Health News

Googling Symptoms Helps Patients and Doctors. Medicine has to accept that patients Google and that doesn't make all patients cyberchondriacs either.

Oddly, I actually went on the quest for an answer prior to the internet's heyday. I had to take premed classes (earning straight As, thank you).

And walk 12 miles in the bitter cold with no shoes to do it. Old school, people. Hard a$$.

Here's the contrarian view of a whiny a$$ doctor: When the Patient is a Googler. Frankly, this guy can Suck It. My diagnostic accuracy has routinely been higher than that of medically trained personnel. So why would I think I don't know anything? Because experience proves me right time and time again and the doctors are always behind the eight ball.

Medicine is fallible. It fails patients miserably ALL THE TIME. Forget Google, what we need to be talking about if we want things to get better is how and why medicine fails patients.

Patients may be annoying (so are the doctors, FYI people in general are annoying) but they aren't anyone's enemy.

Gabrielle Giffords has great insurance and access to health care. What about the rest of the people in her home state? I did a cursory search to see if any media outlet has bothered to look at health care access, insurance and costs of the shooting as a socioeconomic exercise. This has not been part of the public discourse at all, which is unfortunate considering all the hoopla over health care reform.

Did everyone who got shot that day get care and access the same as Giffords? I would like to know.

The newlywed couple I blogged about earlier, they are from Arizona. Fighting to get health care while Giffords flies to Texas for state-of-the-art care simply because of who she is and how much money she makes.

It's pretty clear our care is rationed by class and that good, innocent people are suffering.

Listen up? You want good medical coverage? Get elected to Congress. Better yet, become President. Otherwise forget it because health care reform isn't even close to bridging the gap.

All but one of published studies on statins flawed. No good news on statins this week. The drug companies aren't looking at all for adverse side effects. Don't know, don't care. Looks like science is, rightfully so, calling Big Pharma on it.

Here's the original Cochrane Review abstract that blew the whistle. However, it's kind of devoid of meaningful data. The info I'm seeing in mainstream media is not reflected, which is annoying because the news bytes don't jive with the data from which they are derived. It's all 'statins are evil and useless' in the media and that's not really what the abstract says. Hopefully, a more authoritative article will come out and connect the dots.

Okay, so now for the most interesting news of this post: How I outsmarted my toddler.

She was recently determined to stay up all night.

In fact she was so riled up that we let her get up and hang out with us while we watched the last of Easy A (cute cute movie). The plot went waaaaaay over her head, but I just told her when she was in trouble to come talk to her momma. I hope she remembers that.

So the movie ended and I tucked her into bed (for the umpteenth time) around 11:30pm.

"Mommy, I'm going to stay up alllllllllll night."

"Oh. Great idea. Do you know how you do that?"

"How?"

"You lay really quiet and still in your bed. If you don't, you won't be able to stay up all night, okay?"

"Okay."

And that's what she did, right up until she fell asleep.

Don't mess with momma.

I almost started singing "Stay awake, don't go to sleep." Ha.