Wednesday Bible Study: Bad King
Psalms 51 and 52 refer to incidents in 2 Samuel and 1 Samuel, respectively, in which David does not exactly earn his crown. As with all the psalms of David, they were written long after he was dead -- they ' re actually fan fiction, or commentaries on Samuel. Just as a reminder, Psalm 51 refers to 2 Samuel 11-12 in which David rapes a woman named Bathsheba and gets her pregnant. To try to cover it up he summons her husband Uriah, a general, back from the front, but Uriah is loyal to his troops and won ' t come, so David has him murdered. He then marries Bathsheba. That is definitely not nice. God sent Nathan to let David k...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 24, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Drug prices continued: Innovation?
Pharmaceutical manufacturers claim that they need patent protection and marketing exclusivity so they can charge high prices to recoup the costs of drug development and clinical trials. There are a few things wrong with this argument, but they add up to the general fact that the system does not serve the public interest. Drug companies care about one thing only, that is profit. And the pursuit of profit does not serve the interests of public health or social welfare.One obvious mismatch between the goal of public health and the goal of profit is that a relatively cheap drug that you can take once or for a week or so, that ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 23, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: I'll give it one like
Psalm 49 is one I can pretty much get behind. It ' s kind of Buddhist, actually. One of Jesus ' s sermons is also reminiscent -- in Matthew 6 19-21. (That whole chapter is where a lot of the good stuff in the Gospels is to be found.)19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[c] consume and where thieves break in and steal,20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust[d] consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.Psalm 50, on the other hand, is another one of those vaingloriou...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 21, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Correcting more disinformation
The gap between Republican blathering and reality is unbridgeable. I ' m just going to rip off NPR here.Experts say New York is not experiencing a crime waveSo is it accurate to say New York in the grips of a crime wave?Some experts say not at all." Putting
shooting and homicide crimes into context, we ' re a much safer city than
we were 30 years ago, " says assistant professor Christopher Herrmann, acriminologist
at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He ' s formerly with the NYPD
and has been studying the city ' s crime trends for years. Herrmann says
last year there were438 murders; there werenearly 2,000 t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 20, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Pharmaceutical profiteering
Another reason why we spend more on pharmaceuticals than the rest of the world ( " drugs " also means fentanyl and crank so I ' m trying to disambiguate here) is the profit motive. There are perverse incentives built into the system that encourage use of higher priced chemicals when cheaper ones would be as good or better for patients.There are some medications that people can ' t take at home. You have to go to a physician ' s office and have them infused. Medicare pays the physician a percentage of the cost of the drug, which means, obviously, that doctors make more money infusing a $10,000 drug than they would infusing ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 20, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Healthcare: The Path of Least Resistance for Cybercriminals
The following is a guest article by Steve Gwizdala, VP of Healthcare at Ping Identity
The healthcare security landscape has become an increasingly critical concern. According to the 2023 ForgeRock Breach Report, healthcare has consistently ranked as the most targeted industry by cybercriminals for the past five years. These relentless attacks come at a staggering cost, with the average healthcare breach reaching $10.93 billion according to IBM Security.
The primary cause of breaches is unauthorized access. The 2023 Verizon Breach Report further highlights vulnerabilities with the healthcare sector, identifying web applicat...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - January 19, 2024 Category: Information Technology Authors: Guest Author Tags: Ambulatory C-Suite Leadership Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System IT Infrastructure and Dev Ops LTPAC Security and Privacy 2023 ForgeRock Breach Report 2023 Verizon Breach Report CIBA Cybersecurity ForgeRock CI Source Type: blogs
Okay, getting back to drug prices . . .
As I noted previously, prescription drugs cost much more in the U.S. than everywhere else in the world. Yes, yes, I know, the drug companies say they need to recoup the high costs of research, development, and clinical trials, so the U.S. is subsidizing that for everyone else. I ' ll get around to why that ' s a crock, but first let ' s deal with the fact of high prices. As we learned last time, drug makers have a period of patent protection and then additional " marketing exclusivity " after their drugs are approved by the FDA. During that period, they have no competition, and they can charge as much as they think th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 18, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Religion and morality
A commenter asks about the relationship over time between religiosity, and crime and " sexual deviance. " You got it!If you will refer to my previous post on declining religiosity in America (or just take my word for it) the trend toward fewer people claiming religious affiliation began in about 1992. What a coinkydink! That ' s exactly when the crime rate began to decline. Here are property crimes (data is from the Bureau of Justice Statistics andI cribbed it from the Wikipedia article): And whaddya know, that ' s also exactly when the homicide rate started to decline! (Note that it first started to go up sharp...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 17, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Religio-nationalism
The next three psalms are songs of praise to God, but they also equate his greatness with the strength of the Jewish nation. It ' s important to keep in mind that in the ancient world, Gods pertained to particular nations or ethnic groups. The Hebrew Bible was largely compiled during the Babylonian exile, mostly from earlier material, but as Ezrah/Nehemiah and other works show, some of it was added after the return and construction of the Second Temple. I ' m not sure whether these were written before or after the exile, and therefore which incarnation of Zion they refer to. Psalm 46 seems to refer to an earthquake, but we...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 17, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Losing my religion
I ' m going to interrupt the series on medical costs for today and talk about religion. I ' m sure it won ' t come as a surprise to anyone that I am very pleased by the graph below.I took it from this Daily Kos diary about the actual meaning of " Christian " identity to Trump cultists, which is not really the main point of this post although it ' s relevant.The majority of poll respondents still say they identify as Christian, but it ' s a sharply declining majority. Furthermore, many people who say they identify as Christian do not attend church regularly. Church is for weddings and funerals and maybe Christmas and Easter...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 15, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: What's this doing in the Bible?
Psalm 45 is apparently written to celebrate a royal wedding. It starts with a panegyric to the king, then introduces the bride and exhorts her to renounce her family and country of origin. RSV translates the word " Shoshannim " as Lilies, which would apparently refer to a melody, but some think it actually refers to a musical instrument. In any event, nobody has any idea what this has to do with the sons of Korah, although it seems to me the most likely explanation is that they are a guild of musicians, or perhaps even a specific band -- the New Christie Minstrels of the day. Notably, there is no theological content, ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 14, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Why is health care so expensive in the U.S.?
It seems inquiring minds want to know, and rightly so. In fact, we spend about twice as much on medical goods and services as the average wealthy country (defined for most purposes as members of the OECD), and something like three times as much as Japan, but we also have the lowest life expectancy of all those countries, and Japan, that spends the least on so-called health care, has the highest.WTF is going on here? We can usefully decompose the issue into four parts, or maybe 4 1/2, but in the end it all comes down to one main problem. The four and a half parts are 1) prices for medical goods and services are higher in th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 12, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Who are these guys?
Fortunately we now have a few relatively short psalms. A " maschil " probably means an instructive or didactic psalm, according to some authorities, but that would not seem to describe Psalm 42. It could instead be a musical form. The " sons of Korah " are a rather surprising attribution, however. (In the KJV it appears to be addressed to them, in the RSV they seem to be credited as authors. It isn ' t clear.) As you likely will not recall, in Numbers 16 Korah organizes a rebellion against the hegemony of the Levites. Yahweh responds by causing the earth to open and bury Korah and two of his lieutenants alive, and th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 10, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Physician burnout: the hidden quality metric [PODCAST]
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes! Join Trina E. Dorrah, an internal medicine physician. We explore the concept of integrating physician burnout as a quality metric in health care. Discover why Trina believes this change could revolutionize the American health care system, potentially saving lives and improving patient care. Trina
Read more…
Physician burnout: the hidden quality metric [PODCAST] originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - January 10, 2024 Category: General Medicine Authors: The Podcast by KevinMD Tags: Podcast Psychiatry Source Type: blogs
Busting a myth
A common right wing trope is that illegal drugs are coming across the southern border, carried by illegal immigrants. You may even have seen the political ad featuring people climbing a wall wearing backpacks, implying that they were what are called " drug mules. " The whole thing was, of course, faked. I have written here before that this is not true, that is not how illicit drugs come into the country, butnow there is a very rigorous study proving it. Unfortunately, unless you have institutional access, you can only read the abstract, which is not very informative. (NBER used to be open access, this is apparently a new p...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 9, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
