Standard Mischief

Pawpaw pointed me to this interesting WaPo news article.

The author is amazingly good at coming up with excuses for herself for her multiple failures, but at least she only half-assed blamed Bush here.

The conservative politics of the Bush administration forced me to have an abortion I didn’t want. Well, not literally, but let me explain.

It?s most appropriately titled “What Happens When There Is No Plan B”?

Okay, so let’s analyze the multiple mistakes and failures that led this lady to get the abortion that she claims she didn’t want.

?”we managed to snag some rare couple time and, in a sudden rush of passion, I failed to insert my diaphragm.”

Here’s the first one. They failed to use the birth control properly. People do make mistakes, but she’s not exactly taking credit or responsibility for the mistake. Thank goodness there is still available options at this point.

She doesn’t even acknowledge the second mistake. She and her partner have failed to prepare for a contraceptive failure. They do happen. The time to decide the moral and religious implications of using emergency contraceptive (hereafter “EC”) is right now. If you decide that you might wish to take a type of EC such as the brand name “Plan B”, please plan ahead and acquire for yourself some of this medicine and learn how to use it. Things happen, don’t rely on our mostly good medical infrastructure to get you the medicine that you need instantly. Any of a number of problems such as shortages, natural disasters, or emergencies might toss a wooden shoe into the gears.

(I’ve already covered EC, Plan B and it’s off-label, but still safe and effective alternatives here and here.)

The third mistake was waiting until the next day to discover that her ob/gyn does not, for personal reasons, dispense EC. Other people are entitled to their opinions and I would never force a doctor to prescribe something he or she didn’t believe in. The lesson here is to find out now if your doctor has a problem with EC and boycott that doctor if necessary. I would suggest you let the doctor know why you are no longer a customer. She tried two other places, but they either would not prescribe, or would not prescribe it over the phone. She said that the weekend, and her 72 hour window to use the medicine was fast approaching. I don’t think she tried too hard, however, because I spent five minutes and found the Falls Church Virginia Planned Parenthood clinic. They have “Supply Pickup Hours” that includes walk-in emergency contraception on Friday from 11-3 and on Saturday from 10-4.

Even though personally I’m pro-choice, I would take the (hypothetical) decision to abort extremely seriously. If I was a woman, I’d hope I’d go above and beyond in the effort to not have an egg released by using EC, rather than risk pregnancy. Unfortunately, an unwanted pregnancy did occur in this case.

I was disappointed to hear that in Virginia there is a cooling off period for the abortion procedure. Waiting periods are not cool for firearms purchases or medical procedures. Whether the legislature is trying to guilt people into changing their mind or the state is trying to make sure that the procedure is done with no regrets, I’d like to personally tell the commonwealth to mind their own fucking business.

Fortunately (in this case) there are state borders. She got the procedure she needed in the District of Columbia, after navigating through a free speech protest on the Internet and one at her clinic.

I felt sick. Although I’ve always been in favor of abortion rights, this was a choice I had hoped never to have to make myself. When I realized the seriousness of my predicament, I became angry. I knew that Plan B, which could have prevented it, was supposed to have been available over the counter by now. But I also remembered hearing that conservative politics have held up its approval.

Again, she whines about “a choice I had hoped never to have to make myself”, yet she never took personal responsibility beyond plan A, and then she’s angry she had to wait for Plan B. She’s good about making excuses for herself, for the Bush administration, not so well.

My anger propelled me to get to the bottom of the story. It turns out that in December 2003, an FDA advisory committee, whose suggestions the agency usually follows, recommended that the drug be made available over the counter, or without a prescription. Nonetheless, in May 2004, the FDA top brass overruled the advisory panel and gave the thumbs-down to over-the-counter sales of Plan B, requesting more data on how girls younger than 16 could use it safely without a doctor?s supervision.
Apparently, one of the concerns is that ready availability of Plan B could lead teenage girls to have premarital sex. Yet this concern - valid or not - wound up penalizing an over-the-hill married woman for having sex with her husband. Talk about the law of unintended consequences.

Well here’s the point where she starts making sense. The idea, I believe, behind prescriptions is that the few dangerous drugs out there are made less available to be sure that you take them with supervision. Now I certainly don’t want people that have tuberculosis to go down to the pharmacy and play drug roulette with their contagious disease, but EC doesn’t get you high, isn’t habit forming and is fairly safe. It can’t be used as a date-rape drug and it isn’t a precurser to a illicit drug that is remarkably similar to Ritilan which is popularly perscribed nowadays for kids. There are more dangerous drugs that are OTC. Tylenol (acetaminophen) will, in abnormal amounts, promptly destroy your liver. That’s apparently why they add it to some prescription pain pills (Tylenol 3 with codeine). I guess the FDA doesn’t care about codeine addict’s livers.

The FDA is suppose to be a government agency who’s mission is to do what’s best for the health of the citizens. When I see the FDA in the middle of a squabble between a HMO and a drug maker over whether a drug should be OTC or not, and the arguments are based on which corporation gets to spend the least money, I see clearly how far it has come from serving the needs of the people.

There’s no compelling reason to keep EC as prescription only, no reason except for some partisan politician’s personal beliefs.

Excerpt from the screed at feministe.us :

Raincitygirl Says: Standard Mischief, do you understand fucking ANYTHING about the Canadian medical system? Because I live here, and the stuff you’re saying bears no relation to the system I’ve been getting my health care from since 1978.

Seems like I do, but hey, thanks for your input!

.. You can only get 13 packs (at 28 days per pack) paid for in one year. However, when I wanted to skip my period because I was going on vacation, and thus went through my 13 pack prescription in slightly less than a year, my doctor came up with a very logical solution?

Damn, looks like I was spot on here, zuzu. Thankfully, it’s no more restricted than your average HMO here in the states. I figured it was like this the same way most people figure out which way to flick the light switch when you walk into a dark room. You don’t even think about it, most of the time just from past experience, you flick it up.

Prescriptions are handled by pharmacies, not by the government. If you have an extended health plan, often times you can get the co-payment taken off when you get your meds, [snip rest of interesting paragraph]

So you are saying the all encompassing Canadian healthcare has not yet reached prescription plans? That’s interesting. I do know, however that the Canadian government has instituted price controls on pharmaceuticals, nationwide.

I have a fair bit of choice in terms of which doctor I see, certainly much more than an American whose HMO will only allow him to see certain doctors. Possibly because universal healthcare is like one big HMO, but where NOBODY doesn’t have coverage. Yes, there are problems with the damn system, yes there are waiting lists for non-emergency care and non-life threatening surgeries, but if your doctor pisses you off you can go to another one without being restricted to the doctors of whom the HMO approves.

For this very reason, I’ve had a PPO for years. I could got to any doctor I wanted, but if I stayed on a pre-approved list, I only had to pay the copay. I never needed a referral, I could just go to a specialist if I wanted. I even had a decent prescription program. However, even though I had the very best coverage available short of visiting heads of state from corrupt third-world countries who have near unlimited funds and pay for the very best care by the hour, I still got shafted. See below.

And if you are diagnosed with cancer or another serious illness when you go to a doctor, you will always get care. In the US, if you’re unlucky enough to be diagnosed with a serious illness at your first trip to the doctor when you sign onto a health plan, that’s a pre-existing condition, and they don’t have to pay. Which means you’re probably mortgaging your house to get treatment. I have many complaints about Canada’s health care system, but I’d take living in a country where getting seriously ill doesn’t also mean you may end up bankrupt over living in the US any day. Mainly BECAUSE I am appalled that the richest country int he world, which put a man on the moon and spends billions on fighter jets, doesn’t have a public health care system.

Look, I’ve already freely admitted that the way we tend to do healthcare here in the USA has serious problems. And I haven’t even touched on what happens when you don’t have coverage.
In my case, I had just about the best coverage plan one could buy.

My GP could not figure out my problem, so he sent me to a bunch of specialist. I saw a dozen specialist on my plan’s dime, but not a single one of them spent more than fifteen minutes on me. Frequently they ordered diagnostic tests, frequently the very same tests. Two of the doctors ordered a battery of blood tests before I even saw them. I don’t “know anything” about blood test “kickbacks”, but many of the doctors employed people who’s sole job was to take blood. I think that they received payment back from the lab for every vial they drew because as soon as I instituted a strict policy of only having my blood drawn at a lab, to prevent the doctors from receiving kickbacks, the blood test batteries stopped. They were pumping my excellent coverage for cash, which drives up costs for everyone else on my system. Also, in an effort to control costs, my plan would try to disallow coverage for shit, after-the-fact of course. Oh, and I already mentioned the “drug roulette” game
.
In the end, I went around to the dozen doctors, got all my records (got in to a few nasties here. a few asserted that they weren’t my records) and hit the books. I had to cross index my results, [ed: I indexed about a 1 inch stack of lab results, including all the redundent Lymes disease tests] make lists of all the possible nasties I might have, and then I cornered my GP at my next visit. I got his full attention for about 40 minutes, and he sat down with me and we reviewed my records, and crossed out, one-by-one, the various things that I didn’t have.

In the end I made the diagnosis, he merely confirmed it. Treatment was surprisingly inexpensive, the actual diagnosis saga spanned over two years and cost thousands of dollars, most of which was redundant and was paid by my PPO. The not-so-funny thing is if they had sprung for perhaps an hour of real doctoring and a small battery of focused tests, they could have saved thousands.

If poor women in the US could afford the regular “well woman” check-ups which are a huge part of preventive medicine, and catch medical problems before they become very serious,and maybe if uninsured pregnant American women could go to the OB/GYN on a regular basis over the course of their pregnancy, the US might not have a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba. Fucking Cuba, which, may I remind you, is considered by many to be Third World country. You know which developed country on that list had the highest infant mortality rates: Latvia. That’s the only industrialized country in the entire fucking world where more babies die in infancy than in the US. And I had a roommate from Latvia. Trust me, being able to say you’re better at something than Latvia is pretty pathetic. Like an American bobsled team saying they’re better than the team from Jamaica.

I?m with you 100% on the preventive care, but the rest of this may be cooking-the-books. See this (including the comments):

www.saysuncle.com/archives/2006/05/10/the_feminine_mistake/

Raincitygirl, thank you for commenting, you have added a bunch to the discourse here. [same link as yesterday, now with bonus comments]

No real entry for today, but I’ve been commenting over on Feministe again. It’s fascinating how these women can effortlessly double-clutch between Libertarianism and Socialism, depending on which philosophy suits for the moment.

Anyway here is what’s up:

What I’m concerned about is that the guidelines will provide more cover for doctors who already do things like withhold effective treatments from their non-pregnant patients on the grounds that the treatments are harmful to a hypothetical fetus, even when the alternative, fetus-safe treatment does not adequately control the condition or has more severe side effects for the patient than the fetus-harming treatment. To wit:…

So I’m over there saying that if you want healthcare choices, and you support medical privacy, you really ought to drop your support for socialized medicine. It seems logical that the people who hold abortion as being (among other things) a privacy issue would not want to create a bureaucratic system that manages people’s health records and issues edicts that might limit the types of treatments that your doctor may be able to provide to you.

But it seems a tough sell. Part of my comment:

Regardless and back on topic, can you see how perhaps a Canadian style (universal, single-payer, socialized, take your pick) healthcare or a HMO plan might limit one?s choices compared to perhaps something like Health Savings Account (HSA) with a medical high deductible health insurance plan?

Increased government regulation is gonna ooze it’s creeping crud between a doctor and his practice and take away any discretion of the course of treatment, no getting around it. That’s just what bureaucrats do.

The other benefit is this. Medical records used to be between a doctor and the patient. Nowadays it?s between a doctor, the patient, and the HMO (still understandable, they have to pay out the expenses, of course they’ll want to see the records). Now the trend is a computerized standard defined by the government. How is that going to enhance your privacy? (You all are still big on medical privacy, right? I mean that was a cornerstone in Roe, right?)

If you honestly think that politically well-connected congress-critters and their maggot minions won?t improperly traipse through other people?s medical record when it suites their purposes, you ought to take a look at the aids of Charles Schumer did to get ahold of Michal Steele’s credit report (I have to say though, Chucky did the right thing and promptly fired their asses, but he goes on and picked up their lawyer bills) http://tinyurl.com/qj38e (WaPo)

Yup, I’m a big advocate of Health Savings Accounts (that are nothing like the use-it-or-lose-it Flexible Spending Accounts you may be used to):

I did mention the “medical high deductible health insurance plan” right? That’s the group insurance that kicks in when your expenses go over the “high deductible”. Except odds are, most people will never hit that ceiling. That’s why the rates are cheap, but if you ever have a medical catastrophe , your risks are spread out over others. It’s a safety net that does not get used as a hammock.

Anyway, go over and check it out.

Big DEA bust in California. The federal overlords have made another raid in the War Against (Some) Drugs. This time it’s a group called “Beyond Bomb” which I’ve never heard of but kinda reminds me of a group called “Food not Bombs” which is an effort to feed anyone who is hungry.

As a rule, I generally can’t stand dopers. What I call “dopers” are the recreational marijuana users that smoke daily, and can’t seem to function without that morning “wake and bake”. But there is no question that marijuana can be helpful for some kinds of maladies.

No one denies that dope has the side effect of giving someone the “munchies”, the desire to eat. No one (except the “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” folk) can seriously argue that something like a hash brownie is never useful to a chemotherapy or an AIDS patent that might not have any desire to eat, but needs to so they can avoid loosing any more weight. There are other anti-nausea and pain relieving uses to the drug too. There’s no sane reason to keep this drug out of the hands of the sick, but the gov-o-crats at the federal level keep it at schedule I, which means that they claim no therapeutic use and a high level of abuse. There are even therapeutic drugs that mimic pot, except they cost more, sometimes don’t work as well, and generate royalties to a drug manufacture company.

I’m sure the DEA would like to use ABC news to spread their FUD, and while ABC news didn’t pass up the chance for a catchy headline, it looks like they have avoided swallowing the ?moral panic? DEA Kool-aid, this time.

click for hi-rez 166 kb

Officials say the locations are part of Beyond Bomb, a marijuana candy manufacturer with products “that mimic the name and appearance of well known, name-brand candies and products.”

Products confiscated included Pot Tarts (a play on the name “Pop Tarts”), Stoney Rancher Lollipops (Jolly Rancher), Trippy Peanut Butter (Skippy Peanut Butter), Munchy Way (Milky Way), Budtella (Nutella) and Rasta Reese’s (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups).

“[These] marijuana-laced candy bars and sodas look very much like the store-bought candy that we see on our shelves,” said Pena. “If someone was to take this unknowingly, it would be potentially dangerous to that person.”

click for hi-rez 484 kb

My my, think of the children! Actually it looks like they are hiding the dope in stuff that looks like normal food, not to hook the poor little kiddies, but so people can consume the medicine discreetly. They even show a picture of the “Pot Tart’s” packaging, which won’t fool anyone, but probably looks amusing. Kinda reminds me of “Wacky Packages”, parody stickers from my childhood.

In fact, if you click on the images and look carefully at the hi rez versions you will see that the packaging has dosing info, so the consumers can get a consistent amount, and is merely spoofing the other brands, probably to generate buzz. The photos, by the way, I got off the DEA website. Here’s the full quote from the agent mentioned above.

SAC Peña stated, “In a way, this case sort of answers the question, ‘What will they think of next?’ What so many people don’t realize is that innocent children may somehow get their hands on these products and think they are just normal candy or soft drinks - thus, making this action not only illegal, but potentially tragic.”

So, Special Agent Propaganda, what’s the LD50 of marijuana again?

(If you go to the DEA site, you will see one real Nestle Butterfinger wrapper in one photo, blotted out. I’m not sure what’s up with that.)

So yea, no moral panic here, just a bunch of dopers that are probably enjoying their supply of dope while they help sick people get effective drugs that our overlords have decided we can’t be safely trusted with. I also like the freelance “compounding pharmacy” approach to making more palatable medicine. Because it’s “Made in the USA”, no money is going overseas to terrorist, and no border police were distracted from their duties in the growing of these plants either. While local police, through modern police tactics of seizures that violate the 5th amendment have managed to turn a profit on petty crimes like dope possession in many areas, the stiff federal mandated punishments make me think that this type of enforcement is a net loss for the nation that really needs to be a bit more fiscally responsible and is, by the way, is still fighting that war on terror.

Related Tags: Beyond Bomb, DEA, Medical Marijuana, The War On Some Drugs, The War On Drugs, Marinol, FUD, Moral Panic

Way back when, the scientists in control of deciding all things that were healthy decided that saturated fat was the final word in unhealthy fats. They wanted everyone to reduce the amount that they consumed, and they wanted restaurants to switch to healthier oils to deep fry stuff in.

In 1993 a group called “Center for Science in the Public Interest” held a media event, claiming huge levels of unhealthiness in movie popcorn. The problem? To get that “movie popcorn smell”, they were popping the corn in coconut oil, which is loaded with saturated fat. The “Food Police” got almost everyone to switch over to partly hydrogenated veggie oil. Gone was that great smell, but hey, it’s all for the better, right?

Well no, the chemical hydrogenation of those oils produces the current evil bad fat, something called “trans-fat”. The food industry likes partially hydrogenated fats because they don’t go rancid as fast and they apparently taste better than straight veggie oil.

The Wikipedia trans-fat article claims that the fast food industry used to use beef tallow to make freedom fries with, and that CSPI badgered them until they switched over to the partially hydrogenated stuff, at which point they were left alone. Part of this might be because trans-fat was not seen as a big threat at the time, and maybe partially because they knew they would never get Burger Fling to cook fries in 100% olive oil. (Which also might be unhealthy now, something about too many omega-6s, not enough omega-3s.)

So science marches ahead, and we’re all the better for it. Life expectancy is increasing, and if I don’t make it to 200, it’s probably all that Crisco and margarine Mom fed me back then because it was low in cholesterol, thus “healthy”. (Good thing she fed me fish, four Fridays a year during Lent, to offset that stuff) Of course, a short time ago when I saw that bottle of 100% coconut oil at the health food store, I did a double take. I don’t know what’s up with that.

I kept that in mind when the obsessive-compulsive reading disorder kicked in tonight and compelled me to read what was before me, a box of Jiffy “corn muffin” mix. (I put the quotes around “corn muffin” because there’s apparently more wheat in the mix than corn. They put the quotes around “Jiffy” because, I don’t know, probably because they think 15 minutes in the oven really isn’t “jiffy” or something.)

Like everything else, they are required, as of 2006, to state how much of the evil meanie trans-fat is in their mix, and so, to appeal to the most people, they want to put down zero.

So how did they accomplish this feat? What did they use to replace the hydrogenated stuff with? Take a look at the ingredients.

Yup, good old lard. Animal Shortening. Mmm mmm good.