Insurance company-driven “fast and loose” treatment is dangerous to patients and doctors alike

In a Flawed Health Care System, Doctors Lament ‘Moral Injury’

BY MELISSA BAILEY

DR. KEITH CORL was working in a Las Vegas emergency room when a patient arrived with chest pain. 

The patient, wearing his street clothes, had a two-minute exam in the triage area with a doctor, who ordered an X-ray and several other tests. 

But later, in the treatment area, when Corl met the man and lifted his shirt, it was clear the patient had shingles. Corl didn’t need any tests to diagnose the viral infection that causes a rash and searing pain.

All those tests? They turned out to be unnecessary and left the patient with over $1,000 in extra charges.

The excessive testing, Corl said, stemmed from a model of emergency care that forces doctors to practice “fast and loose medicine.” Patients get a battery of tests before a doctor even has time to hear their story or give them a proper exam.

“We’re just shotgunning,” Corl said.

Amid the non-stop Trump news, don't ignore the persistent assault on the environment

Trump's environmental protection rollbacks quietly continue, but there are more signs of climate awakening in TV news.

Peter Dykstra For Environmental Health News

These days, the front pages and cable gabfests are nearly all-Trump: Impeachment hearings, Presidential Twitty-fits, pardon-a-paloozas and more.

American news organizations, particularly TV news, choose to devote little bandwidth or interest to Trump's relentless, ongoing assault on environmental protection.

Thus, these actions, which carry impacts that will be felt for decades, are carried out with relative stealth.

Trump's EPA chief Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, took another step toward unbuilding the regulatory wall in late January by finishing off what was left of the Obama-era Waters of the United States rule.

Wheeler's new rule would remove Clean Water Act protections from thousands of small or seasonal waterways and nearly half of America's wetlands, limiting the landmark 1973 law to "navigable" waterways.

Enshrining Trump's hero

Small consolation

'Sea-level rise won't affect my house'

Even flood maps don't sway some coastal residents
Risa Palm, Georgia State University and Toby W. Bolsen, Georgia State University

Here is a sea level rise map for Charlestown from the FloodIQ.com online tool described below.

Advertisers understand that providing consumers with the facts will not sell products. To get people to stop and pay attention, successful advertising delivers information simply and with an emotional hook so that consumers notice and, hopefully, make a purchase.

Climate communication scientists use these same principles of messaging – visual, local and dramatic – to provide facts that will get the public’s attention. Such messaging is intended to help people understand risk as it relates to them, and perhaps, change their behavior as a result.

As social scientists studying the effectiveness of climate change communication strategies, we became curious about a particular message we found online. Some houses advertised for sale in South Florida were accompanied by banner ads with messages such as “Flooding hurts home value. Know more before you buy. Find out for free now.”

The ads were sponsored by the First Street Foundation through their website FloodIQ.com. The nonprofit foundation provides detailed aerial photos of present and future flooding as a consequence of rising sea level.

My colleague and I decided to survey residents of coastal South Florida to better understand how information affected their attitudes and opinions. Did these messages developed by a nonprofit organization change the perceptions of coastal residents who live in low-lying areas about the threat of coastal flooding as a result of sea level rise?

No cause for alarm

‘Cultivate the Possibilities’ is theme of URI Master Gardener symposium, March 7

Featured speaker to discuss “Gardening as if the World Depends on It”

Todd McLeish

 Martin believes that every decision made as a gardener has a significant impact on birds, insects, deer and other elements of the environment, so she wants gardeners to rethink their gardens and their gardening practices.

That’s why she titled her upcoming presentation at the annual gardening symposium at the University of Rhode Island “Gardening as if the World Depends on It.”

“Every single thing that individual gardeners do has an effect on the world, and it’s very fulfilling,” said Martin, who has been gardening since childhood and is the author of Garden in Every Sense and Season. 

“I’ll be discussing things that I’ve discovered while working on my garden that have a much broader impact than you might imagine.”

The symposium, sponsored by the URI Master Gardener Program and designed for gardeners of all abilities, aims to inspire gardeners to take their gardens to the next level. It runs from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, March 7, at the URI Center for Biotechnology and Life Sciences, 120 Flagg Rd., Kingston campus.

Who is born a US citizen?

Citizenship rights for all who were born here
Carol Nackenoff, Swarthmore College and Julie Novkov, University at Albany, State University of New York

Like most of us, Trump came from immigrant stock - recent, in his case.
Their children benefited from the Constitutional principle of birthright
citizenship

A recent court ruling about faraway American Samoa may have profound implications for a conflict that’s been going on for nearly 200 years: who gets to be an American citizen.

Debates over who gets citizenship and what kind of citizenship they get have always been intertwined with race in American history, as we have learned through our individual research on the historical status of Native Americans and African Americans and the research we have done together on restricting Chinese immigration.

Nonetheless, even in the highly racialized political environment of the late 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed an expansive view of birthright citizenship – the idea that people born in a country are automatically citizens of that nation. In an 1898 ruling, the court decreed that the children of immigrants were citizens, regardless of their parents’ ancestry.

That decision laid the groundwork for the 21st-century ruling that people born in the U.S. Pacific island territory of American Samoa are U.S. citizens. If upheld on appeal, the ruling would overturn more than a century of federal policy, including congressional refusal to grant American Samoans citizenship status.

Trump can’t win in November without foreign help

And the Republicans and his MAGAiacs are OK with that

By Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos 

Donald Trump needs foreign help to get reelected in 2020, just the way he needed Russia’s help in 2016.

In fact, Trump has made it perfectly clear to the world that he welcomes foreign interference on his behalf, telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last year, “I think I’d take it.”

Of course, he would—he needs it.

But that’s only what Trump has said in public.

In private, we know that he’s shaking down foreign leaders in any way possible in order to enlist their help in his reelection bid.

That’s exactly what Trump did in the “I would like you to do us a favor though” phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, urging him to investigate his political rivals eight times.

So publicly, Trump’s pushing out open calls for pro-Trump interference by foreign governments and, privately, he’s dropping the hammer on countries that need U.S. support in order to extract help from them in his quest to cheat the American people yet again.

But the mere acknowledgment that Trump will actually receive the help he has sought is cause for heads to roll.

What happens when Trump shoots a guy on 5th Avenue?

 For more cartoons by Ruben Bolling, CLICK HERE. 

How Trump is protecting us from the coronavirus

No cause for alarm

“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart."

Donald Trump, February 24

“It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

Right-wing radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh on February 24.

The Buck Stops Here

Don’t Feed Deer Deadly Corn

By KRISTEN J. DeMORANVILLE/ecoRI News contributor

Christian Floyd, a natural-resource scientist at the University of Rhode Island, spotted an unusual white-tailed deer carcass while birding on the South County Bike Path in mid-January.

Floyd went into the woods for a closer look at the carcass. His inspection revealed that this wasn’t a hunting fatality or natural death; the deer’s stomach looked as if it had exploded. 

The animal’s stomach was enlarged and bursting open with partially digested corn grains. 

The cause of the deer’s death was familiar to Floyd, who recalled a scene from his childhood,” I knew that rumen acidosis was responsible because my favorite goat, Maria, succumbed to the same fate after devouring the chicken feed.”

Ruminants, including deer, goats, and cattle, are a group of animals named after their specialized digestive system that allows them to eat large amounts of nutrient-poor plant material such as grass and woody shrubs. 

No excuses...

Yesterday, February 24, the Dow ended down more than 1,000 points. So when will we see Trump fired into the Sun?

Eating disorders are about emotional pain – not food

Take it from our Westerly neighbor, Taylor Swift
Michele Patterson Ford, Dickinson College

Taylor Swift, one of millions of Americans who has struggled with
an eating disorder. AP Images/Invision/Charles Sykes

In her documentary “Miss Americana,” music icon Taylor Swift disclosed her history of eating disorders. 

Her revelation underscores the fact these disorders do not discriminate. 

According to the advocacy and awareness organization Eating Disorders Coalition, they strike all genders, races, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Despite their prevalence – the problem is worldwide – myths about eating disorders abound. 

Such as that they are a choice. They are not. Or they’re not a big deal. They are. Or that a person with an eating disorder is always severely underweight. Not always.

As a licensed psychologist and psychology professor, I find it’s common for my clients and students to say “A little food helps me with my anxiety” or “I’m not thin enough to have an eating disorder.” 

Such beliefs often prevent people from recognizing they have a problem. More is involved in an eating disorder than food, or body image. Someone gripped by one is attempting to regulate some very difficult and complicated emotions.

Guns don’t make you happier

And guns don’t help you sleep better

By Science News Staff / Source

“We want to understand gun owners’ subjective experiences,” said lead author Dr. Terrence Hill, a researcher in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona.

“We’re trying to understand when guns promote individual well-being, if at all, and that will add to the discussion of the role of guns in our society.”

In the happiness study, Dr. Hill and his colleagues analyzed 27 years of data from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, collected between 1973 and 2018.

While the data initially seemed to point to a positive relationship between gun ownership and happiness, that relationship disappeared when the scientists factored respondents’ marital status into their analysis.

It turned out gun owners were more likely to be married, and being married — not gun ownership — was driving happiness.

When the researchers considered marital status and other variables such as race, religion and education in their analysis, gun owners and non-gun owners exhibited similar levels of happiness.

“Gun owners will often tell you that guns help them to feel safe, secure and protected. They will also tell you that guns empower them and make them feel independent and strong. They also talk about how just holding and handling guns is pleasurable,” Dr. Hill said.

“If guns do make people feel safe, secure and protected, if they are empowering, if they are contributing to feelings of pleasure, then they should promote happiness, but we don’t find any evidence of that. That calls into question whether or not these are real feelings that gun owners have, or are they just part of the culture of owning a gun?”

The data showed no difference between gun owners and non-gun owners in terms of their level of sleep disturbance.