jabmyeyes.com

Nothing (until now) has peaked enough interest to cause me to add anything new to this jabmyeyes site.  Not because the world isn’t full of interesting trappings, more so, because the ICU I’ve been working in requires too many hours of consuming thought.  

Watching people die from  Clostridium difficile    (C diff),   infection is absurd.  Most of the people that die from this are usually elderly nursing home patients.  Being a person who wants to live to be very very old and involve myself in the accomplishments and culture of my grandchildren (be an interfering grandmother) I want things like this fixed. 

100 years from now folks will look back on our batty lack of prudence.  

What happens –> you take antibiotics to kill bad bacteria ( teeny bad bugs) that are infecting your body.  These antibiotics also kill the good bacteria (teeny normal bugs) that live in our colon (guts) to protect us from invaders like C. diff.  It is silly that we die from C-diff when we only need to reintroduce some good guys into our systems.  Why isn’t this being done?  I don’t have an answer, but, there are obscure individuals (researchers) coming up with answers that we seem to be ignoring.

Two such researchers named Elaine Petrof and Gregory Gloor  have developed a “pseudo-poo” .   This is a safe and effective substitute for  a fecal transplant (putting someone else’s poo into your colon).   This recipe is  a life saving stew of Microbes without any of the extra fecal matter.  This stew is  “re-poo-pulated” into the colon of an infected individual via an enema (squeezed in rectally). 

Just a little reminder that even the most beautiful creatures on earth create poop.

They have had predicted success and a guy named Rob Knight from the University of Colorado, who studies gut bacteria  is enthusiastic and hopeful that this will become a common practice to save lives.  Of course research and commercialization (how are we going to make money from this?)  has to come in to play before any actual lives are saved.

If you’d like to know more –>  http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/10/infusion-of-pseudo-poo-cures-gut-infections-in-two-women/

Ronald Reagan quoted movies and he loved his wife.  GOP/ Religious right folks love quotes and the appearance of monogamy.  No one really cares if you love your wife or if you are faithful.  Many men who say grace before dinner have or at least intend to have sex with a women who is not their wife.

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Women are sluts if they have sex and don’t intend to have children.  I guess we should just get used to the word because almost every woman I know has used birth control in order to have sex without the desire to have children.  I’m so grateful to live in modern times.  Women can give birth without intense pain thanks to epidurals.  Women can decide not to get pregnant by taking birth control.  What a wonderful world!  I’m guessing most men agree.

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It is disingenuously misleading for the Catholic Exchange to claim that Obama’s Healthcare package mandates birth control for all women.  What it does state is that all insurance companies and employers need to allow birth control for women who want it.  This is “Huge Caroline”.

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A huge difference that is.  The GOP is so opposed to our president they are shooting themselves in the foot with this one.

If the catholic church or any church for that matter wants to instill the doctrine of the church within the laws of the United States, doesn’t that go against the constitution?  Shouldn’t they pay taxes if they are so involved in healthcare law and its policies?  Isn’t the provision of birth control for women who want it a good thing for America?

I wonder if Nancy used birth control?

Some folks work hard and are poor anyway, not indigent, but, damn close and if any kind of physical anomaly befalls them they quickly become indigent.   Some of these people are alcoholics or drug abusers and some are just unlucky.

A dumptruck driver with a swollen ankle, went to a local free clinic and was given a prescription to get an x-ray and have an orthopedic surgeon look at it at the county hospital ER.  He had no way of getting to the hospital to get this done.  His ankle was swollen, broken or sprained; couldn’t drive his dumptruck, and he had no insurance.  He was that dreaded self-pay that never pays and is therefore turned away in non-emergent situations.  He became a resident of the Salvation Army house.   Orthopedic surgeons don’t fix people who don’t have insurance unless they have a lot of cash up front.  Free clinics can only do so much.

What are the essential requirements of an American life? Food, shelter, clothing, clean water, good health and an education.   Some of us think that access to health care is as essential as access to clean drinking water.  Some do not.

Those who are opposed to the Affordable Care Act which is a big step in providing health care to a wider range of Americans  seem to be concerned about the cost to them personally. “The more money we make the more they take.”   Who are they?

What are they doing with my money after they take it?  Isn’t that what we all piss and moan about?  What is this going to cost me?   A health care system that provides quality services for citizens is an acceptable and essential place for our money to go.  Health care and the health of this planet is more important than killing people in other countries.

The dumptruck driver could get back in his truck after his ankle was fixed and be a productive tax-paying citizen again.  How is that bad for you?

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

Voltaire

Senate Republicans pledge that their first crack at repealing The Affordable Care Act (ACA) won’t be their last.  Some refer to it as Obama’s Health Care Law or Obamacare.  The ACA is about Freedom.  Some factions are adamantly drilling in the idea that the ACA is taking away our freedom to not have insurance.  They push the idea that the government is trying to control your body and kill your grandma. When our presidents wife suggests we grow our own food and get more exercise she is compared to Stalin.  It is OK for a child to grow up and die in a war to protect our freedom to not have health insurance?  Please read the truth…

Today, employers can begin submitting applications for the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program. Created by the Affordable Care Act, this program provides $5 billion in financial assistance to employers, unions and state and local governments to help them maintain coverage for early retirees age 55 and older who are not yet eligible for Medicare.

For too long insurance company bureaucrats have stood between Americans and their doctors. On Tuesday, President Obama announced new regulations that will crack down on unfair practices by insurers and change the balance of power back in favor of consumers – putting consumers back in charge of their health coverage and care.

Secretary Sebelius marks the three month anniversary of the Affordable Care Act with a live webchat where she will answer your questions.

Today, HHS announced new investments under the Affordable Care Act to support prevention activities and develop the nation’s public health infrastructure which will improve health and enhance health care quality.

To read more facts go to…

Most Americans without insurance don’t have insurance because they can’t afford it not because they don’t want it.  The gentleman who owns the small restaurant had to let his family plan go to keep the business afloat and ignored his chest pains.  The waitress let her private plan go after rates increased due to her kidney stones in order to pay for her condo she paid too much for in 2005.  Most emergency rooms are full of “self-pays”  because self-pays use ER’s as their only source of health care.  Preventative care does not exist for the average self-pay American.
Most restaurants and small businesses can’t afford to offer insurance plans and private plans are expensive, with high deductibles.  There are a those not yet experiencing problems with their health, but they have rent and weddings and cell phone plans to pay for and insurance premiums just don’t fit in to the budget.

The ACA will enhance our freedom — freedom from worry about accidents and sickness, freedom from worrying that if you use your insurance the rates will go up or worse yet you’ll no longer be covered, free from discrimination, free to provide insurance for our adult children, and free preventive care for seniors.

My favorite freedom is the freedom to have your own business because you are no longer forced to work in the corporate world to provide insurance for your family.  Many corporations don’t want us to have that kind of freedom and are backing politicians who convince us to keep things just as they are.

Just be careful what you wish for.

“…The health care law is little different from Social Security. The court unanimously recognized  in 1982 that it would be “difficult, if not impossible” to maintain the financial soundness of a Social Security system from which people could opt out. The same analysis holds here: by restricting certain economic choices of individuals, we ensure the vitality of a regulatory regime clearly within Congress’s power to establish. The justices aren’t likely to be misled by the reasoning that prompted two of the four federal courts that have ruled on this legislation to invalidate it on the theory that Congress is entitled to regulate only economic “activity,” not “inactivity,” like the decision not to purchase insurance. This distinction is illusory. Individuals who don’t purchase insurance they can afford have made a choice to take a free ride on the health care system. They know that if they need emergency-room care that they can’t pay for, the public will pick up the tab. This conscious choice carries serious economic consequences for the national health care market, which makes it a proper subject for federal regulation.

By LAURENCE H. TRIBE

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I feel that an individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune that one who does not. Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace – anxiety, doubt, disappointment – these are definitely less.

Dalai Lama

So what happened to President Obama?

I knew we weren’t going to get much out of him re: the environment, it wasn’t high on his agenda.  I didn’t like his plan to expand oil drilling but I liked him getting our troops out of Iraq and providing health care.  I didn’t think he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, but, I do like that the rest of the world seems to have a better view of us, because of him.  I guess when you get placed too high on a pedestal you fall hard and fast.  What has he done, or not done to make you so angry?

People who support our cool, private and formal President are up against a loud unified “tea-party”  Conservatives vs Liberals — one accusing the other of not staying on top of the facts. I’m glad our Liberal forefathers fought for our National Parks System, Medicare, Federal Highways, banning nuclear testing,  clean air and water, public schools, religious freedom, and being able to sit anywhere on the bus we want regardless of our skin color.  I am very grateful they stood up and fought the hard fight to provide these wonderful American ways of life for us.

Who were they fighting?  Who didn’t want these things?  Most people simply hate and fear the unknown.  There is no evil motivation. If you show them a plan for a better way they fight it, dealing with what they know is easier then figuring out a better way.   That thinking was manipulated by the powerful money handlers who were profiting from the unregulated timber industry or cheap child labor in factories.  Factory owners lobbied against mandatory education and the timber industry didn’t want National Parks.

Just like now, Corporate interests don’t want public healthcare available to all Americans and have convinced many Americans that the government is going to kill grandma and infiltrate their personal lives with this crazy healthcare for all scheme.  If healthcare was to become available to all Americans then  some  innovative Americans would go out and open a small business not needing corporate insurance benefits anymore. They don’t want that.

What did out conservative forefathers achieve for us?

Ronald Reagan played a big part in the USSR breaking apart and losing it’s power.  George HW Bush had a short successful war.  Nixon brought our troops home from Vietnam and re-opened trade with China — some may say China trade wasn’t such a good thing, because before that we made our own toasters and jeans.   Conservatives are pro-life and Christian.  They don’t like government intervention, they prefer corporate rule.  They refer to Liberals as elitists, I’m not sure where that came from.

As for me, I was raised in a Republican, military, Methodist, household.  My father hated “All in the Family” and he loved Nixon.  I remember sadness and tears in my household when Nixon resigned.  He said the presidency always involves covert happenings that the public has no business knowing.  In my mind, that, is big government and from that time on I silently went my own direction to find truths.  Nixon was big government and I think we should be much more afraid of his kind than of Obama.

Conservatives don’t like “Obamanomics” stimulus and infrastructure and all Americans having health insurance;  too costly. I say we need to work together to get jobs back in America.  Small business needs to prosper.  Corporate growth needs to stop being the impetus.  “Improving stockholder profits” needs to stop being our battle cry.  Americans need to move back into main street and open their hardware stores and butcher shops and make glassware in their small factories on the edge of town.  Stop hating and start coming up with solutions.  Yelling, table pounding, hate-filled accusations are  just counter productive exchanges of air

Stuff made in China is cheaper than American made stuff (for the most part) because the Chinese have little kids making it.  They don’t have rules.  No 40 hour work week with overtime.  No  clean air and water rules,  their factories pollute at will.  They don’t have a strong liberal front fighting for them.

We need to change our buying habits away from Target and Wal-Mart (unless they start stocking the shelves with American made products) and go back to main street.  Obama didn’t create this mess, I’m not sure he is doing everything right to fix it, but, I am sure it can’t be fixed without our participation.

Did you know that Monsanto (the same company that brought us agent orange) together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer controls almost all agriculture in the World?  They are like drug suppliers except they are in the seed business.  Ever wonder why the fruits and vegetables at grocery stores are so big and plump and colorful compared to the fruits and veggies at farmers markets?  Monsanto adds stuff, pesticides and they have created hybrid seeds that the farmers have to buy.  They have a contract. Small farmers have been successfully sued by Monsanto when they violate any terms of the contract.  Drug suppliers send out heavies that break your arms and Monsanto sends out heavies in the form of lawyers that break your family.

Independently owned farms are actually corporate farms as long as they use Monsanto seeds.  This is a fact of life in the US and we have grown accustomed to our giant red and yellow produce. Literature tells us to eat colorful food to be healthy.  Many Americans are wising up and going to farmers markets and food co-ops to avoid the pesticides and antibiotics and fungicides like Thiram that are added to Monsanto seeds to make stuff look better.  We have hospitals full of antibiotic resistant diseases and cancer.  Do you think there is any relation?

I had my own garden many years ago when I was pregnant with my son.  We had the good fortune of renting a little Wisconsin farmette that had been abandoned for many years after the owners died.  We washed the house and painted it.  We took the 10 year old cow crap that was in the barn and put a little clump at the bottom of every hole and put seeds and starter plants in the bottom.  It was a small town and people took pride in their gardens.  This garden was my first and my neighbors were full of wonderful advice.  I wrapped my tomato plants with newspaper to prevent pests, I picked off the little sucker growths, and I planted as they advised to make sure the tallness of the corn didn’t block out the sunlight to the lower plants.  We had a pear tree, an apple tree, and a concord grape vine.

I had a basement full of potatoes, giant red tomatoes, squash, peppers, melon and everything was huge and colorful.  My take on all of this is we buy the cow poop from organic ranchers and pay Wisconsin farm wives to teach us how to grow stuff.   Then we won’t need seeds with scary additives.

Meantime, I read an article in “Yes” magazine…

Monsanto has donated to Haiti some of their hybrid corn seeds.  These seeds are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram.  Thiram belongs to a highly toxic class of chemicals called ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (EBDCs).  Results of tests of EBDCs on mice and rats caused concern to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which then ordered a special review. The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. The EPA also ruled that pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, based on the assumption that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing. Dress like an astronaut to do your gardening?

The concern of Haitian social movements is not just about chemical dangers and the possibility of future GMO imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local seeds for local consumption—otherwise known as food sovereignty. Monsanto’s arrival in Haiti, they say, is a further threat to such a future.

Vía Campesina, the world’s largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than 60 countries, has called Monsanto one of the “principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples.” They claim that as Monsanto and other multinationals control an ever larger share of land and agriculture, they force small farmers out of their land and jobs.

In the United States –>The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge against Monsanto that has just made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety’s case on April 27 3010. The Supreme Court lifted a nationwide ban on the planting of genetically engineered alfalfa seeds, despite claims they might harm the environment.

Go to

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/beverly-bell-in-haiti/haitian-farmers-refuse-monsanto-hybrid-seeds

and

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/food-rebellions-7-steps-to-solving-the-food-crisis

and this entry by Jr Deputy Accountant where I stole this picture from

http://www.jrdeputyaccountant.com/2010/06/psst-any-victory-for-frankenscience.html

if you’d like to read the entire article and others like it.

“Rich people give poor people jobs. Plain and simple. With out rich people, poor people won’t have jobs. See all the liberals want the government to take away all the rich peoples money, but don’t ever give any of there own.” This is a quote from an apparent Republican to his liberal facebook friend.

When did this happen?  The rich paying for the poor?  Define poor.  Do you think the richest Indian was the one with the fanciest horse?  Or was the bravest Indian the one with the fanciest horse?

I was extremely impressed with a Missouri gentleman that built our kayak from strips of wood.  He explained the procedure and that his boats would withstand some of the wildest rivers in Missouri and Arkansas.  It took about 4 months for it to be completed and now it is a gorgeous lightweight kayak that is durable, usable art .  I suppose some of the glues, and paints may have had Chinese roots or came from a factory owned by a wealthy corporation, but, for the most part our beloved vessel was handmade by an American. He had a home, a car, a workshop, diabetes and a smoking habit.   He made his own way in his own shop living a free American life that many of us might envy.

Insurance would have been impossible for him to obtain if it hadn’t been for medicare.  He qualified for socialized medicine because he lived long enough too.  Prior to that I think he plucked chickens in a factory or something like that so he would be insured. Why is our society set up like this? Because the guys that own the chicken factories don’t want us to be free.  If we are free and don’t need the insurance they provide, we may leave and start an organic chicken farm that would compete with them.  We would be poor, but, we would be free and insured.

“Another word for freedom is nothing left to lose”  I so miss the days when everything I owned fit in my car and I traveled about, working at random restaurants, taking ballet classes and teaching ballet classes.  I never broke a body part or had a kidney stone or appendicitis.  I never thought about healthcare or health insurance.  If I had needed healthcare back in those days I would have been financially screwed.  I guess I was poor, but, I didn’t feel poor, I felt  free.

Life happened.  Husband, kids, and a job that provided health insurance for us all.  There went my freedom.  I don’t think it should have to be that way.  I think we should be able to make things, grow things, be brave and ride a fine horse.  I think we should have the choice to be free and at the same time be responsible.  I don’t think providing healthcare for all is the rich paying for the poor.  I think it is all of us pitching in for all of us.

I was in a conversation with a physician I work with the other night at the hospital.  He described me as “uber liberal” and decided I needed to be reformed and informed.  He started printing up things for me to read from his Fox network.

This Physician is very very afraid of our government running anything.  On the other hand,  if you leave the government out of our lives then you end up with a place — well –  Haiti is a graphic example of a  weak government.  Us worker bees need to be protected.  We are the ones out here in the trenches doing the work.  We don’t mind, we’re happy and have amazing respect for our founding fathers’ plan for checks and balances and equal rights.  They were a bit hypocritical about equal rights, writing and signing the constitution while their slaves tended to their farms, but, their ultimate plan was ingenious.

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The Physician and I are an example of check and balance.  His check is the need to be compensated for all the patients he fights hard to save.  Many of them are self abusers, over-eaters, smokers, alcoholics, prescription drug abusers.  They vary from uninsured, medicaid, Medicare as well as the insured.  Some try to sue him for an anomaly that is most often a result of their own self abuse.  The litigation involved is extremely expensive and is driving up healthcare costs.  Tort reform is his primary concern to improve our health care system.   I definitely get his point and I also am angry at the folks making a living out of being sick.

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My balance is the waitress with a kidney stone, the restaurant owner with chest pain, the guy that builds kayaks by hand with diabetes, the lady with a shop full of locally made art.   To them insurance is a gamble; those without are gambling they won’t need it,  those with individual insurance pay dearly for a catastrophic plan.  How can we remain innovative Americans if we can’t leave Wal-mart to try our hand at Tilapia farming or growing bamboo or opening a breakfast joint.  We aren’t really free as long as we are locked in to a job because we need the insurance?

What angers me is the minds that sit around figuring out ways to make money off of our misfortunes.  There are boardrooms full of people trying to figure out how to pocket some cash.  I call them clipboard carriers.  Administrators are rewarded for making money rather than  for providing amazing results for the health of a community.  I worked with an occupational therapist who was so inspiring to me and others as we watched her bring smiles to the depressed and life to those ready to give up.  She was let go because she didn’t generate enough income for the little rural hospital.  Hospitals are not factories.  They don’t have assembly lines.  Hospitals are full of real people with real problems and sometimes fixing those problems just doesn’t make anyone any money.

Dr. William D. wrote a blog that made me think,  then again maybe they are factories?…

“. . . the life of the pig has moved out of view; when’s the last time you saw a pig in person? Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality. . .”

The same disconnect has occurred in healthcare for the heart. The emotional distance thrust between the hospital-employed primary care physician, the procedure-driven cardiologist, the crammed-into-a-niche electrophysiologist (heart rhythm specialist) or cardiothoracic surgeon whose principal concerns are procedures—with an eye always towards litigation risk—mimics factory farms that now litter the landscape of the Midwest. The hospitals and doctors who deliver the process see us less as human beings and more as the next profit opportunity.

The “factory hospital” has allowed the subjugation of humans into the service of procedural volume, all in the name of fattening revenues. Never mind that people are not (usually) killed outright but subjected to a succession of life-disrupting procedures over many years. But whether livestock in a factory farm or humans in a factory hospital, the net result to the people controlling the process is identical: increased profits.

The system doesn’t grow to meet market demand, but to grow profits. The myth that allows this growth is perpetuated by the participants who stand to gain from that growth.

See hospitals for what they are: businesses. Despite most hospitals retaining “Saint” in their name, there is no longer anything saintly or charitable about these commercial operations. They are every bit as profit-seeking as GE, Enron, or Mobil.

http://www.wellsphere.com/heart-health-article/factory-hospitals/472314

I think most of us really do care about people and their individual health.  We just need to care less about profits.