Category: Health Care

Welcome to the Health and Fitness weekly diary which is cross-posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette. It is open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

By sweet potatoes, I mean the orange-fleshed tubers with brownish skin that growers and supermarkets often mislabel as “yams.” The two varieties at my local farmers’ market are jewel yams and the darker-skinned garnet yams, both sweet and moist.

   In fact, actual yams have starchier, light yellow flesh and a rough, brown skin; they are native to Africa and Asia, and an important staple in the Caribbean and in parts of Africa. But they don’t have the impressive nutritional profile of real sweet potatoes.

The question of budget deficits and the health of government programs has been the largest can frequently kicked down the road.  Though it’s become repetitive to warn or caution in this fashion, we need to make the appropriate steps and institute the proper reforms now.  This issue is not going to go away.  It is perhaps the least politically popular and most divisive.  As we have seen with Health Care Reform, it may even inspire a backlash that shows the door to many courageous legislators who dared to paddle upstream against a strong headwind.  There are some issues which can be dodged without much harm being done, but then there are others which must be confronted.  Some politicians could write whole books (and teach others) about their genius system of embracing political expediency, but what we need now is not an escape artist or a magician.  We need leaders.  

copyright © 2011 Betsy L. Angert.  Empathy And Education; BeThink or  BeThink.org

Once again, Americans are up in arms or perchance, better armed and dangerous.  Only little more than a week into 2011, citizens have had to confront their fears, feelings, all at gunpoint.  It began on a calm, clear Saturday.  In a Safeway Store Tucson parking lot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords held one of her customary Congress on the Corner events.  It was January 8, 2011.  Friends and admirers from each political Party turned out.  Suddenly, cordial chatter turned icy cold. gunshots shattered the calm.  People were slaughtered.  Some survived.   However, as a nation, we were all wounded.

Retorts followed.  Seemingly, a culture was changed, or was it?  Just as has occurred, many times in the recent past, people quickly took sides.  Blame was ballied about.  Solutions were also presented.  Some argued for stricter gun control laws.  Others used the occasion to validate a need for less restrictive restraints on gun ownership.  Persons who held a position similar to the most prominent victim proposed a need to protect themselves.

Part of this will be personal, for those who may be interested in that, and part of this will concern some medical news in the transgender arena in general.

First up, my surgery, which was postponed on December 27 due to blizzard, was rescheduled for January 3, and apparently had no complications, since I was allowed to come home yesterday…although I am still on a clear liquid diet and am very hungry.  I have an appointment with the surgeon on Tuesday and will learn more about how things went…as well as possibly upgrading what I can eat.

Possible complications involved not having enough esophagus free to move my stomach back from my thorax into my abdomen, possible infection, and the possibility of developing pneumonia since my stomach has been sharing space with my left lung for over a year.  But I have a breathing “toy” to play with in order to expand my breathing capacity and I seem to be doing okay in that regard.

On NCOD, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force released the National Transgender Discrimination Survey:  Report on health and health care (warning = pdf:  I read the pdfs so you don’t have to).  Being as how it was during the week and that week was midterm exam time, I just got around to reading it.  I know others have reported on the findings, such as David Mixner, but I would like to share what it looks like through my eyes.

I’m a doctor, but not a medical doctor, but I thought I recalled some words from somewhere:

First, do no harm

In response to my prior piece about Medicare and doctors, I received an e-mail from a physician.  I will summarize her response below.

Something not particularly well known about Social Security Disability is that after two years, a disabled person, regardless of age, is eligible for Medicare.  An eligible person isn’t just given the option, he or she is automatically moved to the program unless he or she specifically declines it.  Until that point, a disabled person usually has to make do with Medicaid and all of its maddening restrictions and budget shortfalls.  One would think that the ability to transition to a better program for health insurance would be reason for celebration.  In some ways, it is, but in unexpected ways, it has not proven to be been appreciably better.

Link

GOP’s ‘Pledge To America’ Replaces Affordable Care Act With Provisions From Affordable Care Act

By Igor Volsky, ThinkProgress.org — Sept 22, 2010

Ironically, today Republicans are also unveiling a new “Pledge To America,” an agenda that promises to “repeal” all of these benefits — as well as the entire health care law — and replace it with “reforms that lower costs for families and small businesses, increase access to affordable, high-quality care and strengthen the doctor-patient relationship.”

The document provides almost no specifics about what the [GOP] party would do to control health care spending, improve quality, or pay for its reforms.

And at least 7 of the GOP’s ideas on health care are already included in the health care law:

Insurance Across State Lines

High-Risk Insurance Pools

Pre-Existing Conditions

Lifetime and Annual Caps

Recissions

State Innovation

Conscience Protections

WTF!  What Kind of Pledge is that?

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

Dearest Doctor, I have come to my senses.  Days ago, when you offered your diagnosis, I died.  No, not literally.  Had you done me in, I would not be here to write what I hope will help inform your bedside manner.  Well, in my case only the way in which you approach a patient who merely sits in an examining room chair near you is the concern.  You may recall our time together began so innocently. We sat down to review the results of annually scheduled blood-work.  I had not felt sick all year or on that day.  You had even expressed, it had been so long since we last saw each other.  You scanned the pages, and proclaimed, that I must have returned to my bulimic ways. My spirit perished.  I had done nothing of the sort!  Yet, you said you were sure I had.

Sometimes stories happen because of planning; other times serendipity intervenes, which is how we got to the conversation we’ll be having today.

In an exchange of comments on the Blue Hampshire site, I proposed an idea that could be of real value to unions, workers…and surprisingly, employers.

If things worked out correctly, not only would lots of people feel a real desire to have unions represent them, but employers would potentially be coming to unions looking to forge relationships, and, just to make it better, this plan bypasses virtually all of the tools and techniques employers use to shut out union organizers.

Since I just thought this up myself, I’m really not sure exactly how practical the whole thing is, and the last part of the discussion today will be provided by you, as I ask you to sound off on whether this plan could work, and if so, how it could be made better.

It’s a new week…so let’s all put our heads together and rebuild the labor movement, shall we?

There are two very important, and full of real facts, op-ed’s in the San Francisco Gate this Sunday morning that should be read and absorbed.

We hear very little, actually almost nothing, about the present costs, nor long term costs, of our long occupations of choice. Especially by those that held the power and readily rubber stamped what their same political party administration wanted. Nor did they feel much need in holding congressional hearings, investigations nor much oversite, not much heard when reports of billions just went poof nor when private contractors on their no bid contracts kept wasting money on shoddy work and much more, while they held the power. They weren’t the only ones, even their supporters and talking heads readily supported everything they did and didn’t do.

Of/By/4 in 18 minutes By Lawrence Lessig

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

Dearest Mommy and my natural father . . .

I apologize.  My belly, my bloated body, only belatedly do I understand.  It never was in the genes.  The abundant meat that weighed heavily on my bones was not caused by my chromosomal structure; it was piled on by Congressional and corporately funded campaigns.  Mommy and the husband who helped make me, much to my embarrassment, today I acknowledge my error. I was spoon-fed, and not by the two of you.  Legislators, Lobbyists, and big businesses that place misleading labels on chemically cooked up cuisines put corn fillers on my every plate. I chowed down.  My little body bulged out.  From the inside out, I grew bigger and wider.