Family planning in the Philippines is not about population control,” Dr. Ilem said. “It is a health intervention. We are focusing on women who are too young, too old, too poor or too sick to have babies but their situation does not allow them to stop.
What is going on here? Why have so many people settled on the heartbeat as the best marker of life in-utero? This is not science. It is the tyranny of a metaphor.
For the past six years, I’ve been a standardized patient, or SP. This job is most easily described as being a fake patient, but it’s much more than that. And no, it’s not “just like that one episode of Seinfeld where Kramer pretended to have gonorrhea” (said everyone ever when I tell them what I do). As an SP, I’m a trained professional who teaches med students how to perform standard physical exams. I show them how to use an otoscope (that thing they stick in your ear) or do an abdominal exam and then they practice on me. These days though I specialize in teaching two exams: the breast and pelvic.
So how does one become a professional vagina?
Sometimes you get a call out to one of the little trailer parks, because people do live here even though no one really wants to, and it’s for chest pains, possible heart attack. It’s an older man in a uniform (you decide what kind) pale and sweaty and shaking, his face like dough. He’s got a crocheted afghan in a startling color combination covering his lap, and his wife (you guess she’s the one who made it, she’s got that look) wrings her hands nearby. She’s the one that called you. He’s as mad as he can manage when he can barely breathe.
The paramedic hooks up the EKG.You don’t know how to read the bouncing lines, but even you know it’s not good. Okay, let’s go. We need to get you to the hospital.
“No.
FEW areas of international affairs have seen more recent success than the fight against AIDS. Thirty-one years ago, when it was first noticed, the disease was a death sentence against which there was no appeal. Sixteen years ago, when the first good drugs became available, an appeal became possible, but it cost $10,000 a year—far beyond the means of most sufferers or their governments. Now, as reported to the biennial meeting of the International AIDS Society, held this week in Washington, DC, effective treatment can be had for $200 a year, and more than 8m people are being treated. That is only just over half the 15m who would, according to current guidelines, benefit from taking the drugs. But as a consequence, the number dying each year has fallen from 2.3m in 2005 to 1.7m last year.
Do fat people get fat because they’re hanging out with a bunch of fatties — in other words, is it a causal relationship fostered by shared behaviors? Alternatively, do fat people initially make friends with other fat people simply because, as the study suggests, “birds of a feather flock together,” which would indicate these individuals are connecting because they were already fat in the first place?
OR, do fatties gravitate toward each other based on a biological impulse to pool information about where the best pie can be had in their local community? (OK, I made that one up.)
caro:
Breast cancer has ripped through my family so violently that I’m pretty much guaranteed to get it in a pretty nasty form down the road if I haven’t already managed to get mauled to death by rabid howler monkeys. But I have a good job, great health insurance, and an awesome doctor who is already helping me a lot with regard to prevention and early detection. A lot of women aren’t lucky enough to have any of this.
Komen’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s free cancer screenings for low-income women is yet another reason why the organization disgusts me and will never get a cent from me. It does spend plenty of money on exorbitant executive salaries, showy marketing, and predatory lawsuits against smaller charities that come within a football field’s distance of maybe-possibly-sort-of emulating its logo or messaging. So donate to an organization like BCRF instead, please.
And while you’re at it, I’d recommend throwing some pocket change to Planned Parenthood, which by the way spends most of its time preventing abortions rather than performing them, thanks to educational programs and contraceptive distribution.
(Link via rachelfershleiser)
••••• Ditto. Spread the word —BP
neontummy:
Denmark has imposed a “fat tax” on fatty foods in an effort to convince Danes to eat healthier. The tax is a complex one, in which rates will correspond with the percentage of fat in a product. The value of the tax is about $3.00 for every 2.2 pounds of saturated fat.
Read on here
But it’s not a big deal if the ultrasound tech returns after taking the first set of images to take some more because “the doctors saw something small”, right?
