An anti-abortion rights organization is withdrawing an award it planned to present Rep. Bart Stupak, after the Michigan Democrat announced Sunday he would support health care reform legislation.
The Susan B. Anthony List had chosen Stupak to receive the “Defender of Life” award at the “Campaign for Life Gala” Wednesday here in the nation’s capital.
Because we all know Susan B. Anthony was pro-life.
From Yglesias. Emphasis mine.
We should also, however, spare a thought for the unsung hero of comprehensive reform, McConnell and his GOP colleagues, who pushed their “no compromise” strategy to the breaking point and beyond. The theory was that non-cooperation would stress the Democratic coalition and cause the public to begin to question the enterprise. And it largely worked. But at crucial times when wavering Democrats were eager for a lifeline, the Republicans absolutely refused to throw one. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and other key players at various points wanted to scale aspirations down to a few regulatory tweaks and some expansion of health care for children. This idea had a lot of appeal to many in the party. But it always suffered from a fatal flaw—the Republicans’ attitude made it seem that a smaller bill was no more feasible than a big bill. Consequently, even though Scott Brown’s victory blew the Democrats off track, the basic logic of the situation pushed them back on course to universal health care.
Today, conservative anger at the Democrats is running higher than ever, and for the first time in years the GOP leadership’s blanket opposition has won them the esteem of their fanatics. But in more sober moments in the weeks and months to come, my guess is that the brighter minds on the right will recognize that their determination to turn health reform into Obama’s Waterloo sowed the seeds of their own destruction. Universal health care has been attempted many times in the past and always failed. The prospects for success were never all that bright. Many of us, myself included, at one point or another wanted to try something more moderate. But the right wing, by invariably indicating that it would settle for nothing less than total victory, inspired progressive forces to march on and win their greatest legislative victory in decades.
Paul Krugman
Instead, I want you to consider the contrast: on one side, the closing argument was an appeal to our better angels, urging politicians to do what is right, even if it hurts their careers; on the other side, callous cynicism. Think about what it means to condemn health reform by comparing it to the Civil Rights Act. Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality? (Actually, we know who: the people at the Tea Party protest who hurled racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote.)
And a word of my own on “death panels.” Now that healthcare reform has passed (barring something catastrophic in the Senate), I predict the same people who whipped their followers into a froth over the government using death panels to put granny down, I predict that these same people will start to talk about the burden of keeping the poor and illegal immigrants alive. They are costing us money in insurance. Why should they get a life-saving transplant, they will say. I’ve done everything right all my life so why should I be punished.
Predators. I predict they’ll say child predators can get health insurance and it will cost insurance money to keep them alive. Those costs will be passed on to us. In short, that they very people who fear mongered are now going to be the ones who want to go back to the old system where they can choose who is worthy of life-saving treatment.
Webicina.com is getting closer to the 50th collection and the newest addition is Pediatrics and Web 2.0 that focuses on selected mobile apps, blogs, podcasts, Twitterers, communities, slideshows and many more social media tools dedicated to pediatrics.
The number of websites created for pediatricians is constantly growing and it is getting harder to find relevant, reliable resources, but with PeRSSonalized Pediatrics it will be a piece of cake for You.
A 50-year-old man presented with a 1-month history of mild, generalized pruritus. A total-body examination of the patient's skin revealed small, yellowish-brown flecks in the hair of the upper arm, chest, and axilla on the left side and in the pubic area.
Dermoscopy showed pubic lice (Phthirus pubis), colloquially termed “crabs”. The pubic louse is classically a sexually transmitted pediculus and is aptly named, since it is most commonly found in pubic hair. In heavy infestations, the trunk, limbs, and eyelashes can be colonized.
Dermoscopy revealed the typical broad body of the crab and the large middle and hind legs, which have thick claws for grasping hairs.
The patient was treated with two total-body applications of topical permethrin 5% cream, which were applied 1 week apart. Household members were also treated. Complete resolution was achieved without recurrence.
Source
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According to emedicinehealth, the possible causes are:
The source of infection for pubic lice is intimate contact with an infected person. Therefore, pubic lice are often transmitted during sex.
Since transmission occurs during intimate contact, actual sexual intercourse is not necessary for the spread of pubic lice.
Pubic lice can also be transmitted by contact with contaminated belongings such as towels, bed sheets, or clothing.
Crabs are transmitted through any intimate contact. Lice do not jump or fly, so actual contact is necessary for transmission. An individual may acquire an infection by sharing bedding or towels.
Cats, dogs, and other pets are not involved in the spread of human lice. Your pet cannot become infested with human lice and transmit the lice to another person.
For more information click here.
According to MedicineNet, there are three stages in the life of a pubic louse: the nit, the nymph, and the adult.
Nit: Nits are pubic lice eggs. They are hard to see and are found firmly attached to the hair shaft.
They are about the size of the mark at the end of this arrow . They are oval and usually yellow to white. Nits take about 1 week to hatch.
Nymph: The nit hatches into a baby louse called a nymph. It looks like an adult pubic louse, but is smaller. Nymphs mature into adults about 7 days after hatching. To live, the nymph must feed on blood.
Adult: The adult pubic louse is about this size and resembles a miniature crab when viewed through a strong magnifying glass. Pubic lice have six legs, but their two front legs are very large and look like the pincher claws of a crab; this how they got the nickname “crabs.” Pubic lice are tan to greyish-white in color. Females lay nits; they are usually larger than males. To live, adult lice need to feed on blood. If the louse falls off a person, it dies within 1-2 days.
DNA nanotechnology breakthrough offers promising applications in medicine
McGill researchers create DNA nanotubes able to carry and selectively release materials
This release is available in French.
A team of McGill Chemistry Department researchers led by Dr. Hanadi Sleiman has achieved a major breakthrough in the development of nanotubes – tiny “magic bullets” that could one day deliver drugs to specific diseased cells. Sleiman explains that the research involves taking DNA out of its biological context. So rather than being used as the genetic code for life, it becomes a kind of building block for tiny nanometre-scale objects.
Using this method, the team created the first examples of DNA nanotubes that encapsulate and load cargo, and then release it rapidly and completely when a specific external DNA strand is added. One of these DNA structures is only a few nanometres wide but can be extremely long, about 20,000 nanometres. (A nanometre is one-10,000th the diameter of a human hair.)
Until now, DNA nanotubes could only be constructed by rolling a two-dimensional sheet of DNA into a cylinder. Sleiman’s method allows nanotubes of any shape to be formed and they can either be closed to hold materials or porous to release them. Materials such as drugs could then be released when a particular molecule is present.
One of the possible future applications for this discovery is cancer treatment. However, Sleiman cautions, “we are still far from being able to treat diseases using this technology; this is only a step in that direction. Researchers need to learn how to take these DNA nanostructures, such as the nanotubes here, and bring them back to biology to solve problems in nanomedicine, from drug delivery, to tissue engineering to sensors,” she said.
The team’s discovery was published on March 14, 2010 in Nature Chemistry. The research was made possible with funding from the National Science and Engineering Research Council and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Milton R Wolf, MD, Obama Health Care Bill, Primum nil nocere, First do no harm
Dr Milton R Wolf, a cousin of Barack Obama, was on the Sean Hannity Show on Fox, March 16, 2010. I was very impressed with Dr. Wolf. He stayed consistent with his earlier statements that he was against Obamacare and that the Health Care Bill will hurt our health care system and likely prevent some people from getting care.
Reported here March 12, 2010.
“Dr Milton R Wolf, Obama cousin, Obama Health Care Bill”
“Primum nil nocere.”First, do no harm. This guiding principle is a bedrock of medical care. Sadly, those politicians who would rewrite our health care laws do not live in the same universe as do the doctors and health care professionals who must practice it.
“Imagine if, like physicians, politicians were personally held to the incredibly high level of scrutiny that includes civil and financial liability for any unintended consequence of their decisions. Imagine if they were forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars each year on malpractice insurance and still faced the threat of multimillion-dollar lawsuits with every single decision they made. If so, a government takeover of health care would be the furthest thing from their minds.
Obamacare proponents would have us believe that we will add 30 million patients to the system without adding providers, we will see no decline in the quality of care for the millions of Americans currently happy with the system, and -if you act now!- we will save money in the process. But why stop there? Why not promise it will no longer rain on weekends and every day will be a great hair day?
America has the finest health care delivery system in the world. Let’s not forget that and put it at risk in the name of reform. Desperate souls across the globe flock to our shores and cross our borders every day to seek our care. Why? Our system provides cures while the government-run systems from which they flee do not. Compare Europe’s common cancer mortality rates to America’s: breast cancer – 52 percent higher in Germany and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom; prostate cancer – a staggering 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway; colon cancer – 40 percent higher in the United Kingdom.
Look closer at the United Kingdom. Britain’s higher cancer mortality rate results in 25,000 more cancer deaths per year compared to a similar population size in the United States. But because the U.S. population is roughly five times larger than the United Kingdom’s, that would translate into 125,000 unnecessary American cancer deaths every year. This is more than all the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, cousins and children in Topeka, Kan. And keep in mind, these numbers are for cancer alone. America also has better survival rates for other major killers, such as heart attacks and strokes. Whatever we do, let us not surrender the great gains we have made. First, do no harm. Lives are at stake.””
A person should not have to learn the most important lessons about life from experience. Most of them can be taught, if we know enough to teach them to our children.
Not knowing those lessons, not knowing how to cope with the adversities that life throws at every one of us, means we must suffer pain. Not just the pain of each tragedy, but also the pain associated with the stress of having a severe problem (or a bunch of them) and not knowing what to do about it.
My sister didn’t know. She smoked herself to death from cancer at age 54, never understanding why she had to live alone, on welfare, never having anyone she could trust or depend on. Never having a friend in her life. Never having any happiness in her marriage because she didn’t know how. Never being able to hold a job because she didn’t realize employers need skills and employees who can get along with each other.
Her children don’t know. Her daughter, my niece, at one time displeased with me because I told her about lies her mother had told about her and about me, suggested that I should kill myself. Her son, my nephew, joined an extreme religious cult where he feels loved and respected.
No doubt my father chose a remote rural area to rent the apartment above a general store when I was a baby because he didn’t want his family to suffer the indignities he had suffered as a child. He and my mother didn’t know that children learn from each other by playing together. I rarely saw any other children and never played with one until I was nearly six years old.
My parents understood that parenting consisted of providing food, shelter and clothing to their children. And punishing them when they did something wrong. It never occurred to them to teach a child what the child needs to know to avoid getting into trouble. My parents didn’t teach their children anything. Except how to eat with a knife and fork and how to use toilet paper.
My mother, who never worked a day after she got pregnant with me, eventually needed to hire a cleaning lady once a week because she couldn’t keep up with dusting, cleaning and laundry. No one knew why. Chronic fatigue syndrome, now recognized as a widespread problem, was just called laziness in those days. My mother never talked about it.
The same way she never talked about why she chased me around our house at couple of times when I was 10, brandishing a broom and threatening to kill me if she caught me. I hadn’t a clue about why she was angry. But I didn’t let her catch me either. I couldn’t spell “menopause” let alone understand what it meant. All I knew was her words.
My father, a naturally clever man who never managed to pass grade nine, found considerable success in business. He became an alcoholic because he had no idea how to cope with the stresses associated with his business success.
He adopted the advice of someone he worked with as a young man. It was: Never learn how to do something if you don’t want to do that thing. My father disliked working with his hands. One of his employees, a mechanic, bought him a simple screwdriver one day because he thought my father should be able to tighten a screw himself. My father never taught me any skills. He didn’t have any mechanical skills or interest in learning to do things with his hands. He never used the screwdriver either.
My father’s father had a thriving florist business until the First World War destroyed it. My father was five years old when his father committed suicide.
Suicide is not genetic, but it tends to run in families. I didn’t want to become an alcoholic or to kill myself, though I knew no coping skills because I had never been taught any. By anyone. Lacking coping skills, I now know, is the leading cause of alcoholism, suicide and many other severe problems.
As I knew nothing about being a father, in fact I was afraid of little children, I avoided having much to do with my own children when they were young. Their mother raised them through those first few critically important years of their lives. She taught them everything they knew. They became everything she was.
She believed that success at work was more important that success as a parent. She believed that money was the sign of success. That’s what the society we lived in taught. She left our kids with me when they were about ten years old and went out to be successful as a school principal and a savvy investor. She had money, a great car and an impressive house. She had taught those values to our children.
She died of cancer at age 44, having spent her last year alone, at home, rarely receiving a visitor. Neither her children nor her business friends had anything more to gain from her, so they abandoned her. When she died, our daughter didn’t even hold a funeral because she thought no one would come.
After their mother died, our children decided they wanted nothing more to do with me. They wanted money and I didn’t have much. I didn’t believe that money was the most important thing in life. They thought I was stupid. My daughter told her children–whom I was never allowed to see–that all their grandparents were dead. Only one was.
Sitting on a loading dock on a break from my first summer job at age 15, I overheard two men talking. One said to the other, “I never have conversations with young people under age 25. They never know enough to talk about.” As I thought about that, I realized that he was right.
I had no skills or hobbies. I had learned nothing from books or newspapers. In fact, I could barely read. I didn’t have friends I could learn from. My teachers repeatedly told my parents I was lazy. It never occurred to them that I couldn’t read. It never occurred to them that I had a learning problem caused by restriction of blood flow to my brain at birth–I was born breech. I can think as well as anyone, but I do it slower and my capacity to learn at any one time is more limited than most.
I have a very mild form of cerebral palsy, undiagnosed until recently, as a result of that birth problem. When I went to school, every kid was either good, a trouble maker or lazy. My teachers had little trouble placing me in that third category. In reality, life in schools is little better for kids with problems today. “Special needs” is a category for kids with severe and fairly easily recognized problems.
I passed through high school without ever reading a book all the way through. I received a certificate after a three year course at college without ever having read a book all the way through. I passed through teachers college without having read a book all the way through.
I went to York University, in Toronto, and received my B.A. without ever reading a book all the way through. I received a Master of Education degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto, without ever having read a book all the way through.
That’s survival. That shows how a person can learn to cope with challenges and problems if they learn how in time.
I also taught elementary school for 17 years, around the same period I was taking university courses. A few times the children I taught were reading books for reading assignments that I had not read myself. I was functionally illiterate. I didn’t know that because no one had told me.
In fact, I was functionally illiterate until after I left teaching and had started my own business with my wife.
Although I had written long papers in my university and post graduate courses, most of what I wrote had come straight out of my head, not from books. I discovered how to snatch quotes from relevant texts without actually reading those books. I only started to learn how to write something that people other than professors would find interesting in the late 1990s.
In 2005, my book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems was published. A social problem is any problem that is experienced by enough people in a community that it becomes a community problem. Like drugs, violence, addictions and so on.
I found solutions to problems most people believe are unsolvable, consequences of the way life is in the 21st Century. How? Because I wasn’t tied to what others had written in books. Books by so-called experts who told how tragic social problems are but offered nothing in the way of solutions.
The solutions begin at home. They begin when each child is born. They begin when a child is taught what he or she needs to know, when they need to know it.
That begins when young adults know about children and how they develop. It begins when adolescents and young adults learn the skills of parenting.
That’s the message I want to take to the world.
Here’s one comment written a few days ago by a member of one of my internet groups, directed to me:
“During all these years as, member of the group had the I privilege evidence that you are extremely cultured and have an excellent text.
With you I learned an enormity of things. And reading your mensages I know sail that for all the areas of the knowledge.”
That was written by a friend in Brazil, one I know as Maita. “Maita” in Portuguese, means “little mother.”
Maita’s real name is Maria Alice Baptista de Oliveira. That’s Dr. Oliveira, a pediatrician with decades of experience at bringing babies into the world and teaching mothers how to look after them.
Maita is one of many people, some of whom are medical doctors, some professors, people in every field of life including factory workers, who live on six continents, who believe that there is a better way to raise children than most of us have been using over the past few thousands of generations.
It’s a complex world we live in. A complex world creates complex problems. Those complex problems require solutions so complex they are unmanageable.
The only way to change anything is to prevent the problems from arising in the first place.
That’s what Turning It Around is all about.
Until recently I have been experiencing stress–not at a controllable level but at a primal level beyond the control of my conscious brain–stress that has taken me to the edge of sanity and suicide. I have stepped back from that edge. I survived. Again.
Stress can be the cause of many physical diseases and organ failures. But it’s also an effect. Stress results when a person lacks the emotional resources to cope with problems in their life. Knowledge about stress and the coping skills needed to avoid it are teachable. Teaching them is easy, cheap and would not meet any resistance because it helps whole communities.
I want to teach people the skills they need to cope with problems that seem insurmountable, that seem beyond their control. That begins with teaching children, right after they are born.
That’s who I am. That’s what I do. If you want to help spread the word, you are welcome to join us. It doesn’t cost anything. All you have to do is talk to people. It’s that easy. But nothing will change until we get enough people talking to each other about this.
Lots of people are talking about this, but it’s a big world with lots of problems.
As adults we don’t necessarily always learn from our experience. Some of us make the same mistakes over and over, causing ourselves and others around us a great deal of grief. However, life lessons we learned as children usually stay with us and shape our lives.
Teaching children what they need to know about life and coping with it are as important as learning to read and do arithmetic. We need to teach the children. They want to learn. They want to know about life.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what children need and when they need it, rather than what adults believe children should be forced to learn.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
. They are oval and usually yellow to white. Nits take about 1 week to hatch.
and resembles a miniature crab when viewed through a strong magnifying glass. Pubic lice have six legs, but their two front legs are very large and look like the pincher claws of a crab; this how they got the nickname “crabs.” Pubic lice are tan to greyish-white in color. Females lay nits; they are usually larger than males. To live, adult lice need to feed on blood. If the louse falls off a person, it dies within 1-2 days.