Health Center Blog

Josh The Pilot and I cashed in free time share tickets at Busch Gardens yesterday, which is subdivided into the nations of Europe, and yet still charges people five American dollars per beer. Which I desperately needed once we walked through Ireland. Since when you think Ireland, you think American bald eagles, there were several of them in a little habitat about seventeen paces from the Riverdance Ripoff Theater. They sat on logs and in tufts of grass, looking various degrees of pissed. “Wh

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In Bethesda, a 15-year-old girl talks to her television set. Often, she seems more connected to the tube’s ghostly embrace than to her own father, mother, brothers and sister. She flushes household items down the toilet. She has no friends outside her family. Rachel does not understand why other …

Food costs a lot these days, so bargains catch the eye more than ever. And when the bargain is for a tempting, icy liquid concoction on a hot, steamy day, it can be hard to resist.

· American Hospice Foundation, Washington. Nonprofit consumer advocacy organization provides information for consumers and educates health care providers and human resources professionals about hospice and grief. http://www.americanhospice.org, 202-223-0204. · Capital Hospice, Falls Church. O...

This week we will discuss whether there are things you can do to spend more time sitting on your ashcan. That is not the word the late George Carlin would have used. But even in the Health section, where unmentionable things are often displayed in detail, there are rules.

A diabetic with a history of thyroid cancer who is also struggling with a neurological disorder and gastric reflux disease, Patricia Hewitt is well aware that she's not a prime candidate for health-care coverage.

Twenty-five years after Medicare began paying for hospice care, the federal health program has issued a new rule calling hospice providers to closer account on the quality of care they offer. The rule, which will take effect in December, guarantees hospice patients a say in their treatment plans …

I just learned about the Promise to Mothers Lost campaign of The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood from Madeline Bunting’s, “Pregnancy Should Be a Cause for Cheer, Not a Reason to Fear for Your Life” published in the June 30, 2008 issue of the The Guardian.  The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood was formed to increase public awareness for the need to make pregnancy and childbirth safe for all women around the world, because very minute around the world:

• 380 women become pregnant
• 190 women face unplanned or unwanted pregnancies
• 110 women experience pregnancy-related complications
• 40 women have unsafe abortions
• 1 woman dies

To illustrate the disparity in health access think about these statistics. In sub-Sharan Africa 1 in every 16 women dies in childbirth compared with 1 in every 8,200 women in the UK. According to Bunting,

Maternal mortality is the most dramatic health inequality on the planet - more stark even than child mortality. There is plenty of evidence for how, with the right combination of political will and policy, the maternal mortality rate can be dramatically reduced. Thailand cut it by 75% in 18 years; the Matlab region of Bangladesh cut it by two-thirds in 21 years. Yet in 20 years, the rate in sub-Saharan Africa has barely budged. The lamentable lack of progress on millennium development goal [MDG] five - a 75% cut in the maternal mortality rate by 2015, to which 186 countries have committed themselves - has become an acute embarrassment to the world. It is the incontrovertible evidence of how little women’s lives are valued or their voices heard in many parts of the world….

The goal of the Promise to Mothers Lost campaign is to amplify the voices of grass roots movements and presure the powers that be (e.g., wealthy governments, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund) to invest the money needed to provide access to a healthy pregnancy and safe childbirth for all. Bunting explains,   

Its aim is to drum up commitments of $10bn a year in aid for health systems, rising to $20bn a year by 2015 and an extra 4 million healthcare workers. This is the scale of what is needed if the UN summit on the millennium development goals at the end of September is not to look a farce.

Maternal mortality is the MDG that has fallen furthest adrift of its target. It is the scandal of the MDG that either gets forgotten or provokes too much controversy to mobilise the effort required. First, the forgetting: maternal mortality is easy to ignore in many developing countries. The highest rates are among the poorest women in remote rural areas, and they are not the kind to storm barricades and demand their rights….

But the forgetting is also here in the developed west. I took for granted the services on which my life depended through four pregnancies. We forget that millions of women have no such luck. What the campaign on maternal mortality wants to do is mobilise mothers here to campaign on the part of mothers everywhere. Ann Pettifor, the veteran campaigner who got debt on to the mainstream agenda through Jubilee 2000, wants women to play the role that the HIV/Aids activists in the US played in getting massive US funding into treating HIV/Aids in Africa. Can women find some degree of internationalist solidarity with other women on this issue?

I hope that both women and men can pull together and work on resolving this life-or-death issue. 

Eh. Why is this so hard? Why do I have no self control when it comes to eating healthy and exercise? I am not an idiot. I know that if you eat crap you will be fat and sick. I understand that if you never get up off of your ass you will be tired and stiff. I still choose ice cream over veggies. I still pick a nap instead of a walk. I want to win a Zune! But I won’t. Because I make unhealthy choices. I thought, “Hey, Hey You, if you publish your intentions on the internet, then you will have a