As we speak, a debate on S.2260, the Senate’s health care cost bill, is underway. You can watch it live here.
But get comfortable: staffers report there are 265 filed amendments to consider.
Lawmakers weigh in on the Senate health care cost bill
Update at 4:53: The Senate voted 15-22 rejecting amendment #125 that sought to trigger a single-payer health care system.
Upgrading the vibrator for the iPad set
A very long and very excellent piece in The Atlantic (thanks for passing it along, J.) profiles San Francisco industrial designer Ethan Imboden, whose company, Jimmyjane, embraces an ambitious vision: to redesign the vibrator with such aesthetic and engineering prowess that it actually improves peoples lives. Mostly their sex lives, of course, but their overall lives as well.
To do that, it seems, Imboden wants to up the cool factor for vibrators (they’re elegant, silent and waterproof, according to the marketing) much as Starbucks and Apple have for coffee and phones.
Here are a few snippets of Andy Isaacson’s piece “Can A Better Vibrator Inspire An Age Of Great American Sex:”
Jimmyjane’s conceit is to presuppose a world in which there is no hesitation around sex toys. Placing its products on familiar cultural ground has a normalizing effect, Imboden believes, and comparing a vibrator to a lifestyle accessory someone might pack into their carry-on luggage next to an iPad shifts people’s perceptions about where these objects fit into their lives. Jimmyjane products have been sold in places like C.O. Bigelow, the New York apothecary, Sephora, W Hotels, and even Drugstore.com. Insinuating beautifully designed and thoughtfully engineered sex toys into the mainstream consumer landscape could push Americans into more comfortable territory around sex in general. Jimmyjane hopes to achieve this without treading too firmly on mainstream sensibilities. “Not everyone sits in a conference room and talks about vibrators, dildos, anal sex, clitorises — and we do,” Continue reading
I saw this flyer recently on my gym’s bulletin board. The loneliness and loss of identity it describes are surely shared by a great many people who have to leave sports, famous or not, but what comes to mind is the suicide of Junior Seau, the 43-year-old former NFL player who shot himself in the chest last week.
Much of the coverage has focused on the possibility that Seau, like many other football players, suffered concussions that wrought permanent damage to his brain. But what struck me most were the descriptions of him as a player — upbeat, intense, loving the game — and then his life after retiring: He drove his car off a cliff in 2010. His girlfriend told police he assaulted her.
Junior Seau smiles during 2007 football training camp in Foxborough, Mass. (AP)
“I’m sorry to say, Superman is dead,” said San Diego Chargers chaplain Shawn Mitchell after Seau’s suicide, according to The Associated Press. “All of us can appear to be super, but all of us need to reach out and find support when we’re hurting.”
Finding support is the idea behind the therapy group that Dr. Matthew Krouner, the Brookline post-doctoral fellow in clinical psychology who posted that notice above, is aiming to put together.
It would not be only for elite athletes, he said. “This group could be for anybody who has at one time identified themselves as an athlete. It could be high school, it could be they like to run marathons, it could be they play pick-up basketball once a week. But once you’re not able to do that anymore, even if it’s not a professional identity, there’s a real sense of loss and a grieving that can take place. For elite athletes, the transition out of sport is conceptualized as a loss or grief experience.”
Dr. Krouner never had a stellar sports career himself, he says, but always played, and had long been fascinated by stories of pro athletes whose lives deteriorated after they retired from sports at young ages, when many people are just starting their careers. They had to face the monumental challenge of losing an “all-encompassing identity — it’s how you relate to other people, it’s how you use your body, it’s your mental stimulation.”
Athletes have become more open in recent years about mental health issues, reducing the stigma. So “it seems like a good time for more supports to be out there,” Dr. Krouner said. “There tends to be a sort of expected toughness factor among athletes and that may make them less likely to seek out mental health resources, but hopefully by putting more and more out there, it can appeal to the need that is present.”
That need is very real, said Justine Siegal, director of sports partnerships at Northeastern University’s Sport in Society program and a doctoral candidate in sports psychology there.
Plan the exit well in advance
It is estimated that about 20 percent of athletes need “considerable psychological adjustment” after they leave the sport, she said. Continue reading
Dr. Adam Wolfberg, a specialist in high-risk obstetrics, knows more than most about the highly technical world of maternal-fetal medicine and the extreme interventions often required to save infants born prematurely. About half a million babies — 1 in every 8 — are born pre-term in the U.S. and much of Wolfberg’s work focuses on how to prevent and manage such births.
Lately, though, he’s been thinking about a particularly low-tech, centuries-old device that is getting new attention as a method to prevent premature delivery: the pessary, described by researchers as “a tiny inverted cereal bowl with a hole cut in the center” more typically used hold up sagging pelvic organs. Writing in the Huffington Post, Wolfberg details the latest, promising research:
In this excellent study, published in the prestigious British journal The Lancet, obstetricians at five Spanish hospitals randomized 385 women with a short cervix to use of pessary or nothing. Pessaries are centuries-old devices that women place in their vagina to support their uterus and pelvic organs and prevent symptoms of pressure when these organs “fall” (prolapse) typically later in life. A handful of small studies using pessaries to prevent preterm delivery (the idea is that the pessary supports the cervix or lower uterus) have been published over the past 50 years, but none has had the size or scientific rigor to convince the obstetric community.
The cervical pessary (The Lancet)
In their study, the Spanish group used the Dr. Arabin pessary, named after the German scientist who developed it… The Dr. Arabin pessary is approved for sale in Europe but not in the U.S…”
Time on attachment parenting: Has it gone too far?
Time magazine this week asks some important questions about attachment parentingand whether its practitioners’ relentless concerns with long-term breast feeding, co-sleeping and “wearing” their babies for constant comfort is rational or insane.
But more than the stories, it’s the cover photo that will grab your attention whether you’ve got your kid in a sling 24/7 or not.
It shows Jamie Lynne Grumet of Los Angeles, baring her breast for her three-year-old son (who seems like a particularly large child) to suck on. There are more pictures inside. These are startling images, even for someone like me, who nursed my kids past the two-year mark.
Readers, please weigh in here. Do you find these arty photos of moms breastfeeding their three-year-olds discomfiting or empowering?
Slate’s Hanna Rosin finds the whole concept alarming, as she writes here:
Attachment parenting demands not just certain actions you take with your baby but also certain emotional states to accompany those actions. So, it’s not just enough to breast-feed but one has to experience “breast-feeding induced maternal nirvana.” Continue reading
Two little boys in my extended family have Cystic Fibrosis, the debilitating, life-shortening lung disease, so every time there’s news on potential new drugs or treatments, we get a flurry of hopeful email.
This week, Vertex Phamaceuticals, the Cambridge-based biotech, announced “promising results from a Phase 2 clinical trial of its cystic fibrosis drug Kalydeco™ and VX-809, a CF drug in development. The results showed a significant improvement in lung function in people with two copies of the most common CF mutation who received the two drugs in combination.”
My relatives, a pair of 11-year-old boys, both have two copies of this mutation, the Delta 508 gene. Needless to say, their mother is psyched.
In a letter to supporters, Robert Beall, president and CEO of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation explains the details and calls the findings “a significant step.” Continue reading
Note to self: Do not store shopping bags in bathrooms.
Note to green activists: You may be facing a bit of an image problem for those environmentally virtuous cloth shopping bags. Though I suppose this could have happened with a plastic bag, too.
Now to the story: NPR and the Los Angeles Times report today that a contaminated shopping bag left in a hotel bathroom caused the spread of norovirus — the highly contagious stomach bug — among a girls’ soccer team this fall. They cite an article by Oregon researchers in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. From the LA Times:
The investigation showed that the virus was found on a reusable grocery bag that had been used to store snacks for the team. It had, unfortunately, been stored in the bathroom. When the sick girl used the bathroom, the norovirus was aerosolized and deposited on the bag, where it was later transferred to other girls when they got snacks.
“While we certainly recommend not storing food in bathrooms,” Repp and Keene wrote, “it is more important to recommend that areas where aerosol exposures may have occurred should be thoroughly disinfected; this includes not only exposed surfaces, but objects in the environment” such as grocery bags.
The paper’s authors also suggest: “When feasible, we recommend dedicated bathrooms for sick persons and informing cleaning staff (professional or otherwise) about the need for adequate environmental sanitation of surfaces and fomites to prevent spread.”
For more advice on preventing norovirus: How to outsmart the stealthy stomach bug.
(quaziefoto/flickr)
A new study by the RAND Corporation bears this out. It concludes that when consumers have the kind of health insurance that requires more out-of pocket payments, they do, indeed, become more mindful of their care. And this more conscious approach to picking and choosing medicines, tests, specialists and treatment could save billions annually, the report, published in the May edition of the journal Health Affairs notes. But these so-called “consumer-directed” health plans, notably high-deductible plans and personal health accounts, do have risks because people may forego important prevention and treatment measures in order to cut costs.
“The study found that among families enrolled in consumer-directed health plans, about two-thirds of the savings were the result of fewer encounters with health care providers. The remaining third was caused by lower spending per encounter, suggesting patients were making different choices about tests and treatments. Families in consumer-directed plans used fewer brand-name drugs, had fewer visits to specialists and had fewer elective hospital admissions than families in traditional plans,” the news release says. Continue reading
Nancy Rappaport, a psychiatrist, writes about her' mother's suicide
By Nancy Rappaport, M.D.
Some 34,000 people die by suicide every year in the United States, which means that every 15 minutes, there is another devastated family faced with the challenge of how to make sense of a tragic loss.
While there is so much that we have come to understand about suicide and how to protect people from self-destructive impulses, last week’s sad news about the suicide of Junior Seau reinforces the complexity of every suicide death and illustrates the heartbreak and trauma that results. Initial news coverage suggested that Seau’s final act may have been influenced by the ravages of playing in the NFL for so many years. The problem goes deeper than that; in most cases, there are multiple causes that drive a young man like Seau to shoot himself tragically in the chest.
I write this as a mother of three healthy children who can understand the unbearable anguish at the thought of something harming one of them. I lost my mother to suicide when I was just four years old. I can imagine the sorrow and the bewilderment of Seau’s three children, because I felt it myself so many years ago. I am also a child psychiatrist who knows that mental illness is the underlying cause of the majority of suicides.
I have devoted my professional life to preventing this devastating outcome, so that families will not wrestle with the exhausting, haunting impenetrable question of why. My hope is that those who are suffering with suicidal thoughts or mental illness don’t worry alone. Call someone.
The early recognition and treatment of depression and other psychiatric illness is one of the best ways to prevent suicide. If someone can get the appropriate treatment –including psychotherapy, medication, or a combination of both — and stay with it, the prognosis is actually quite good; over eighty percent of people feel better with combined treatment. Continue reading
I would follow Dr. Damian Folch to hell and back, and that may be just what I’m about to do.
I met Dr. Folch, a 58-year-old Chelmsford primary care doctor, last year when I was reporting on a growing movement called Lifestyle Medicine. It helps doctors actively tackle their patients’ unhealthy habits, in part by sharing their own fitness experiences. Dr. Folch was walking the walk, literally, on an office treadmill, and with his low-key but warmly enthusiastic coaching, I’m sure he could inspire even a lifelong laggard to get moving. Or a middling-fit person like me to push much harder.
Dr. Folch ran his first half-marathon this fall. When I checked in with him last month, he said his latest fitness exploration was “Insanity,” a super-intense DVD workout that requires no equipment. I’d repeatedly run across used Insanity DVDs for sale on Craigslist, and figured it was some sort of scam, one of those Bowflex-style deals that make irresistible promises that you’ll get impossibly ripped.
Not at all, Dr. Folch said. Not in his experience.
But before I get to his persuasive account of Insanity, let me remind you: CommonHealth has just launched its new spring fitness initiative, under the title “Shake It Up,” and to join is exceedingly simple: Just post in the comments below your plan to try something — anything — new in the realm of exercise. Yes, you need to stick with what works for you. But healthy fitness is a lifelong journey, and research suggests that it’s best to vary our workouts. Rachel has already begun by trying trampoline aerobics, and I’m about to descend into Insanity. So what’s your plan?
Back to Dr. Folch. I interrogated him about his Insanity experience. Its concept of long intervals of exertion interspersed with short rests sounded efficient if exhausting. But wasn’t it leaving masses of injured or discouraged people? He replied:
I decided to try Insanity after I saw a program with Dr. Oz. Up to that point I thought it was too dangerous and for a younger crowd. Shawn T. presented a 15-minute workout where Dr. Oz participated and I decided to do it. It was challenging but both Dr. Oz and myself were able to finish. I was sore for a few days. This was a program designed to be done daily for 15 mins. I did that for 3 or 4 days and decided to go for the real thing. Today is the end of my second week. These are my initial impressions.
1. The program is hard but not as hard or crazy as I thought – I ran 3 miles after one of the workouts and another time I wanted to move the rest day one more day, so I did weights an extra day. Continue reading
