Making the rounds of medical blogs:
I was a smoker for seventeen years until I quit in 2000. Kris smoked for even longer. It was a lot more expensive than I thought, according to Dr. Happy. In order to finally quit, I gradually reduced my smoking and put off, in five-minute increments, when I would smoke. After a meal I waited five minutes to light up. Then ten, and so on. Finally we figured out how much money we were spending on cigarettes and we bought a car with a note for that amount, in the theory that if we had no money, we couldn’t go back to smoking. Which worked, although Kris took longer to quit than I did. So our cigarettes equaled a car in the short term, and in the nine years since, well, I won’t do the math. But apparently a lifetime of not smoking could make you the $6 Million Dollar Man.
What happens to a lifetime amputee after getting an prosthetic arm? Find out here; it’s fascinating. h/t Dr. Wes
Kevin MD wonders Why is Sweden allowing murderers and rapists to become doctors?
Galen takes a look at the Department of Health and Human Services Budget and assumes without making an ass out of anybody.
Tell you what. You put in to place these wondrous programs that will conjure 300 billion without placing a crippling regulatory burden costing billions in forced compliance on the rest of the health care system and you can spend it anyway you want without a peep of complaint from me. Until then, I’m going to assume your budgeted items will be paid for almost entirely from tax dollars or deficit spending.
If such programs exist, why haven’t they been implemented before now?
Finally, not a blog but an interesting article. As Bill Clinton noted, religious people seem especially reluctant to get to heaven.
You might think religious people would be most comfortable with the idea of death or at least the most ready to pass on. That would not exactly be right. The patients identied as positive religious copers — those who relied on faith to handle death and other trying times — were almost three times as likely to seek and receive life-prolonging care such as ventilators.
These religious copers were also less likely to have completed advance medical directives, such as living wills or do-not-resuscitate orders that would limit the potential intervention near the end.
The commenters engage in the usual snark against believers, but one wrote something that stuck with me:
In my experience, the religious and the spiritual don’t necessarily have much to do with each other. Finding both in a single individual isn’t very common, but when you do the result can be awesome – I had an aunt that passed away recently from pancreatic cancer, and toward the end she couldn’t wait to go. During my last visit with her she was absolutely transcendent – being in her presence was like being bathed in pure light. I’m not religious at all, but I have no doubt about where she is now, and it’s an entirely better place than she left.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting we all get out there and pull a Heaven’s Gate. Nor do I know what I’m going to do when illness makes my death imminent. I’ve been pushing this Engage With Grace project because I think we all – especially Christians – ought to be thinking and talking about it a lot more. People have a 100% mortality rate. It’s something to think about.
