In a building smack in the middle of chaotic Hyderabad, an hour’s flight from Bangalore, 29-year-old American Brad Fister recently got acquainted with the delirious joy of first-time parenthood.
Fister and his partner Michael Griebe, who own a computer business in Kentucky, contracted a womb from an Indian surrogate mother thousands of miles away in Hyderabad. Their daughter Ashton, conceived in a laboratory out of Fister’s sperm and an anonymous donor’s egg, was born in mid-February.
India has long been the go-to destination for a diversity of outsourced tasks such as answering customer service calls, online tech support and high-end technology services.
Now Americans — and increasingly gay American couples — are follwing American corporations into the world of oursourcing. More:
At Pawan Sinha’s MIT lab, he and his team spend their days trying to understand how the brain learns to recognize and use the patterns and scenes we see around us. To do this, they often use computers to model the processes of the human brain, but they also study human subjects, some of whom are seeing the world for the very first time and can tell them about the experience as it happens. They find these unusual subjects through the humanitarian branch of their research, Project Prakash.
In this talk, Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain’s visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.
New Delhi: Rural youth have more pre-marital sex than their urban counterparts. The less educated are more likely to cast their vote and India’s youth is ill-prepared for employment in a globalised economy. It is information like this that the government hopes will help it understand the ‘vulnerability’ facing the nation’s youth.
In a first of its kind study, researchers and policy makers have tracked key phases in a person’s life, especially concerning health, marriage, civic participation, pre-marital sexual activity and work force participation. The consolidated data of the study — conducted in six states — will be launched by Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Saturday.
Youth in India: Situation and Needs is the first ‘sub-nationally representative’ study undertaken by the government to track key transitions experienced by young people in six states in India. More:
Researchers at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi have developed tomatoes genetically modified to stay fresh for 30 days longer. From The Telegraph, Calcutta:
Plant biologists in India have discovered two previously unknown genes that are involved in fruit ripening and shut them down to create what might be the world’s longest-lasting tomatoes.
The tomatoes developed at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, can retain their firmness and texture for up to 45 days without refrigeration, compared with ordinary tomatoes that shrink and lose texture in about 15 days.
The researchers at the NIPGR have applied their gene-silencing technology on tomatoes, but they say it may also, in theory, be used to increase the shelf life of mangoes, papayas and bananas.
“We’re not adding new genes into tomatoes — the shelf life is increased by shutting down two genes that make the fruits go soft,” said Asis Datta, the senior scientist at the NIPGR who led this research. More:
The past decade has produced thousands of new foodies and new yogis, all interested in healthier bodies, clearer consciences and a greener planet. Inevitably, the overlap between the people who love to eat and the people who love to do eagle pose has grown. In 2007, a combination yoga studio and fine dining restaurant, Ubuntu, opened in Napa, Calif.
Yoga retreat centers now offer gourmet cooking classes and wine tastings; New York yogis trade tips about which nearby ashrams (Anand) and studios (Jivamukti) serve the best muffins.
But not everyone agrees that the lusty enjoyment of food and wine is compatible with yogic enlightenment. Yoga purists say that many foods — like wine and meat — are still off limits. Others, like Mr. Romanelli, say that anything goes, as long as it tastes good. The debate is exposing rich ores of resentment in the yoga world.
“The culture of judgment in the yoga community — I call it “yogier than thou” — is rampant, and nowhere more than around food,” said Sadie Nardini, a yoga teacher in New York. (“Yogis” are those who do yoga, teachers and students alike.) More:
Mehtar Lam, Afghanistan — Knocking on door after door, thousands of volunteers fan out every month across southern and eastern Afghanistan, vaccinating children against polio, a disease eradicated almost everywhere else in the world.
Usually, the volunteers — sent by the government and sponsored by United Nations agencies — bring a single-page letter requesting people to cooperate, “for the benefit of our next generations.” The letter’s signatory: Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed supreme leader of the Taliban.
“We always carry a copy,” says Dr. Attar Wafa, the chief of polio vaccinations in the insurgent-infested province of Laghman, much of which is a no-go area for government workers and foreigners.
The antipolio campaign brings together the Taliban, President Hamid Karzai’s central government, Unicef and the World Health Organization in an uneasy but functioning partnership — one that recognizes the reality of the insurgents’ stranglehold over large chunks of the country. More:
Haridwar, India: At the crack of dawn, 4,000 people sitting on yoga mats silently watched the renowned guru Baba Ramdev on stage. After his introduction as the one who will dispel the darkness of ignorance, the orange-robed Ramdev chanted “Om” into a microphone. The audience followed with a reverential hum.
“Eat this every morning to prevent cancer,” he said, holding up four holy basil leaves.
“No blood pressure and asthma problem if you do this daily. Be free from medicines!” he exclaimed after performing a few yoga postures and demonstrating six breathing techniques. The crowd cheered. More:
A nutritionist claims to have invented an alcoholic cocktail that could prevent festive hangovers by “cleaning” the bloodstream. The vodka-based tipple contains a string of “superfoods” that cleanse the system and ward off the effects of heavy drinking.
It is the brainchild of the British nutritional therapist and Indian “superfood” guru Gurpareet Bains, 32. He said: “This cocktail is about helping people have a good time without having to pay for it the following morning.”
The “Christmas spice-infused acai and pomegranate cocktail”, which has an alcohol by volume rate of 40 per cent, will still cause drunkenness, but its ingredients fight the symptoms of a hangover — commonly a splitting headache, parched mouth and the overwhelming desire to vomit. More:
In the Sunday Express a report from Anand in Gujarat, India’s surrogacy hub and the story of a woman who rented her womb:
Ramilaben Solanki: "This time I am asking for Rs 5 lakh ($10,000) because I am too weak to keep doing it many more times."
Before she pressed her inked thumb on the contract agreement, they had made Ramilaben Solanki understand that she is a womb. No more, no less. They had told her that the baby would be no part of her flesh and blood. That she was its shell, only a shell.
But sitting in the dark of her single-room, tin-roofed hovel—home to nine more people in her extended family—this 27-year-old domestic help in Gujarat’s Anand is still fighting to come to terms with herself. She thinks that the “pink infant with the golden hair and light brown eyes” of his American father, the one she bore and delivered, had come of her. Not through her.
For seven days and nights after, until the American couple from Wisconsin, US—whose sperm, ovum and money helped make her baby—flew in, Ramila had fed him her milk, sung him to sleep. She had also whispered in his ears that he is Deep, younger brother to her own five-year-old daughter, Deepali. More:
Fed up with foreign companies patenting traditional medicine from India, the country’s top scientific body is compiling a giant database of everything from yoga positions to medicinal fruit juice. An AFP report at Physorg.com:
The initiative has had early success since going public in February, repelling two foreign patent applications in July — one for a skin cream based on melon extract and another for a cancer medicine based on pistachios.
Another 30 cases are being examined worldwide, drawing on the database which aims to prove medical precedents and therefore undercut attempts by companies to patent knowledge that has been passed down over generations in India.
V.K. Gupta, the head of this library, known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), told AFP he hoped the database would provide a cheap and easy system to prevent “wrong patents” based on Indian naturopathy.
“Nobody in the world has a right to take our knowledge, repackage it and claim it as theirs,” said Gupta, who works for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
The TKDL already contains 30 million pages and more than 200,000 medicinal formulas derived from herbal and mineral-based treatments originating in India and abroad, such as ayurveda, unani, siddha, as well as yoga techniques. More:
The opening of a film focusing on the rare Progeria disorder is the latest in a spate of Bollywood films about health disorders. The BBC’sPrachi Pinglay looks at why the Indian film industry is departing from its traditional formula to tackle weighty issues such as autism and Alzheimer’s disease.
Auro is 13, but looks 65. He has Progeria – a rare disorder which accelerates ageing in children.
Pia has been married to a man for over 20 years but she does not always remember him. She has Alzheimer’s disease.
Ishaan, eight, is a gifted painter but messes up his numbers and letters. He is dyslexic.
Sanjay Singhania cannot remember how his wife was killed, yet he wants to take revenge. He suffers from “short-term memory loss”, a type of amnesia developed after a traumatic incident.
What links these people?
They all have neurological conditions, and are the protagonists of mainstream Hindi films released in the last two years. more
Last summer, while watching a news program about a possible AIDS vaccine, Zach Barnett had a “Eureka!” moment. The show was describing a Texas scientist’s unorthodox approach to vaccine-making, a strategy that involved superantigens and covalent bonds and a lot of other words that weren’t in Barnett’s vocabulary. That didn’t matter; the science turned him on anyway. “It was just so cool,” he says. “I was like, ‘lightbulb!’ “
For years, Barnett, a fashion publicist, had been trying to get involved in AIDS activism, but mainstream organizations had told him there wasn’t much for him to do, save passing out brochures. “That was a waste of my talent,” he says. Here he saw a use for his skills. He wrote to the scientist, Dr. Sudhir Paul of the University of Texas, to tell him that “if what he was saying was true, he was doing a bad job of publicizing it.” To show he was serious, he offered Paul $50 out of his own pocket to support the research. More:
In India, a factory model for hospitals is cutting costs and yielding profits. Geeta Anand in the Wall Street Journal:
Hair tucked into a surgical cap, eyes hidden behind thick-framed magnifying glasses, Devi Shetty leans over the sawed open chest of an 11-year-old boy, using bright blue thread to sew an artificial aorta onto his stopped heart.
As Dr. Shetty pulls the thread tight with scissors, an assistant reads aloud a proposed agreement for him to build a new hospital in the Cayman Islands that would primarily serve Americans in search of lower-cost medical care. The agreement is inked a few days later, pending approval of the Cayman parliament.
Dr. Shetty, who entered the limelight in the early 1990s as Mother Teresa’s cardiac surgeon, offers cutting-edge medical care in India at a fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world. His flagship heart hospital charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery. More:
Mumbai: An Indian doctor claims to be able to beat a variety of incurable or terminal illnesses using embryonic stem cells — and is charging as much as £30,000 for a single course of treatment.
Medical researchers are deeply sceptical of Geeta Shroff’s claims, and brand many rogue stem-cell physicians dangerous quacks offering expensive, unproven and potentially dangerous treatments that are banned in Britain.
Some of her patients, however, insist that they are getting better.
Dr Shroff says she has treated 700 people, including several Britons, since 2002, by injecting them with embryonic stem cells capable of replicating themselves and of giving rise to almost any specialised cell type. She says all the cells she uses are derived from a single unwanted embryo left over from an IVF treatment.
The results, she claims, have been remarkable. More:
Actor and model Lisa Ray chronicles her journey through cancer and its lessons in a blog. From Mint Lounge:
In June, model and actor Lisa Ray was diagnosed with multiple myeloma — an incurable cancer of the white blood cells. In between getting blood transfusions, trying to retain a normal life and attending press conferences for her new film, Ray decided to write a blog: The Yellow Diaries. Partly sardonic, partly heartbreaking, it’s a glimpse into her personal journey and the journey of those who are battling cancer. Edited excerpts:
From the marrow
7 September 2009
A few months ago my bone marrow started sending me messages.
The signals: I was always exhausted, pale, drained, and completely depleted of red blood cells. The lack of oxygen made me a serial yawner and spacier than a displaced Czarina. Little did I know, but my haemoglobin had fallen to levels where even a dedicated bloodsucker would turn their thoughts to revival. In between work and travel in India this year, I got a routine blood test and the results sent me to the hospital for a blood transfusion.
But not a reason to stop and, like, change my life?
The attempt to communicate probably started earlier. Time when I was ‘busy’. Building a career and impersonating myself. Travelling a lot and stock-piling impressions and drama and super-hyped destinations and a life in ‘art’. So I couldn’t hear my marrow gently carbonating. Trying to get my attention. Instead of tuning in to my body, I tuned out like a landlocked pirate tuning out the sounds of the sea.
And then I stopped travelling and returned to Canada. Got myself tested by Dr Susy Lin, landed in emergency and eventually got full membership into the Cancer Club.
Dr. Sudhir Paul is a scientist at the very forefront of HIV research. A graduate of AIIMS, Delhi, he is currently Professor and Director of the Chemical Immunology Research Center at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. Click here to link to an article that describes his research:
Scientists working to develop a vaccine for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) report they have created the first antigen that induces protective antibodies capable of blocking infection of human cells by genetically-diverse strains of HIV. The new antigen differs from previously-tested vaccines by virtue of its chemically-activated property that enables close sharing of electrons and produces strong covalent bonding.
On their third trip to India, Rhonda and Gerry Wile finally heard a sound they thought they might never hear: the heartbeat of their unborn child.
Four nerve-racking months after that joyful ultrasound moment, their son arrived on Aug. 26 at 10:22 p.m. weighing 2.7 kilograms and sporting wisps of dark hair. They named him Blaze Xennon Wile, the middle name chosen from a book of baby names that gave its meaning as “from a foreign or faraway land.”
“It seems unreal. We hold him and kiss him a thousand times a day,” Mr. Wile says. “It’s so lucky that it worked out for us.”
For the Wiles, a married couple who live in Arizona, the birth was the culmination of four years of trying to conceive. Theirs was a path marked by wrenching disappointment, a failed pregnancy, many hours on the Internet — and long airplane trips. The determination to produce a child that is at least partly their genetic offspring led them finally on a high-tech passage to India, where they hired a surrogate to bear their baby. More:
Sujoy Guha, a biomedical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, believes that the most critical problems are a result of artificial hearts attempting to mimic the real thing.
The human heart has four chambers, but only the left ventricle is responsible for building the pressure that moves blood around the body. Depending on one chamber to do the hard work places this part of an artificial heart under enormous strain.
Dr Guha likens the process to trying to scale a four-foot rise in just one bound. “Do it too often and your knees will give way,” he said. “Much better to use a series of small steps.”
The sudden build-up of pressure inside conventional artificial hearts can also damage blood cells, Dr Guha said. This can lead to clotting and strokes, and means that patients must be given anti-coagulants, which place them at risk of severe bleeding. More:
Little Cumbrae (Scotland): The Scottish island of Little Cumbrae, whose long and chequered history takes in the Vikings, Robert The Bruce of “try, try again” fame and Oliver Cromwell, is witnessing the arrival of three wise men from the East.
From their retreats in Haridwar and Rishikesh high up in the Himalayas, the trinity – Baba Ramdev, Swami Chidanand and Acharya Balkrishna – have come bearing blessings for the Hawan ceremony and bhoomi puja.
This is because Little Cumbrae is being transformed into “a place of pilgrimage” for followers of Patanjali yoga by the island’s new owners, Sarwan and Sunita Poddar, who bought the island for £2 million (Rs 15.2 crore) last month.
As a fast “rib boat” sped across the Firth of Clyde from the marina at Largs on the Ayrshire coast, Ramdev was dressed the part from his saffron shawl and dhoti down to his fashionable saffron trainers. Only the life jacket he and all the others were required to wear was more a shade of red.
The breeze ruffled Swami Chidanand’s long hair, while it emerged that Acharya Balkrishna, who preaches Ayurveda, had visited the island on a previous occasion to advise the Poddars on their purchase. More:
Atul Gawande, “slightly bewildered” surgeon and health-policy scholar-and a literary voice of medicine. Elizabeth Gudrais in Harvard Magazine:
One Wednesday last April, Atul Gawande was in his office at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, trying to make some progress on a New Yorker article about disparities in healthcare spending. He kept getting paged when other physicians thought their patients might need surgery. By late afternoon, there had been a few false alarms: he visited patients and ruled against operating. Responding to a page about an elderly man who had had heart surgery the previous week and was now in severe abdominal pain, Gawande got on the phone with the surgical resident and pulled up an MRI on his computer screen. He navigated through digital slices of the patient’s abdomen, squinting at the screen, then agreed to meet the resident at the patient’s room. As he got up from his desk, his movements took on a sense of purpose. “I think this one’s real,” he said.
Gawande had seen that part of the man’s colon was ischemic -dead and gangrenous-and had ceased to move waste out of the body. He wasn’t sure about the cause, but suspected a blood clot. One thing was clear: without immediate surgery, the colon would rupture.
After examining the patient, Gawande conferred with the resident in the corridor outside the man’s room. He went through a familiar and well-practiced set of actions that he seemed to do without thinking: slipping his ring finger into his mouth to moisten it, working his wedding band off, unbuckling his watchband, threading it through the ring, and refastening it, all the while carrying on a conversation about stopping the patient’s anti-clotting medication and getting a vascular surgeon to assist.
One moment, this patient’s children had thought he was on the mend from cardiac surgery. The next, they were having to process the fact that he faced near-certain death if he didn’t undergo another procedure with its own dangers. Suddenly, a life was in Gawande’s hands. The New Yorker would have to wait. More:
The world’s first hospital in a train has performed more than 81,000 surgeries since its launch in India. Those who benefit most are the poor and needy. Jerry Pinto reports in the National:
It’s a hot afternoon in Udaipur, a small town in Rajasthan, best known for the Lake Palace Hotel that floats like a fevered dream in the middle of a rapidly drying lake. With temperatures reaching 40C in the shade, it’s not the best time to be travelling 200km with a four-year-old child. But Rajan and his son Chander don’t care. They’ve travelled for nine hours now, walking some of the way, taking a city bus for a while and then walking again from the bus depot until they’ve joined a line of people, waiting outside platform one of Udaipur City Station. They’re powered by a dream.
Chander was born with a cleft lip. At the Lifeline Express, the world’s first hospital in a train, a plastic surgeon will give him a new face.
“It’s not just a new face,” says Zelma Lazarus, the chief executive officer of Impact India, the United Nations-affiliated non-governmental organisation that runs the train. “It’s a new life.”
She’s not exaggerating. In rural India, a child with a cleft lip is said to be possessed by the devil. “The boys become beggars; the girls go into prostitution,” says Lazarus. “It’s a terrible thing and it’s easily avoided. Surgery takes about 30 to 45 minutes.” More:
Actress Lisa Ray is suffering from Multiple myeloma, a relatively rare and incurable cancer of the white blood cells. Ray has announced her condition in her blog, The Yellow Diaries.
“I’ve started this blog to give people an insight into my life,” she wrote on September 3. “The yellow diaries will be a place where I write about my personal journey.” More:
I was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma on June 23rd. Started my first cycle of treatment July 2nd. Not long ago.
For me, it was a relief to hear what was wrong. The plasma cells in my bone marrow were rampaging, multiplying, squeezing out the red blood cells and it was time to begin doing something about it. I was also tired of being tired all the time. And you just know when something is not kosher with your body. So when I sat there with Bobcat- my life partner and reservoir of Yellow- and got the news I didn’t react and I didn’t cry. I’m an actress, believe me, I can be dramatic. Not just then though.
First the facts.
Myeloma is incurable.
It’s a relatively rare cancer of the bone marrow that affects about 6000 Canadians. Every year, approximately 2100 more cases are diagnosed. More:
Baba Ramdev attracts thousands of devotees to his open-air yoga sessions, from political powerbrokers and business barons to their drivers and maids. Now he is branching out from his spiritual headquarters on the Ganges to a tiny island in the Firth of Clyde.
This month the superstar swami, one of India’s most charismatic and controversial gurus, will attend a ceremony on Little Cumbrae to mark the start of his new project, the creation of an “international base” for his expanding yogic empire.
Little Cumbrae was bought recently for about £2 million by two Scottish devotees of Baba Ramdev, Sam and Sunita Poddar. The couple, who moved from India 32 years ago and made a fortune running care homes, are renaming it Peace Island. Within 18 months it is hoped that Peace Island will start welcoming pilgrims to retreats, where they will practise strict vegetarianism, stretching routines and circular breathing exercises. More:
Bikram Choudhury loves Bentleys, bling and shopping, making him the true spiritual guru for the consumer age. In the Times:
I have a 10-pack! Still I have a 10-pack!” The Beverly Hills “bad boy” of yoga, Bikram Choudhury, who owns a fleet of 40 Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, and has a global army of acolytes sweating it out to his copyrighted “hot yoga” sequence at temperatures of 40C, is keen to prove he has defied his 63 years. The diminutive mogul leaps up like a coiled spring from the sofa of his luxurious Park Lane suite -- black candyfloss ponytail bouncing beneath a trilby concealing his bald patch -- and yanks up his disco top to reveal a yoga-trim torso and chest stubble (he teaches only in Speedos and a radio mike: perhaps he shaves for aerodynamics).
Sufficiently famous to ditch the surname, Bikram is his very own poster boy. He insists he never gets sick, doesn’t sleep (no, he hasn’t been to bed, having just had “a kind of party”) and doesn’t eat -- well, just a little protein in the late evening. But, then, the Calcutta-born yogiraj may not even be 63. “I don’t say my date of birth,” he smiles enigmatically. But it’s on your website -- 1946. He won’t budge. “I feel 20 years old,” he declares emphatically. Bikram Yoga, now with more than 4,000 studios and rising worldwide, is seen by its legions of devotees as a cure-all. Andy Murray raved about it after taking it up this year -- the toughness helps his mental strength, he says. The Williams sisters practise it, as do all the New York Giants. And Lily Allen. And Madonna. And, erm, Peter Mandelson, who has been on the phone. “He wanted me to make more yoga schools,” Bikram deadpans. “Since he’s been doing my yoga, he write me that his life changed. He feel everything so clear, he could do things much more faster.” Phew. More:
The latest yoga fad: Doggy yoga (aka doga)
“Dogis” sleep better and are more chilled, apparently. Aids available are Om balls and chewable, squeakerless Shanti Sticks (bodhitoys.com). Barking.
Their heads are too large or too small, their limbs too short or too bent. For some, their brains never grew, speech never came and their lives are likely to be cut short: these are the children it appears that India would rather the world did not see, the victims of a scandal with potential implications far beyond the country’s borders.
Some sit mutely, staring into space, lost in a world of their own; others cry out, rocking backwards and forwards. Few have any real control over their own bodies. Their anxious parents fret over them, murmuring soft words of encouragement, hoping for some sort of miracle that will free them from a nightmare.
Health workers in the Punjabi cities of Bathinda and Faridkot knew something was terribly wrong when they saw a sharp increase in the number of birth defects, physical and mental abnormalities, and cancers. They suspected that children were being slowly poisoned.
But it was only when a visiting scientist arranged for tests to be carried out at a German laboratory that the true nature of their plight became clear. The results were unequivocal. The children had massive levels of uranium in their bodies, in one case more than 60 times the maximum safe limit. More:
In November 2008, the Hindustan Times’ LiveMint broke the story of an infant in Bangalore having died after being administered a vaccine in a drugs trial. The Drugs Controller-General of India (DCGI), Dr Surinder Singh, halted the testing, reportedly the first time that the office of the DCGI had taken such action. The trial, for a new pneumonia vaccine, was being conducted by a Hyderabad-based contracted research organisation, GVK Biotech, for the US-based multinational Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. The infant had been recruited from St. John’s Medical College, a reputed private medical institution in Bangalore.
GVK’s spokesperson claimed that the vaccine had nothing to do with the death, as the child had received an approved and widely used vaccine – not the experimental product. However, the DCGI’s investigation revealed that the infant had a heart condition, and that the trial had been meant to be conducted only on healthy babies. According to C M Gulhati, editor of the Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, India and a Delhi-based expert on clinical-trial regulations, the investigation revealed a number of other irregularities as well: the informed-consent document had not been signed before the child was recruited; and the St John’s ethics committee had not been properly constituted, as it was not chaired by an external member to ensure independent functioning.
Yet the infant’s death was not an aberration. More:
And more on the subject in the August issue of Himal Southasian:
India’s new health minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad believes that one way for India to curb its growing population is through better entertainment television. The more time people spend watching television, they less time they’ll spend, ummm, making babies. Do you agree? Send us your comments and suggestions to stem India’s population march forward. Meanwhile, on the Times of India, film-maker Mahesh Bhatt agrees with Azad: good entertainment is the best contraceptive.
Thou shalt gratify, not edify’ is the maxim we entertainers live by. It has always been this way. Small wonder the village dancing girls always threatened to take away the pontification priest’s audience. Unsurprising then, that in this age of instant gratification, the only way to wean oneself off something is to replace it. Mother Nature has always lured us mortals into a honey trap of happy copulation by ensuring the act is the zenith of pleasurable experience. All this in order that man self-perpetuates. In India, the Shivaling — a symbol of the male organ mating with the female — is enshrined in the inner sanctum of the temple. It is a reinforcement of the place given to pleasure in our culture. more
Sandeep Jauhar, director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and author of Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation, on the rising commercialisation of the medical profession, in the New York Times.
Doctor cupcakes/cc-clever cupcakes
To meet the expenses of my growing family, I recently started moonlighting at a private medical practice in Queens. On Saturday mornings, I drive past Chinese takeout places and storefronts advertising cheap divorces to a white-shingled office building in a middle-class neighborhood.
I often reflect on how different this job is from my regular one, at an academic medical center on Long Island. For it forces me, again and again, to think about how much money my practice is generating.
A patient comes in with chest pains. It is hard not to order a heart-stress test when the nuclear camera is in the next room. Palpitations? Get a Holter monitor — and throw in an echocardiogram for good measure. It is not easy to ignore reimbursement when prescribing tests, especially in a practice where nearly half the revenue goes to paying overhead.
One consequence of the high cost of medical care in the United States has been the rise of medical tourism. Every year, thousands of Americans undergo surgery in other countries because the allure of good care at half the price is too good to pass up.
Average total fees at well-regarded hospitals like Apollo and Wockhardt in India are 60 percent to 90 percent lower than those of the average American hospital, according to a 2007 study by the consulting group Mercer Health and Benefits (where Dr. Milstein is affiliated). Even compared with low-cost American hospitals, the offshore fees are 20 percent to 50 percent lower. More:
The infant girl, Gloria Thomas, died of complications due to eczema. Eczema. This is an easily-treatable skin condition (the treatments don’t cure eczema but do manage it), but that treatment was withheld from the baby girl by her parents, who rejected the advice of doctors and instead used homeopathic treatments. more
