>> L.A. got a new medical marijuana shop law. “The ordinance caps the number of dispensaries at 70 and creates a buffer zone around schools and places of worship.” It’ll be at least 45 days before the new rules will start being enforced.
>> Can a heroin maintenance program work for addicts? Vancouver’s experiment sounds promising: “88 percent of the heroin maintenance group stayed on their course of treatment, versus 54 percent in the methadone group.” Why this news should be interesting to non heroin addicts: “An untreated heroin addict costs the state $45,000 a year in legal and medical bills; heroin maintenance costs $7,000.”
Questions remain, though, about whether other programs might be safer or more effective, or whether this program is flawed because it doesn’t actually get addicts unaddicted.
>> In case you forgot, John Mackey wrote an anti health care reform editorial in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that health care — and even food and shelter — are commodities people shouldn’t feel they have a right to.
>> Despite John Mackey’s views on health care and seeming skepticism that global climate change is indeed happening, the guy’s resignation isn’t exactly cause for rejoicing, Tom Philpott points out at Grist:
The investors now taking control of Whole Foods are likely more interested in the money than in the good. When profits falter, the “power of conscious capitalism” (the subtitle of Mackey’s book) succumbs to the power of unfettered capitalism. If I were a Whole Foods “team member,” I’d be seriously considering starting a union to protect wages and benefits. And as a backup plan, I’d be agitating for universal health care.
>> Did you know John Mackey’s tried “a therapeutic session of holotropic breathing” and followed the very veg Engine 2 Diet? A long profile on the guy in The New Yorker tells you more about the guy than you probably ever wanted to know: “The right-wing hippie is a rare bird, and it’s fair to say that most of Whole Foods’ shoppers have trouble conceiving of it.”
While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter? Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges.
>> That got some people to launch a boycott against Whole Foods.
So Mackey is wrong on health care, but Whole Foods is often right about food, and their support for the farmers matters more to me than the political views of their founder. I haven’t examined the political views of all the retailers who feed me, but I can imagine having a lot of eating problems if I make them a litmus test.
>> Dave Murphy at Grist concurs with Michael. “A boycott of Whole Foods won’t make a difference on health care, and it might actually hurt something progressives care about — organic and natural farmers.”
I won’t be officially boycotting Whole Foods — but Mackey’s disgusting editorial’s grossed me out enough that I may just stick to shopping at Co-opportunity and the farmers’ market until the whole health care debate plays out in Washington.
However, I’m very lucky in that I live in a neighborhood with better shopping options for local, organic food than Whole Foods offers. I would hope that those living in less eco-foodie-friendly neighborhoods won’t feel like they now have to shun Whole Foods if that’s the best place they have to get local, organic food.
>> Find out how the health care reform bill’s coming along. Today’s news: To help pay for a revamped health care plan, U.S. hospitals will give up $155 billion in future Medicare and Medicaid payments. In exchange, the hospitals will be reimbursed above Medicare / Medicaid rates if a public health insurance plan’s included in the final bill. Lots of other kinks still have to be worked out of the bill, however, including whether or not to add a tax on some employer-provided health insurance benefits.
>> Confused as to what exactly this public health insurance plan’s gonna look like? That’s because Obama’s been very vague, as John Dickerson points out in Slate. As of now, there’s a big “gap between those who want a pure public option (a Medicare-for-all-type plan that would be separate from Medicare) and those who support a patient-owned cooperative that would be free from government control.”
>> Newsflash: Most married women are sex-starved. “In a much-discussed recent survey of 35,000 American women, published in the July issue of Woman’s Day, 72 percent of married women said they had considered leaving their husbands. Seventy-nine percent said they’d like sex more often, and 52 percent said they have no sex life to speak of.”
“We’ll probably never know until it’s too late, but we both think he’s hiding something,” said Prenner’s mother, Danna Prenner. “All of his friends are married and have children, so when he says to me, ‘Mom, I’m happy living the single life,’ I have to wonder what he’s not really telling us. I only hope that someone can intercede and bring him out of the black hole that he’s falling into, like a woman who wants to start a family and settle down right away, for example.”
>> Formaldehyde in baby shampoo’s totally safe, says Johnson & Johnson. Parents and enviro groups beg to differ — and want the company to take that stuff plus 1,4-dioxane out of Johnson’s baby shampoo — just like the company’s done for its Japanese products.
Japan’s got better consumer safety laws than we do — which is why eco-orgs like Environmental Working Group are pushing for the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act, which would overhaul the U.S.’s chemical regulatory law requiring chemical safety testing, proof of chemical safety from companies, and better EPA oversight for consumer products. Earlier: There will be polluted blood: 5 eco-justice leaders, 48 toxic chemicals
>> The Future Beneath Us is a New York Transit Museum exhibit of 8 underground projects planned for the Big Apple — like the Fulton Transit Center below the World Trade Center — with a pretty detailed website. (via kottke)
>>The “mental health bible” is getting updated. Been diagnosed with a mental illness or condition? The definition of what you’ve got could change as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders gets updated. L.A. Times notes that “For health insurance companies, [a DSM diagnosis] has become a basis for decisions on paying for care.” I’d like to point out that a DSM diagnosis has often become a basis for denying people health care coverage. Earlier: Finding health care.
A burger a day will kill you, basically, was the big health news this week. And since burgers are no friend of the environment, carnivores who cut back on red meat will be saving both themselves and the planet. Which begs the question (at least for me): If too many burgers can be so deadly, how, um, lively(?) can an anti-burger diet be?
The answer of sorts to that question comes from 6 diabetics who volunteered to drastically their eating habits, going on all vegan, all raw diet for 30 days in an effort to reverse their disease, and having their experiences turned into a newly-released documentary, Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days (trailer below).
So — Does eating raw reverse a disease that, according to the American Medical Association, “has no cure”? The answer, as I interpret the film, is yes, but….
Let’s start with the yes part. The raw food diet yields rather miraculous results for the six people — ranging from a healthy-looking 20-something grad student to a 30-something mother and receptionist to a retired chiropractor with little sensation left in his feet. We watch as all six people’s blood sugar levels and blood pressures drop rapidly to normal levels, even as they stop taking insulin and prescription drugs.
The achievement’s especially astounding considering the fact that the diabetics can eat all they want — including chocolatey desserts — so long as the food’s raw. At the end of the 30 days, the participants talk about their weight loss, their feelings of health, and their improved mood and energy levels. The chiropractor tears up, saying he’s been given a second chance at life.
But here comes the but part. To participate in this raw experiment, the 6 diabetics were flown in to The Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Arizona, where junk food doesn’t exist, where a variety of gourmet raw foods are prepared for them multiple times a day, where constant medical supervision and psychological encouragement is offered by the staff, where fellow diabetics also going raw have all the free time in the world to chat, commiserate, and push each other.
That sort of setting, as you know, is nothing like the real world.
In fact, even in the pristine, isolated setting of The Tree of Life, real life still sneaks in to disrupt the raw experiment. After all, we’re dealing with real people here — Real people with ingrained habits, problems, and addictions. One young dude’s clearly got some alcohol and depression issues. He’s unable to stay off the sauce and ends up sneaking booze into the center, messing up his stats for the experiment and ending up remorseful, repeatedly talking about how he doesn’t “deserve” to be part of the experiment. Another older man successfully brings down all his stats into the normal range — but gets so depressed that he stops getting out of bed and drops out of the program, saying his brain’s rejecting the food, health be damned.
Which is to say that the true experiment really only begins when the diabetics leave the center to return to their lives at home. Because really, even if the diabetics’ regular doctors at home may not have preached an all raw vegan diet, surely those docs must have conveyed to their patients that cutting back on sugary processed unhealthy food is necessary to control diabetes. And clearly, the diabetics must’ve found those directions difficult to follow under the pressures of real life — which is why they decided to try the center in the first place.
And as you might have suspected, when Simply Raw catches up with the six a few months after the end of the 30 days, most seem to have fallen at least partially off the raw and/or healthy eating wagon. The film’s descriptions of the diabetics’ “new” lives are positive in tone but extremely vague, in the vein of “She has kept most of the weight off.” There are few specific details about what sort of diet the participants were able to maintain, or how their blood pressure and sugar levels are holding up.
That’s not to say that the lessons in Simply Raw aren’t valuable. I’m sure that some diabetics, shown visual proof that a permanent diet change can get them off insulin and meds, will muster up both the willpower and resources to really give healthy eating a serious go. One of the six in Simply Raw got so gung ho about the raw diet that he’s now in medical school, with the goal to use his knowledge about food to help other diabetics in the future.
And certainly, a film like Simply Raw might help shift our nation’s thinking both in terms of preventing and managing diabetes, a disease that costs us millions each year. At the moment, the effort to reverse diabetes naturally is still a fringe movement — though a RDN website does make it easy for those interested to join the cause.
For those who tend to think of the raw food movement as a mere fad: While Simply Raw does focus on the raw diet, the film isn’t against cooked food. Before leaving the center, the participants are even given a cooking lesson for creating healthy cooked dishes. Simply Rawalso includes interviews with Morgan Spurlock of Supersize Me fame, Woody Harrelson, and other celebrities and experts. The DVD’s available for $26.99 on Amazon.
Rock out while supporting single payer health care for Californians! We Be Illin’ — a series of benefit events for universal health care — has expanded to Los Angeles. And the first event happens next week in Hollywood:
When: Monday, March 30, 7 pm Where: Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles Cost:$10 online, $12 at the door.
Local bands I’ve never heard of but perhaps should have — Spencer Kent, Max and the Marginalized, Chris Marsol, Waiting 4 Wyatt, 3rd Alley — will perform. And between sets, you can watch short educational videos about single payer health care system, hear local patient stories, talk to USC doctors and medical students, or pick up educational materials.
Organized by USC medical students, this We Be Illin’ event will raise funds for single payer advocacy, including medical student Lobby Days in Sacramento. I’m planning to go. Who’s with me?
As of Feb. 1, I’m now covered under the MRMIP plan, with Kaiser as my insurance provider. Hopefully this will end my health care woes for a long while — though I’m not exactly looking forward to the fact that I now have to find new Kaiser doctors and will be forced to make long treks to get to Kaiser-specific pharmacies.
Still, I feel somewhat lucky that at least California HAS an MRMIP plan — and that I can afford to pay for it.
That’s not to say California’s at the forefront of health care in the U.S., by any means. In fact, California’s getting sued a lot for health-care related issues these days:
>> San Francisco’s city attorney sued California state regulators, alleging that they approved a system that lets insurance companies discriminate against women, making them pay as much as 39% more than men for similar individual health care policies. The lawsuit could be dropped if either of two bills in the legislature seeking to address this gender inequity issue gets passed.
>> Emergency room doctors sued California because our emergency health care system’s “on life support,” mainly due to lack of Medi-Cal funding. Our state ranks dead last in the country for emergency care access.
>> The Medi-Cal program could get a boost from Obama’s economic stimulus plan — but how much help California will get is up for debate. “The House version of the bill that was approved this week would give financially strapped California about $11.1 billion in Medicaid funds to help pay for healthcare for the poor, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The measure the Senate will take up next week would provide about $9.6 billion.”
Earlier: Finding Health care outside employer-based programs part I, part II, part III.
>> Abortion opponents will soon enjoy broader legal protections than ever. A “new midnight regulation crammed through by the Bush Department of Health and Human Services and poised to become law any day now … allows your access to birth control, emergency contraception, and even artificial insemination to turn on the moral preferences of your pharmacist, nurse, or ambulance driver.” Writes Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:
Like it or not, the right to birth control, emergency contraception, and—under most circumstances—abortion is still constitutionally protected. But these are not services a woman can provide for herself, which leaves her with few rights at all when her physicians, nurses, and pharmacists are empowered by law to misinform her, withhold advice, or to deny services altogether.
Obama can overturn this law, but it’ll take a few months at least.
>> Serendipitously, Obama’s transition team announced a nationwide campaign “to solicit public input on improving the nation’s healthcare system” by “asking Americans to host meetings to talk about reform. Those willing to host will get discussion packets sent to them in the last two weeks of December. I went to Change.gov to sign up, but the meeting / packet info doesn’t seem to be up yet.
Clive Wearing, a British musician who suffers from herpes encephalitis (an infection that attacks the brain) is in a constant state of thinking he just woke up. Nearly every entry of his journal says, in one way or another, “I am awake.” When shown past entries, he denies he wrote them. He gets upset when confronted with his condition.
>> L.A. got a new medical marijuana shop law. “The ordinance caps the number of dispensaries at 70 and creates a buffer zone around schools and places of worship.” It’ll be at least 45 days before the new rules will start being enforced.
>> 
>> In case you missed it, 
>> 
>> Newsflash: 
>> 
The achievement’s especially astounding considering the fact that the diabetics can eat all they want — including chocolatey desserts — so long as the food’s raw. At the end of the 30 days, the participants talk about their weight loss, their feelings of health, and their improved mood and energy levels. The chiropractor tears up, saying he’s been given a second chance at life.
>> 
