminated food by the truckload across the Mexican border?

I have almost grown accustomed to our government's apparent lack of motivation to do their Constitutional duty to protect us from the human invasion from the south. Now, it appears we have conclusive proof that their typical sleeping at the switch has cost us even more unnecessary suffering.

Shockingly, the New England Journal of Medicine is silent. They and the rest of their liberal egotist brethren are too consumed with their crusade against legal, responsible gun ownership to pay attention to the very real public health threat posed by this breach in our food security.

Here's the article, if you care to become further enraged...

Beware of Politicians Bearing Gifts

I just read an article on Medscape.com that started my "Spider-sense tingling". I have an almost visceral mistrust of people who try to bribe you, and this seems to fall into that category. See what you think...

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/577700?src=mpnews&spon=34&uac=76986SV

The part I like the best is the following:

There are 4.4 billion prescriptions written annually in the United States.

The National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative, a coalition of health care and technology companies including Dell, Aetna, Microsoft, Google and WellPoint, has offered to provide e-prescribing software from Allscripts to any doctor for free.

On July 1, the two biggest e-prescribing networks announced that they were merging to form a single, secure, nationwide network for e-prescriptions and exchanging health data.

RxHub, a joint-venture of pharmacy-benefit managers CVS Caremark, Express Scripts and Medco Health Solutions, joined forces with SureScripts, a private company formed by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and the National Community Pharmacists Association.

"We're really focused on seeing how we can help the market get to the elimination of the paper prescription pad," said Rick Ratliff, co-CEO of the new SureScripts-RxHub.

Uhhh...Why? And don't try to tell me that the largest drug stores, the largest medicine shipping company, and the entire computer industry are in this unholy alliance just for patient advocacy. There are billions to be made if we sheep will just fall in line. And what better way to make that happen than to use everyone's favorite bait - money?

The really hilarious bit, however, is that there is no better demonstration of just how far the medical profession has fallen than to see just how little people are willing to use for attempting to bribe us. I mean, seriously. Why don't you just spit on us while we're down. What are we, 1940s bellhops? "Hey, guys...uh...we'd really like you to buy all this new equipment. Not sure about it, huh? Well...uh...we have a couple of friends that I think might be able to talk some sense into you. Say hello to Abe Lincoln...and this is his friend George Washington."

This reminds me of an old story I heard once. Back in the day, in our recent agrarian past, everyone used mules or draft horses to plow and cultivate their fields. Eventually, someone invented the tractor. It was much more productive...when it worked. As someone who has used tractors, I can tell you first hand that you spend about as much time repairing them as using them. Anyway, the tractor manufacturers realized that they had a problem. If they introduced the tractors slowly and word got around that the tractors weren't the miraculous invention they'd been billed as, then farmers might just go back to using their well-trained and well-seasoned mules. No, that wouldn't have worked. They'd have to master the market in one explosive instant.

So they made the farmers an offer they couldn't refuse. They made even trades. Tractors for the farmers' mules, draft horses, donkeys...pretty much anything that'd pull a plow. Then they killed them. They killed them all. They buried them in mass graves. An entire generation of trained farm animals destroyed - animal genocide. Now there was no going back. They could have given the tractors away for free, for that matter. They would have a hundred generations of tractor-buying rubes to make their money back.

True story? I don't know. But it wouldn't surprise me. Caveat emptor, it's been said. I guess I'm just overly apocalyptic in my thinking, but once there are no more prescription pads, then we'll all be at the mercy of whoever sells the prescription-writing-machine.

As for me, they can have my prescription pad when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Or when they whip out "Andrew Jackson" to convince me.

More dangerous: Guns or Doctors? The debate rages on.

I must be on the right track with this blog. MedPageToday had a survey about whether gun control is a public health issue. Shockingly, the response was overwhelmingly "No". God bless us crazy doctors. We may save the world yet. Other than that bit of good news, the article and survey were so last week.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Surveys/#ayk

I had a really interesting talk with a fellow physician last night at dinner. We were discussing the possibility of starting some weekend work at his clinic. I realized well into the conversation, which got really deep and intense about a lot of the things this blog is about, just how nice it is sometimes to have professional colleagues. It sort of made me feel a little better - not so isolated and alone.