From The Pages Of Pills-A-Go-Go. The Best Piece Of Drug Swag Ever.

It's exactly what it looks like my friends. A shit-inspiring CD from the makers of the country's leading vegetable laxative. Get the food a-flowing with tunes from REO Speedwagon, Toto, Eddie Money and Rick Springfield.

What do you suppose those bands had to do to get onto their record company's literal shit list? BRRRRAAAAAHAHHHAAAHHHHAAAHHAAAAAA.........

Anyway, like I said, I got the tip to this little gem from Pills-A-Go-Go. Which I'm starting to think just may be the best book ever. You can buy a copy of both book and CD from Amazon. At least for now. 'Cause I just snapped up the next to last copy of the shit music.

Drugmonkey, I Love Love Love Your Book, But You Don't Write As Much Now That You're A Responsible Business Owner, What's A Person To Do?

I hear you my friends, and I feel your pain so much I went out and found another book to ease your withdraw symptoms. I love this book my friends. I. Love. This. Book. I could waste your time explaining why, or I could just put up an excerpt and let you see for yourself. From "pills-a-go-go" by Jim Hogshire.

Buy a copy of it right now.

Pill-hounds are not only the ones who hate pharmacists: practically everybody hates them. In turn, pharmacists hate everyone back and, for that brief moment when they are in charge of your medical treatment, they will jack you around out of pure spite. 

A pharmacist shuffling papers behind his altar-like counter won't look up when you arrive. He won't even grunt before he's good and ready to peer down at you and acknowledge your existence. Then he will make you talk out loud about your medical problems. Sometimes, he will challenge your prescription. Hmmmmm, you got the clap, dontcha? Prozac, eh? Don't look depressed to me. Isn't it a little early for you to be refilling this codeine? In fact, I'm not sure you should have any more codeine. He will make you grovel. That's what he lives for. 

How did the pharmacist become so odious? Does pharmacy inherently attract people who naturally seethe with inner malice while maintaining a stony facade? Are they born this way or does something happen to them? Unfortunately, there is no evidence that pharmacists have a genetic problem. Like sadistic prison guards, they are largely creations of their surroundings. Something about the job ruins them. 

THE BIG SCAM
The sadistic process of twisting a pharmacist's psyche begins in college. Pharmacy school is rough--you can't get through it without advanced calculus, chemistry and super dedication. Pharmacy school lasts at least five years. And it costs a lot. 

No one would endure pharmacy school for the chance to count pills, let alone to be hated by customers and held in contempt by doctors. So, to make students cram pharmacokinetics (which they will never use on the job), the schools tell big, outright lies. They promise that their graduates will be liked, and will hold an esteemed position in medicine, in society even. 

Students are told again and again about the high degree of trust placed upon pharmacists by patients and doctors. They see pictures of kindly people in smooth coats holding up test-tubes and being beamed at by old ladies. They are shown photocopies of a folklorish survey indicating how certain professions are trusted. Pharmacists, they see, are only a notch or two below Supreme Court Justice--and far above a doctor. 

This is the opposite of reality, of course, which just makes the hoax crueler. When you see a pharmacy student, what you are looking at is someone who just wants to be liked and valued by their community, slaving away for respectability and honor they will never get. 

THE SUCKER PUNCH
The reality of pharmacy is that it is a service industry, not much different than a dry cleaners. Pharmacists are not pillars of the community, they are pill-counters and stock boys. And respect? Please. 

Instead of being part of a benevolent triangle of medical care, the pharmacist finds himself at the butt end of an abusive process nobody likes. It probably doesn't take more than one day on the job to show a newly minted pharmacist that he or she has been tricked, and it's little wonder pharmacists are five times as likely to kill themselves than the average person, or that only psychiatrists (narrowly) finish before pharmacists in the sad race for most suicidal profession. 

Think about it: customers arrive at the pharmacy because they have been hurt or are sick. They have already made the trek to the doctor's office, lost a day of work, been kept waiting and charged a hundred bucks to spend three minutes with a doctor who hands them a piece of paper. Now they have taken the bus to the drugstore and are about to be appalled by the money they are going to shell out to this grump behind a counter so high it makes them feel like a three-year-old. They are not happy to be there. They are, in fact, quite unhappy. And nothing the pharmacist does is going to make them happy. But--too bad--the pharmacist isn't all that content himself. He's been swindled so badly he's never going to trust anyone again. 

The collision between sick, ripped-off patient and tired, ripped-off pharmacist is as predictable, and mean, as a cockfight. The customer grumbles at the pharmacist, asks some ridiculous question--or any question at all--and the pharmacist sneers and usually doesn't respond. The phone is ringing. The people standing in line start clearing their throats. The pharmacist shoots a few withering looks, then doles out the pills. Slowly. Sufficiently abased, the customer begins to limp home. The pharmacist waits for more abuse. Since old people take the most medicine, the majority of his customers are old people--cranky old people who complain about prices and ask the same stupid questions a thousand times a day. This is just more gravel in the pharmacist's shoes. 

There are no test-tubes in sight. No mortar and pestles, no hand-in-hand work with the doctor. In fact, there are no real prescriptions anymore. A clerk in a pizza joint has a more complex job than a pharmacist. Doctors prescribe ready-made medicines, often by brand name. Doctors decide if a generic can be substituted. The pharmacist just gets the right bottle of pills and starts counting. Substitute birdseed for the pills, and a competent pigeon could do your pharmacist's job. There is simply no pharmacy going on in a pharmacy. All those nights of midnight oil, learning absorption rates of alkenes into mucous membrane mean nothing now. That was just the price for a pill-selling license. And pharmacy school didn't breathe a word of this. 

Neither did the school teach any of the practical skills the pharmacist genuinely needs. They didn't teach how to run a cash register, or catch shoplifters, or even how to identify pills. Pharmacy students can draw the molecular structure of almost any drug but cannot visually ID or even name the top twenty pills they will sell. Then there's pill-counting--the most obvious part of pharmacy drudgery. Just how much organic chemistry is necessary to count pills? This is even more humiliating since the number of pills in a bottle is one of the few things a pharmacist/pigeon can screw up. It's also something the old bag snapping about high prices can and will check. 

Of course, as the years grind by under the fluorescent lights behind the silly counter, the pharmacist eventually learns all this. But it's all on-the-job, hard-gained knowledge. And in learning it, hearts are broken. All the bad land sold in Florida cannot have caused the pain a single pharmacist feels by the time you see him there among the pills. 

PILL COUNTERS VERSUS DOCTORS
Pharmacists are not taught to read doctor handwriting, which is unfortunate because all the jokes about this subject are true: most doctors really do have shitty handwriting and the inability to read it can lead to serious mistakes. People have been killed by script fuck-ups and pharmacists commonly mis-dispense drugs due to errors in reading the prescription. Then they get sued and kicked out of the business forever. The doctor, of course, is unaffected. 

So this is a very real problem. But calling the doctor's office for clarification of a prescription just makes the pharmacist a pest. The receptionist treats him like an irritant. The doctor treats him like an idiot. Should the pharmacist have any other "problems" with a prescription, he comes dangerously close to questioning the doctor's wisdom--and may incur the doctor's wrath. And doctors are often angry, angry people with a lot of resentments of their own about the way their educations turned out and the way society views them. So the brittle ego of a pharmacist will not allow him to risk calling a doctor every time he thinks there's something wrong with a script. Mostly, the pharmacist just lives with the fear and uncertainty, which only adds to his or her time-bomb-like personality.

The rest of the book is less pharmacist specific, but as the title promises, full of pill type subversive goodies. You will learn and you will laugh. You will be offended, because if a writer isn't offending someone than he is probably boring. In a prefect world you could use your APhA discount to get it. As it is though, the APhA strives for nothing but non-offensiveness, so you'll have to pay full retail .

You won't regret it one bit. You're welcome.

Book Review Number 5. Remember When CIGNA Killed Nataline Sarkisyan?

I do. I wrote about it at the time and hope to never forget it. Nataline was a 17 year old California girl who fell seriously ill and needed a liver transplant. At least that's what her doctors said. A paper pusher at CIGNA said she didn't though, and I'll bet you know who won that argument. Nataline is dead. A massive public outcry that did manage to embarrass CIGNA into changing its mind wasn't enough to save her. She died two hours after the company reversed its decision. A story that is literally uniquely American.

Wendell Potter remembers too. He was head of corporate communications for CIGNA at the time, and as such, it was his job to put the best possible spin on this story. To make the company that denied a teenage girl her last chance at life somehow look not evil. "Our deepest sympathies are with the Sarkisyan family" Potter wrote after Nataline's death. Sympathies so deep evidently, that a few months later CIGNA employees heckled and gave the finger to the dead girl's mother when she came to CIGNA's headquarters to talk about what happened.

I'm not kidding you. Employees of CIGNA gave the "fuck you" gesture to the mother of the girl they helped kill. If this Obamacare thing stands though, we might have heartless bureaucrats making life or death decisions about our healthcare. Can't have that.

Dealing with the Sarkisyan story broke Potter. He doesn't write about the heckling in his 2010 book Deadly Spin, An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out On How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care And Deceiving Americans, he does write about being relieved at the time that CIGNA wasn't mentioned by name in most of the headlines in the first wave of news stories and blog posts that followed Nataline's death, and he does tell of how the whole experience managed to finally awaken the long dormant humanity that was present in an insurance executive's soul. How a process that began the day he witnessed Americans desperate for medical treatment line up at a county fairground a day in advance of a charity health clinic...

The scene inside was surreal. I felt as if I'd stepped into a movie set or a war zone. Hundreds of people, many of them soaking wet from the rain that had been falling all morning, were waiting in lines that stretched out of view. As I walked around, I noticed that some of those lines led to barns and cinder block buildings with row after row of animal stalls, where doctors and nurses were treating patients. other people were being treated by dentists under open-sided tents. Many were lying on gurneys on rain soaked pavement. Except for curtains serving as makeshift doors on the animal stalls, there was little privacy...Dentists were pulling teeth and filling cavities, ...doctors and nurses were doing Pap smears and mammograms, surgeons were cutting out skin cancers.

  ...came to fruition when he had to become the point man for the company that denied a chance at life to a fully insured client. Wendell Potter quit his job, testified in front of a Senate Committee on how insurance companies "confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors", and he wrote this book  Wendell Potter was broken, and he confessed.

He confessed to the ways you are manipulated by the modern corporate public relations machine. Ever wonder why so many people insist that the government "Keep their hands off my Medicare?" Why so many people continued to believe cigarettes and cancer weren't related even after being buried in an avalanche of evidence? After reading this, you'll have an inkling as to how people can be convinced to say and believe the absurd. You'll learn how the demise of the Clinton health care reform plan led to a significant factor in today's health care mess, the transformation of Blue Cross and Blue Shields from an association of non-profit health insurers into for-profit public stock companies. You'll find out that because of a law intended to protect retiree's pension plans, you have for all intents and purposes no right to sue your health insurer when it denies you care, even if it leaves you looking death square in the face.  Like any confession, it is informative, educational, and a voyeuristic window into how things really work on the dark side.

It's also unsatisfying. It should feel better to have Wendell Potter on our side, able to bear witness to the truths we have been shouting from rooftops for so long, but I found the book depressing, merely reinforcing my belief that to be on the opposite side of money in a fight is to be a permanent underdog, no matter if truth is in your corner. For every Wendell Potter there are hundreds if not thousands just like he used to be, bought and paid for and kept in line with a river of dollars, while Wendell will spend the rest of his life with nothing but the meager power of truth on his side.

If you are the type that is interested in the truth though, then by all means give the book a read. Remember as you do though, Nataline Sarkisyan is still, and will always remain, in her grave.

Deadly Spin on Amazon.      

On Barnes and Noble

Or find it at a library near you. 

Hey! Buy My Book!

I can say that now because my book is real! Seriously. The rollout starts today my friends. You can buy a copy at the createspace store right here, right now. An amazon.com listing is coming in about a week, and it should be good to go on the kindle in about 14 days.

I'm not kidding you. I wrote a book. And you can buy it right now.

Why should you? Because it's hilarious. Like I've said, most of it is regurgitated blog material, but I don't have to tell you this blog is a goddamn gold mine. All I had to do was get me one of those prospecting pans and stand in the creek for awhile to come up with 201 pages of solid gold.

Why else? Because with every copy sold an angel in heaven loses its wings, falls out of the sky, and crashes right on the pointy little head of Lloyd Duplantis of Gray, Louisiana. The ending of the book is original material, and if you were shocked, humiliated and/or downright frightened when Lloyd, Karen Bauer, and the rest of those goons at Pharmacists For Life International tried to hijack our profession a few years ago, you'll be happy to know this book's ending will have them frothing at the mouth. The ending of this book may just teach them a thing or two they wish they hadn't learned.

A thing or two they definitely don't want you to know. Guaranteed.

And on top of all that, you might win a free T-shirt. My dear e-friend ThatDeborahGirl has been kind enough to offer to send me ten Drugmonkey based T-shirts she made as part of her screenprinting class. Since I am not only this book's author but chief copy editor, I worry that I might have missed a typo or two. So here's the deal, buy a book, find a typo, point it out to me, and get a free shirt. Everyone wins. You get a shirt and I get out of hiring a copy editor.

And Lloyd Duplantis gets to live with the fact that if it weren't for him inspiring me to do this, the information at the end of this book may have stayed buried forever.

So yeah, you should totally buy a copy now.

My Book Report.

It's still rough. Like a big mound of clay just starting to take shape.

The preliminary title: Why Your Prescription Takes So Damn Long To Fill; A Foul-Mouthed Pharmacist Breaks The Curse Of Evel Knievel, Finds His Place In The World, And Strikes Back At The Ideological Forces That Threaten The Profession, And Your Health.

Most of what'll end up in there you can find here in the blog garden. My plan is to have a format somewhat David Sedaris-essay like using a lot of the material here. Material which, in case you haven't noticed, kicks ass. The book'll have an overall narrative while jumping around with Family Guy style non-sequiturs as it goes along to its final destination.While there is some value added compared to the raw blog material, the ending is where I really get off asking you to pay for it. I really like the ending. There's a good chance the ending, even if you are well embedded within the profession, will teach you a bit of practical pharmacology you didn't know.

And Lloyd Duplantis of Gray, Louisiana will hate the ending. Which is why I plan on dedicating the book to him. Because I want him to know the book never would have happened had he not inspired me to write it.

So here's the thing. While I am confident I can provide a superior reading experience, hell, I just kept myself entertained reading through the raw manuscript for the last half hour, I want some feedback before I sink the amount of time it will take into honing this sword to razor-sharpness. Would any of you actually consider buying this? Seriously. I know it's taking it to a whole different level to ask someone to part with money, but I also know I just got back from Borders, and I saw a lot of crap there.

Lemmie know. I set up a poll on the right hand side of the page.

Book Review #4. If You're Healthy And/Or Alive, It May Have A Lot To Do With A Poor Black Woman You've Never Heard Of.

Because if you're healthy and/or alive, chances are you've benefited from medical research at some point. Maybe you've never contracted polio. Maybe you did contract a nasty infection of some sort and were cured with an antibiotic. Perhaps you had a lab test that saved you from an agonizing death. If so, you can probably thank Henrietta Lacks, a woman who did die an agonizing death from cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in 1951. You probably don't know why you should be thankful though, and if it weren't for Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks, which I finally got around to reading last week, you probably never would.

The book is the story of how a slice of Henrietta's tumor, taken without her knowledge or consent as she was dying, became the HeLa cell line, the first human cells to be successfully grown in culture and the foundation for a plethora of medical research. Henrietta's cells have been sent into space, blasted with radiation, infected with who knows how many pathogens and continue to this day to be a workhorse of science. There are more than 17,000 patents based on HeLa cells, and you can spend anywhere from $100 to almost $10,000 on HeLa products for your own science projects if you're so inclined.The family will get none of that though, and no one even bothered to tell them any of this was happening. Think about that for a second. Someone took a piece of your mother, grew her in a lab and now parts of her are bought and sold all across the globe. And no one bothered to tell you. The family had no idea for 22 years. They found out when one of them had a chance conversation with a man who worked at the National Cancer Institute. "I ordered them from a supplier just like everybody else" he said.

The book is far more than a tale of science however. Let me be clear. While it took me forever to open the book after I ordered it, once I did I couldn't put it down. It reads like the best of fiction while pouring knowledge into your head whether you realize it or not. Ever wonder why there are so many African-Americans in Northern cities when slavery was an institution of the south? The Great Migration is probably the most significant event you'll never read about in an American History book, but you'll see it illustrated here as Skloot traces Lacks' ancestry from the plantation through the modern mean streets of Baltimore. You'll be taken back to a time when doctors could be both humble enough to make their own lab equipment and arrogant enough to purposely inject patients with cancer cells just to see what would happen. You'll gain a perspective of how utterly horrifying mental institutions were a generation or two ago and of what life is like for today's urban poor. There are a million subtle lessons in this book, none of them uninteresting.

Most important though, are the lessons in humanity as you follow the Lacks family's struggle to understand and come to terms with what happened to Henrietta. At one point a researcher who used HeLa cells to develop fluorescence in situ hybridization, a technique Skoot says "to the untrained eye simply creates a beautiful mosaic of colored chromosomes," presented a giant print of Henrietta's cells to her daughter, Deborah. Henrietta had died before Deborah had any memory of her, and "more than anything" she said earlier in the book, she wanted to learn about her mother and what her cells had done for science.

"You know what I really want? I want to know, what did my mother smell like? For all my life I just don't know anything, not even the little common little things, like what color did she like? Did she like to dance? Did she breastfeed me? Lord I'd like to know that. But nobody ever say nothing." 

Deborah's brother, Zakariyya, spent time in jail for killing a man and struggled to deal with violent tendencies his whole life. "Maybe her cells have done good for some people, but I woulda rather had my mother. If she hadn't been sacrificed, I mighta growed up to be a lot better person than I am now." He told Skloot.

You are now properly set up for this excerpt:

Deborah stood from the bed where she'd been sitting with her grandsons' heads in her lap. She walked over to Zakariyya and put her arm around his waist. "Come on walk us out to the car," she said. "I got something I want to give you."

Outside, Deborah threw open the back of her jeep and rummaged through blankets, clothes, and papers until she turned around holding the photo of Henrietta's chromosomes that Chistoph Lengauer had given her. She smoothed her fingers across the glass, then handed it to Zakariyya.

"These supposed to be her cells?" he asked.

Deborah nodded. "See where it stained bright colors? That's where all her DNA at."

Zakariyya raised the picture to eye level and stared in silence. Deborah rubbed her hand on his back and whispered, "I think if anybody deserve that, it's you, Zakariyya."

Zakariyya turned the picture to see it from every angle. "You want me to have this?" he said finally.

"Yeah, like you to have that, put it on your wall," Deborah said.

Zakariyya's eyes filled with tears. For a moment the dark circles seemed to vanish, and his body relaxed.

"Yeah," he said, in a soft voice unlike anything we'd heard that day. He put his arm on Deborah's shoulder. "Hey, thanks."

Deborah wrapped her arms as far around his waist as she could reach and squeezed. "The doctor who gave me that said he been working with our mother for his whole career and he never knew anything about where they came from. he said he was sorry."

Zakariyya looked at me. "What's his name?"

I told him, then said, "He wants to meet you and show you the cells."

Zakariyya nodded, his arm still around Deborah's shoulder. "Okay." he said. "That sounds good. Let's go for it." Then he walked slowly back to his building, holding the picture in front of him at eye level, seeing nothing ahead but the DNA in his mother's cells"

That is world-class wordsmithing my friends, and it's exactly what you'll find throughout this book. Buy it, borrow it, whatever it takes, but read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I suspect the only people who won't get anything out of it are the illiterate, and maybe those with Alzheimer's. And after the people with Alzheimer's are cured with the help of HeLa cells, they'll be able to enjoy it as well. Which is a little freakishly ironic when you think about it.

Anyway, read the book.

Book Review #3. I Bet No One Has Ever Told The People At Q-Fever They Are The Onion Of Medicine.

I'm kidding. The phrase "The Onion of Medicine"  is the obvious one that comes to mind upon seeing Q Fever!: Medical Humor & Satire For Healthcare Professionals. I'm sure it's been said a lot. That's really not fair to Q Fever! though, because comparing something to The Onion is a sure fire way to make something look inferior. The Onion is the funniest fucking entity on God's green earth, and anything that goes up against it will be crushed.

So I totally won't say anything like Q Fever! Is like The Onion of medicine. Even though it's a book full of fake news stories. Kinda like The Onion. Except about medicine.  

And I won't point out that just like in The Onion's early days, sometimes the entire joke of a Q Fever story is contained in the headline, "Study: Obesity a Risk Factor for Pants Ripping in the Ass." Chuckle chuckle. Really no need to read the rest of the page though, you get the joke. There are more than a few shoot scotch through the nose moments however, such as when my sinuses got the alcohol rinse treatment upon seeing "Heart Transplantation Study Halted Abruptly; Transplant of placebo 'a disaster' researchers concede."

There are also parts that aren't like The Onion. There are top 10 lists, which are more like a rip off of David Letterman. I don't mind that though, as I kinda wish Dave himself would rip himself off from 20 years ago more. And the lists are kinda funny. Five of the "Top 10 Ways To Quit Smoking:"

-Cold Turkey

-Nicotine Patch

-Smoking Cessation Classes

-End-Stage Emphysema/COPD

-Widely Metastatic Lung Cancer

There are also case studies that invariably end in bad puns or photoshop gags, which you won't find in The Onion. Which means you could maybe kinda make a case for Q Fever! not being The Onion of medicine. Even though it kinda is. 

Or I should say was. The book is a collection of highlights from the Q-Fever! website, which is kinda like The Onion's, except geared towards medicine, and work on the website seems to have abruptly halted in 2005. There's some good stuff there though, and I would totally recommend you check it out. And if you're the type, like me, that keeps a little reading material around at work so you don't have to look at customers when not actively filling prescriptions, then the Q-Fever book should be right up your alley. 

Just like The Onion. 

Special Thanks to The Alert Reader who sent a copy of the book my way. 

Book Review #2. I Read Wonky Health Care Texts So You Don't Have To.

Here we go again. A new president is moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and one of the things he's pledged to do is take a shot at solving this country's health care crisis. Most of you have seen this act before, but some of you may not realize it goes back further than Bill Clinton. Much further. As former Senate majority leader and president-elect Obama's incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Daschle notes in his new book "Critical; What We Can Do About The Health Care Crisis" Harry Truman wrote in his memoirs:

I have had some bitter disappointments as president, but the one that troubled me most, in a personal way, has been the failure to defeat the organized opposition to a national compulsory health insurance plan

If you were born when Harry Truman was fighting that fight, you will soon qualify for Medicare, but only because Lyndon Johnson fought the same fight for the oldsters almost 20 years later. Which was almost 30 years before Clinton tried to fight the fight for the rest of us. All that's old is new again my friends, which makes Senator Daschle's book not only relevant but almost perfectly timed. 

Daschle begins by defining the problem. The American health care system is on the verge of collapse. You know it, I know it, hell, even John McCain admitted there was a problem here that needed to be solved. We spend more (over $7,400 per person, more than twice the average of the rest of the industrialized world) and get less (they cover everyone, we have 47 million people with no health insurance) than any country in our peer group. The book is full of many of the heart wrenching tales that those of us in the professions are so familiar with, such as the story of Monique White, a woman diagnosed with Lupus at age 21, and therefore uninsurable. Eventually she qualified for Medicaid, and her medical care stabilized. Tennessee then had the good sense to cut its Medicaid program to save some money though, meaning Monique lost her coverage, and couldn't afford the care needed for her chronic condition. 

She could always go to the Emergency Room though. That's what Republicans love to say when you say people  don't have health coverage in this country. That they can always go to the Emergency Room.  Most medical experts agree that going to the Emergency Room only when there's a crisis is the best way to keep a handle on a long term disease like Lupus. I'll let Daschle take up Monique's story from here:

In November 2005, Monique had a seizure and had to be rushed to Wellmont Bristol Regional Medical Center. Doctors there found that her kidneys had failed, her liver was failing, and her intestines were perforated. in the next ten weeks, doctors at Bristol Regional performed more than two dozen operations to clean up recurring dead tissue. The nonprofit hospital absorbed the $900,000 cost of her care, and she seemed to be recovering.

In February, however, doctors found a fungal growth near her heart valve. Bristol Regional wasn't equipped to perform the necessary surgery, so Monique was transferred to Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. On May 28, two weeks after she suffered a stroke, her heart stopped.

About a week later, Tennessee sent a latter to Monique notifying her that it had put her back on the Medicaid rolls. 

I'm sure what is far more upsetting to our Republican friends though, is the effect our health care crisis is having on corporations. General Motors pays nearly $1500 per vehicle in health care costs, BMW $450 for every vehicle produced in Germany thanks to its national health care system, and Honda $150 per vehicle in Japan. I have a feeling that fact will do a lot more to get us a solution to this problem than the fact Monique literally got screwed to death by the clusterfuck we call a health care system here. 

Daschle's solution involves two bold proposals; building on the current employer/government hybrid we have now with the expansion of the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, and the creation of a Federal Health Board modeled on the Federal Reserve. The idea behind the expansion of the FEHBP being to provide a floor of basic benefits to those falling through the cracks of our current system, and the idea behind The Federal Health Board proposal being that 1) This problem is of such scale that only the Federal Government can solve it, and 2) You can't trust our elected representatives to manage health care policy. Think of it this way: as fucked up as things are in the economy at the moment, we're better off with Ben Bernanke trying to run the money system than we ever would be with 535 people with giant egos who don't know anything about money and can't see past the next election, and we would be better off with people who know something about health care, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate overseeing an improved American health care system than we ever would be with 535 people with giant egos being lobbied by Big Pharma.

Plus, if we wanted to, we could make the head of The Federal Health Board testify before Congress twice a year the way we make the head of the Federal Reserve do. Imagine if we could make the CEO of Humana Health Care haul his ass before Congress twice a year to explain his job performance. That would rule. 

Does that mean I agree with everything Daschel's proposing? Nope. I am an unapologetic left-wing radical, and in my health care world, private health insurance companies would be banished to the depths of hell forever. I tell you what though, Tom Daschle's health care world beats the living snot out of what we have now, and in the end, I was happy just to read a serious, thoughtful proposal to solve one of our nations problems by someone who will soon be part of the executive branch of our government. Because in case you haven't noticed, there hasn't been a lot of serious, thoughtful anything coming from the executive branch of our government in the last eight years. 

Thirteen days my friends.  

The Drugmonkey Tries His Hand At A Book Review. Because Someone Gave Me A Free Book In Recognition Of The Awesome Power I Wield With This Blog.

This may be my favorite Big Pharma ad ever:





"Modern man is the victim of this era" reads the headline.

"War...rumors of war...atomic devastation...too much government...economic uncertainty- all part of a complex pattern, all part of these troubled times. Today, countless factors are taking their psychic toll in your patients. Mental depression is one of the most common results.

'Dexedrine' Sulfate can do much to help the depressed patient. By restoring mental alertness and optimism, by inducing a feeling of energy and well being. 'Dexedrine' lifts your patient out of the gloom of depression and helps him face the future."

Dexedrine, for those of you not in the profession, is a brand name for a type of amphetamine. If nothing else, Nicholas Rasmussen's new book, On Speed, The Many Lives of Amphetamine will forever serve as documentation that there was a time when Big Pharma said the appropriate response to the threat of nuclear war was to start passing out crank.

The book is more than a collection of amusing historical pharmacy anecdotes though. (Another favorite - the tale of an early generic version of amphetamine produced in defiance of Smith, Kline & French's patent and sold in many cases "without the significant savings passed along to the customer." The name of the knockoff? Profetamine. Get it? Profet...Profit? It would be a few more years before pharmacy became the nation's most trusted profession.) In it, Rasmussen makes the case for amphetamine as a key marker of the end of the period of "snake oil" medicine and the beginning of the evidence-based medical era. He isn't shy about the downside of modern pharmaceutical marketing, although at times it seems as if he is trying a bit too hard, such as when he says the Cox-2 inhibitors Bextra and Celebrex "promised to make arthritis suffering obsolete" (they never claimed to be more effective than older arthritis meds, only to be easier on the GI tract) or that the original contraceptive formulas "probably cause cancer" (recent studies show that being on birth control tablets actually cut a woman's overall lifetime cancer risk) The documentation of amphetamine as "a drug in search of a disease," however, will sound familiar to anyone in the health care field, and may well beg questions such as why Attention Deficit Disorder was not nearly a problem on today's scale back when Dexedrine faced no competition as an anti-depressant.

While the book also follows the trends of amphetamine abuse in general society, from cramming college students, ramped up soldiers, jazz musicians, beat poets, hippies who figured out "speed kills" through today's ecstasy raves and crystal meth epidemic, it's most valuable as a chronicle of how where we've been in medicine explains a lot about where we are today.

Personally, if we were about to get nuked, I'd think I'd rather just quietly go to sleep.