End of Year Top Health Stories of 2009

End of year lists: Top Health Stories of 2009 included the following:

1. Health Care Reform dominated the news with talk about "Death Panels" terrifying seniors who feared being bumped off early to make way for younger patients.  It was, of course, total nonsense.  The mere fact that anyone took it seriously is a sad commentary on the state of our nation.

2. In second place, H1N1 dominated the news.  Patients became frantic about getting vaccines for both the regular flu and H1N1.  The fact that children were at greatest risk for death from H1N1 did not deter older adults from pushing to the front of the line. 



3. Breast cancer recommendations took a leap into the bizarre as women under 50 were advised against mammograms, defying all previous guidelines.  Since my practice partner had her cancer caught at age 48 by a mammogram (link to story), we took particular offense at these recommendations.


4. A story that got a lot of local attention was the banning of smoking in bars. As a rabid anti-smoking fanatic, I still could not get much energy up for this one.  Good grief!  It's a BAR, not the YMCA!!!



5. Finally, a drug too many of us are familiar with, Coumadin, may have finally met its match.  Coumadin is life saving, but a nightmare of deadly side effects.  It is also labor intensive to monitor on the part of both doctors and patients.  A replacement that does not require monitoring may be on the way!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Animating on Paper: The Sneeze 1992

Image
I made my last animation with tracing paper and a pen back in 1992.  At the time, I was mainly drawing with a Summagraphics Sketch Pad attached to a desktop Amiga Computer with a ton of peripherals. Even though they all filled a room, it still only output low resolution video. After a day of traveling 23 years ago, I sat down with a black marker and my tracing pad and drew this animation.  When I got home, I scanned the drawings, colored them and compiled them with triggered sound events in Disney Animation Studio.  Paper drawn animation of this type has an interesting jitter referred to as “Line-Boil.”  Like the early animators, I believed line-boil was a terrible imperfection.  Sometimes, however, it makes the animation interesting.  Around the mid 1990’s and later, television grew to like line-boil and added the deliberate exaggerated effect to many titles and animations. Anyway, I found the original 1992 drawing files for "The Sneeze" and, with some e
Read more

Hospital-Admin-Speak: A new language

Image
Anyone who has ever served time on a hospital administration committee knows what I'm talking about.  This is where the vast difference between the world of hospital administration versus the world of doctors and nurses becomes clear. As a side note for those interested in the process of creating these animations: I experimented with a different method of creating the talking head portion.  The result was not what I wanted, but it was interesting... Here is the comparison video:
Read more

Coronavirus Cartoons

Image
It's easy to forget how early most of us knew Covid-19 could become a real problem.  Experts were downplaying it as a minor hazard compared to influenza.. Not until January 20 was there official acknowledgement the virus could spread from person to person. On that same day, I tried to buy face masks for our office and discovered a disturbing problem:  They were all sold out.   Something was brewing.  Though the American Public was preoccupied with Democratic Primaries and impeachment hearings, many were also aware of the new virus in Wuhan.  By January 23, I felt enough people knew of the threat to create two cartoons: The second cartoon was done at a time when people were entering crowded DMV's to get their new driver's license which would enable them to fly in airplanes.  The lines were insane and the wait was many, many hours. This one did not age well.  I thought it was pretty hilarious at the time and I got a lot of positive feedback.  Now, it looks.... kind of cliche
Read more