This Just In!

This isn't necessarily "news," but it's newsworthy. Well it's certainly noteworthy -

"Increased oxygen consumption associated with moderate- to high-intensity exercise appears to reduce the risk of cancer, a new study has found.

"The Finnish study included 2,560 men, aged 42 to 61, whose leisure-time physical activity was assessed over one year. None of the men had a history of cancer, according to the report published online July 28 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine."

That's most of the article, but it's from MSN Health & Fitness.

Healthcare Debate

The people who are attempting to upend our nation's healthcare system think this way -

"Health care does more than save lives: it also reduces pain and suffering. How can we compare saving a person’s life with, say, making it possible for someone who was confined to bed to return to an active life? We can elicit people’s values on that too. One common method is to describe medical conditions to people — let’s say being a quadriplegic — and tell them that they can choose between 10 years in that condition or some smaller number of years without it. If most would prefer, say, 10 years as a quadriplegic to 4 years of nondisabled life, but would choose 6 years of nondisabled life over 10 with quadriplegia, but have difficulty deciding between 5 years of nondisabled life or 10 years with quadriplegia, then they are, in effect, assessing life with quadriplegia as half as good as nondisabled life. (These are hypothetical figures, chosen to keep the math simple, and not based on any actual surveys.) If that judgment represents a rough average across the population, we might conclude that restoring to nondisabled life two people who would otherwise be quadriplegics is equivalent in value to saving the life of one person, provided the life expectancies of all involved are similar."

Those are the words of Princeton "bioethics" professor Peter Singer in his recent "Why We Must Ration Health Care" piece in the New York Times.

President Obama comes from a similar school of thought -



I don't mean to say that these are easy decisions, but I certainly don't want bureaucrats making them.

Is Obama's Surgeon General Pick Too Heavy?

Fascinating -

Critics Slam Overweight Surgeon General Pick, Regina Benjamin

"'I think it is an issue, but then the president is said to still smoke cigarettes,' said Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine who is now a senior lecturer at Harvard University Medical School. 'It tends to undermine her credibility.'"

A Word to the Wise

College Health Plans Don't Always Cover Student Athletes

"Many student athletes have medical insurance through their parents, but often these plans exclude coverage of injuries sustained during participation in varsity sports and injuries that require out-of-state treatment. Some colleges purchase secondary policies to fill the gaps left by students' family plans, but even these plans have disclaimers that could leave students uncovered in some situations."

Blood Clot Crying

I don't think any of my readers are Jamaican. That's not the point, though. Harvard researchers have concluded that travel, during which a person is seated for 2 hours at a time or more, at least doubles the risk of blood clot. The article was on Drudge Report, so you've probably read it already, but it seems important enough to get the story out to as many as possible.

From Reuters -

"Women who are pregnant or take birth control pills and the obese have an especially high risk, they found."

It's still only 1 in every 4,600 trips, but as the researchers point out, there are 2.5 billion passengers that will fly in 2010. So, every 2 hours, you should stop the car or get up from your seat on the plane and stretch your legs.