Standard Mischief

Say, maybe tomorrow morning? I’ll bet they’ll still be shell shocked over the Brown victory.

You don’t want to call or email, that’s too easy. And you don’t want to mail anything, It’ll never get through the anti-anthrax screening on time. Faxes are best.

I haven’t settled on my exact wording, but I will be saying something about how disappointed I am about the backroom wheeling and dealing that’s not on c-span as promised. Oh and I won’t be mentioning the election results in Massachusetts, but I will capitalize on the timing. I’ll suggest scuttling the whole thing because we’ve strayed too far from the ideal bill. I’ll remind them that mid-terms are right around the corner and that I’m not interested in a bill that spends a lot of money we still don’t have and fails to do almost anything to control costs, like allowing overseas prescription drugs.

Apparently there are shortages of the liquid version of Tamiflu, so the CDC has published a handy recipe for whipping up a batch for your kid that has issues swallowing pills.

I find this interesting because it already takes, starting from scratch, six years of study nowadays to become a pharmacist in the US. While they them may be able to technically compound at that point, I believe that many go on and take on additional training to specialize in that branch of practice.

In fact, if I had to wager, I’d bet that compounding without a licence was illegal, (but I don’t carry two lawyers around in my pocket along with the entire US and Maryland state code, so don’t take this as legal or medical advice)

The Brotherhood and Sisterhood of the Collective Compounding Pharmaceutics weigh in:

I originally got wind of this story via Lifehacker, where there’s this comment from a member of the Pharmacist Guild:

@idleuser: I completely agree. I’m a pre-pharm student that works part time as a pharm tech and there’s no way we would recommend patients make their own Tamiflu suspensions. Half the time they can’t even take the correct amount of pills. None of the chain pharmacies around our area compound though. Our store and maybe a couple other local pharmacies do regular compounding. I would urge people to find local pharmacies that can compound Tamiflu for them instead of taking risks with their health or the health of their kids.

here’s a more useful comment further on down the page:

Alot of the Tamiflu coming from pharmacies is in capsule form from the Strategic National Stockpile. These are 75mg capsules only. For most kids under age 10, 75mg is too much; so the above method doesn’t work for them.

For patients mixing Stockpile-supplied drug from home, my state’s Health Department recommends mixing the powder from a full bottle of ten 75mg Tamiflu capsules with 50mL fruit juice. This makes a 15mg/mL solution.

I’d say that if you can’t multiply 75 mg times 10 and then divide the results by 50 mL, if you were never any good at word problems and don’t have or can’t purchase something to measure liquid in cubic centimeters, then perhaps you should leave the math and mixing to a compounding Pharmacist.

Cranky Consumer

Also, someone at Consumerist is angry that a chain pharmacy didn’t volunteer information that they can actually do compounding inhouse right off the bat. I’d say the guy was lucky he was offered that as a solution at all. I once took a prescription that required compounding to a pharmacy on a Friday before a holiday weekend and was not only told they did not do the compounding there, but that the one store that they did do the that was already closed for the holiday. I was more upset at my physician that handed me a Rx that I could not read. Had I done so, I’d have asked her to allow the pharmacy to give me two tubes of ointment and a stir stick. I eventually got my ointment, and I was just charged my usual copay instead of an expected premium.

Additional link

N.J. pharmacists face shortage of liquid Tamiflu, offer alternative

For months, the Mainstream Media has been telling me that production of the H1N1 vaccine was going along smoothly. This month they tell me there is a shortage. The media pass along various excuses, (harder to grow then they thought, the trouble to to create two vaccines in one season, etc), but fail to explain the sudden 180° turn from the ministry of information.

A month ago, I was told that one shot of the vaccine was enough, now I’m being told that some people are going to need two.

Today, I was told that if one opts for the nasal spray, one can’t take both the seasonal vaccine and the H1N1 vaccine spray within a certain amount of time. Where they utterly fail at “due diligence” here is that they don’t mention that the nasal mist is 1) fairly new on the market and does not have years of real world testing. 2) hasn’t really proved very popular, unless there are shortages of the regular injectable vaccine, and the biggie, 3) contains actual, live, disease causing viruses.

The third point is fairly important, and the reason why the mist is reserved for only healthy adults in a certain age range. Your body has to defeat the live virus and produce antibodies against it, but it’s possible to actually come down with the flu from the mist. I’m sure the odds are abnormally long, but I’m also sure at this point that I can’t trust the data provided by the manufacturer or the federal government.

With the recent change in dosing practice for the polio vaccine (it’s no longer recommended to give kids the oral vaccine for the first dose because of a number of cases of vaccine-induced polio), I would think that informing people to the fact that the spray mist does contain live cultures would be required to comply with “informed consent”.

Since it took decades to change the recommendation against three doses of the live oral vaccine for polio, I personally think, (in my dirty, worthless, layperson option , that the relativity new nasal vaccine spray isn’t worth the risk at this time.

Update, 10 PM: I did some googling, and I need to cite for the record that many local news sources do indeed inform their readers that the spray mist is a live virus product, so it’s just the lamesream media, to include the local news source I use during my commute. Also noticed was that there’s a fair bit of people out there with the tinfoil on, shiny-side out. Trust me conspiracy clique, If they really wanted to spread the virus, all they’d need to do is to slip it in something from the school lunch program. Hiding it in plain sight in the fine print on the vaccine nasal spray would take entirely too much effort.

This is but one example. Oddly enough, every example I can find, all have one thing in common, they’re not covered by health insurance.

A tattoo removal story by Rob over at Cockeyed.  Rob presents a story in a sometimes humorous, yet informative matter. If you want to cheat, you could jump to page 5, where the money quote is [1], but I’d recommend reading the whole series (a quick read) to get the feel for how the solely market-driven, profit-motivated endeavor manages to improve the technology while steadfastly decreasing in price.

This story is refreshing because after years of reading Cockeyed.com, I’ve gotten the impression that Rob would probably place himself left-of-center. He’s certainly not a GOP poster boy.  Nor is he a Obama delegate who is not a doctor but plays one at town hall meetings.

[1] …And by “money quote”, I mean the price quote. A laser tattoo removal session drops from $150 to $125 to $100 during the series.

I’ve been over this before, but every time this comes back up, it still manages to floor me.

It goes like this. The cornerstone of Roe v. Wade, a landmark Supreme Court case on the right for a woman to have an abortion, is privacy. Medical privacy. As in “the government may not stick their nose in a woman’s medical care because to do so would invade their privacy” type of privacy.

Furthermore, I also happen to note that the most “vocal”|”fringe”|”progressive”|”leading edge” of the feminist bunch almost universally support government run “universal”|”single payer”|”socialized”|”ObamaCare” type healthcare. One of the promises of the plan they are trying to promote is that there will be a “cost savings” by letting the nanny state safeguard your own medical records in some kind of digital format.

If you can’t see the elephant yet, I’ll spell it out for you. If you think of your medical records as private, how in Lilith’s name is it logical and prudent to hand over safekeeping to the state?

I mean this is the government that has been rightly condemned for misusing the Census data to round up the Japanese and put them into internment camps. The same government that has been doing all that warrantless wiretapping. The same government that has been torturing and detaining non-POWs while ignoring Habeas corpus.

I’ve always asked this question every single progressive pro-choice feminist I run across who speaks fondly and approving of state-run, taxpayer supported healthcare schemes. So far I’ve gotten zero responses. I’ve been left to guess the lack of response is some kind of self-defence mechanism; a cognitive shut-down to avoid a warp core breach.