January 2012
December 2011
The Slippery Slide
The slippery slope of finding and preserving health care stories has found its way into Sporkworld again.
Look below. What was a telling tale of rationing medical treatment even to a 4 month-old baby with a rare heart defect — that link has now broken.
That is not all. Spork Major (aka Millie Niss) wrote of the hazards embedded in the push for electronic medical records in January 2009.
...
WatchThis is what we need to be talking about. This feature was promo’d on Anderson Cooper 360 yesterday on CNN. But it never played.
It’s an important story, one of many medical disasters which generally go unnoticed — until the obituary appears.
Let’s hope this has a different outcome.
“Carlos the Jackal convicted for 1980s French attacks”
– http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16210927
[Carlos the Jackal] claimed to be the grenade thrower at a Parisian restaurant in an attack that killed two and injured 30.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_the_Jackal Accessed December 15, 2011 11:09 AM
It is not often one can say,...
“When people have access to user-friendly,actionable information they are...”
– http://www.americashealthrankings.org/SiteFiles/Reports/AHR%202011Edition.pdf, p. 10
Let us suppose that you have the ill luck to need...
I do not need surgery. This is hypothetical.
You don’t want to get the down and dirty tales of your local hospital. You don’t want the horror stories from the neighbor over the back fence.
You want an authoritative snapshot of your hospital’s functioning so you can be prepared to deal with any problem areas.
You want to be a compliant, but well-prepared patient.
So this is...
In the process, I learned more than I needed to...
Knowing Too Much You know how it is when you have a car that no one seems to know how to fix except Wrong. Pretty soon, you can almost do it yourself but you don’t have the tools or the strength so you drive the smitten vehicle the bedbug of your existence into the repair place which resembles nothing less than a Roach Motel – and when the Customer Service Representative approaches you leap out of...
November 2011
Fake News
I like my news real even when I don’t like the news.
Consequently, I really like the daily Schwartz Report put out by Stephan Schwartz.
Today, he featured a quote from a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to a guy named Elkins. The quote features a prediction of doom that precisely matches the conditions we face today of yielding direction of US society to corporate interests.
Great quote I...
Andy Rooney Responds to "Serious Complications"
Pat Mastors got this one exactly right.
More power to her.
“I think that the culture of “Reputational Immunity” is very very...”
– Kerry O’Connell, a patient safety advocate associated with Consumer Union’s Safe Patient Project. (Used with permission)
I particularly appreciate Kerry’s concise formulation of the problem of secrecy in health care today and his understanding that secrecy brings further harm to...
An Uphill Battle on the Home-Front
(Any resemblance between the subjects of this poem and any lying-around living or dead, whether related to me or a part of the masses, is purely in your imagination.)
The Second Rant in 24 Hours
I wrote a review. Can I read it to you? And the book. Do you want to read it?
How many pages does it have?
Eff! 237 No cartoons, though for the likes of you. Pages?
Well, I don’t have a lot of time, you...
“When a patient goes into a hospital, they are entitled to expect that they will...”
– Dr. James I. Cleeman, senior medical officer at the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
http://www.latimes.com/la-me-harbor-ucla-20111030,0,1578231.story#.TrAmeBfcdXU
Spork Major entered the hospital two years ago today. She had Swine Flu, and she recovered from the flu, but died...
October 2011
