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Placebo Gazette #151
(Keeping Our Finger On The Prostate Of Medicine)
5/12/10 |
House Keeping Will Power
Fat Cops
Exposure
Can NFL Players Legally Smoke Weed? Placebo Journal Update
1. House Keeping
The Placebo Gazette is now going out every week instead of every two weeks. It will be shorter but that will allow more conversation around a smaller concentration of subjects. I will also try to have more blogs up during the weekend as well. Enjoy.
2. Will Power
A Yogi in India is perplexing a whole lot of people with his amazing feats
of will power. Supposedly, he has not
drank or taken a bite to eat in 70 years. Prahlad Jani proved it to doctors
by staying 15 days in a hospital and was not observed eating, drinking or going
to the bathroom. Hell, I went to the bathroom twice while writing this blog. No
one knows how he is doing this. I am not sure if this story is a hoax or not but
it sure has media legs. He says he was blessed by a goddess at a young age,
which gave him special powers. I know that if I was blessed by a goddess at a
young age that I would have asked for something a little different than the
ability to not eat or drink. I don't know what exactly I would have wished for
but my hunch is that the goddess would have run or flown away in disgust.
3. Fat Cops
More than a third of the applicants
for the Jackson, Mississippi police force were unable to pass the fitness
test. How sad is that? The test is made up of push-ups, a 1½ mile run, an
obstacle course and a flexibility test. Last year, if was found that that 77% of
fire and emergency medical technician trainees in Massachusetts were obese.
Anyway, if you read the USA Today article you will find my favorite
line:
Some departments have lowered physical strength standards to
avoid discrimination lawsuits.
Is that insane? Somehow I don't think criminals care about being
politically correct when cops are chasing them down. I can just see a police
officer saying, "Slow down until I catch my breath or I'll sue!"
4. Exposure
A report in the Archives of Internal Medicine in December showed that
radiation from CTs cause as much as 29,000 new cancers a year. An article in a
recent
USA Today discussed this at length. I was pleased that they mentioned that
one-third of CT scans aren't medically needed but are performed because of fear
of lawsuits. That's funny, I thought that malpractice issues aren't really a
major problem in this country? That's what the administration said during the
healthcare reform debate. They reinforced this by basically putting
nothing about tort reform in the bill itself. But I digress.
This issue of over-exposure is real. It brings up the point of overtesting (are
CT angiography scans for heart disease worth the risk?) versus rationing. The
truth is that we ration all the time due to cost and risk. We also rationalize
all the time due to not wanting to be sued. The real war is between rationing
vs. rationalizing. Either way someone loses.
FOLLOW this link to comment on this story 5. Can NFL Players Legally Smoke Weed?
One of the New England Patriots draft picks was interrogated pretty hard
for his history of weed use in college. This seemed to be a huge issue for the
young tight end and it is now hanging over his head. Here is a bigger issue, I
think. What if an NFL player for the Raiders or 49ers got caught smoking weed
through one of their drug tests but it was prescribed by his doctor? It is
banned in the NFL but it is legal in California for medical purposes. Who has
more chronic pain issues than professional football players? It seems to me that
a prescription drug would override the drug policy of the NFL but then again I
am no lawyer. This
was brought up by a recent WSJ article. Would some free agent players sign
with teams in states with legalized medical marijuana? Wouldn't that be an
interesting sales pitch for a crappy team? The Raiders need all the help they
can get. Then again, guys like JaMarcus Russell (who was just cut) don't need any more reasons to
eat.
FOLLOW this link to comment on this story Doug Farrago MD King of Medicine
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