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Okay, let’s just state for the record that there’s nothing funny about rapper Flavor Flav’s fiancée, Liz Trujillo, being hospitalized earlier this week for what a publicist states was “exhaustion.” There is something funny about the fact that Flavor Flav’s latest business venture is the “Flavor Flav House of Flavor Take Out Restaurant.” What’s next? The Snoop Dogg grooming salon? 50 Cent commemorative coins? Beats by Dr. Dre automatic implanted cardiac defibrillators?
It must be incredibly tiring to live as a celebrity. Have you ever heard of any normal person being hospitalized for exhaustion? Is there even an ICD-9 code for that? I suspect it was just another of Ms. Trujillo’s ploys to delay the wedding in order to put off the moment when she will go through the rest of her life as “Mrs. Flav.”
All in on it
Did you ever notice that nothing energizes paranoid people like disproof of the thing they’re paranoid about? Like, why isn’t there any evidence that the Trilateral Commission has a fleet of black helicopters just waiting to introduce Americans to their new overlords as soon as we pass universal health care? Because they’re that powerful! Were the Apollo missions filmed on a Hollywood sound stage? Have Communists infiltrated academia in order to brainwash a new generation of Trotskyites whose families are paying $50,000 a year to send them to private colleges? Are Beyoncé and Jay-Z members of the Illuminati? If you ask these questions, then you already know the answers.
In that vein, I propose we never again waste another dime studying the relationship between vaccines and autism. This week saw the publication of yet another overwhelmingly definitive study demonstrating that vaccines don’t cause autism. Does this mean Jenny McCarthy will finally devote all her energies to kissing random servicemen on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve? I’m thinking if the first 24 investigations didn’t do the trick, this one won’t dissuade a single person who has drunk the (un-fluoridated) Kool Aid.
Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer at Autism Speaks (who wasn't involved in the new paper) told USA Today, "This is a very important and reassuring study. This study shows definitively that there is no connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism." Vaccine opponents responded with a call for more research into the connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism. Funds for these studies will be raised in part through the sale of special-edition tin-foil hats.
Needle in a haystack
Say the American Heart Association came up with seven criteria for a healthy lifestyle, sensible things like not smoking, maintaining a normal weight, eating a healthy diet, being physically active, and maintaining low blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol level. How many US teens do you think you’d have to evaluate before you found one who met all seven criteria? One hundred? A thousand? Four thousand six hundred seventy-three? You’re going to have to keep guessing, because that last number is how many students aged 12-19 participated in a new study published in Circulation, and not a single one of them met all seven criteria. Apparently it’s harder to find a healthy teenager in America than it is to meet a sane person in Congress.
Of all the available criteria, the one that knocked 99% of subjects out of the running was “ideal healthy diet,” with fewer than 1% of males or females qualifying. Researchers blame the fact that bacon just tastes so darn good. The best numbers were for ideal blood pressure, where 78% of males and 90% of females met criteria, presumably because bacon works slowly. These data may be strategically important to enemies of the United States. Rather than building expensive missiles or risky plutonium centrifuges, they should simply flood the country with cheap pork bellies, then wait a generation.
Hardly working
Back when I was in residency, well before the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented humane work hour restrictions in 2003, we showed up on the wards on June 24 and walked out of the hospital 3 years later, dragging our beards on the ground and leafing desperately through old newspapers to figure out who the President was. I was out of residency 6 months before my eyes were fully adjusted to sunlight. But residents who graduated between 2003 and 2011 were protected from working more than 24 hours in a row; some of them even got suntans. With these changes came modest improvements in resident well-being and patient safety.
According to a trio of new studies in this week’s JAMA Internal Medicine, just because less is good doesn’t mean that lesser is better. When the ACGME further restricted resident hours in 2011, it seems residents didn’t get any more sleep, and the number of self-reported serious medical errors actually increased. The authors suggest this may be because while hospitals decreased resident work hours, they didn’t hire any more staff to do those residents’ jobs, leaving increasingly inexperienced docs to do the same work in less time with more patient hand-offs. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these house staff were to be admitted to the hospital themselves for exhaustion, if only they could find someone to write the orders.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Okay, let’s just state for the record that there’s nothing funny about rapper Flavor Flav’s fiancée, Liz Trujillo, being hospitalized earlier this week for what a publicist states was “exhaustion.” There is something funny about the fact that Flavor Flav’s latest business venture is the “Flavor Flav House of Flavor Take Out Restaurant.” What’s next? The Snoop Dogg grooming salon? 50 Cent commemorative coins? Beats by Dr. Dre automatic implanted cardiac defibrillators?
It must be incredibly tiring to live as a celebrity. Have you ever heard of any normal person being hospitalized for exhaustion? Is there even an ICD-9 code for that? I suspect it was just another of Ms. Trujillo’s ploys to delay the wedding in order to put off the moment when she will go through the rest of her life as “Mrs. Flav.”
All in on it
Did you ever notice that nothing energizes paranoid people like disproof of the thing they’re paranoid about? Like, why isn’t there any evidence that the Trilateral Commission has a fleet of black helicopters just waiting to introduce Americans to their new overlords as soon as we pass universal health care? Because they’re that powerful! Were the Apollo missions filmed on a Hollywood sound stage? Have Communists infiltrated academia in order to brainwash a new generation of Trotskyites whose families are paying $50,000 a year to send them to private colleges? Are Beyoncé and Jay-Z members of the Illuminati? If you ask these questions, then you already know the answers.
In that vein, I propose we never again waste another dime studying the relationship between vaccines and autism. This week saw the publication of yet another overwhelmingly definitive study demonstrating that vaccines don’t cause autism. Does this mean Jenny McCarthy will finally devote all her energies to kissing random servicemen on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve? I’m thinking if the first 24 investigations didn’t do the trick, this one won’t dissuade a single person who has drunk the (un-fluoridated) Kool Aid.
Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer at Autism Speaks (who wasn't involved in the new paper) told USA Today, "This is a very important and reassuring study. This study shows definitively that there is no connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism." Vaccine opponents responded with a call for more research into the connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism. Funds for these studies will be raised in part through the sale of special-edition tin-foil hats.
Needle in a haystack
Say the American Heart Association came up with seven criteria for a healthy lifestyle, sensible things like not smoking, maintaining a normal weight, eating a healthy diet, being physically active, and maintaining low blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol level. How many US teens do you think you’d have to evaluate before you found one who met all seven criteria? One hundred? A thousand? Four thousand six hundred seventy-three? You’re going to have to keep guessing, because that last number is how many students aged 12-19 participated in a new study published in Circulation, and not a single one of them met all seven criteria. Apparently it’s harder to find a healthy teenager in America than it is to meet a sane person in Congress.
Of all the available criteria, the one that knocked 99% of subjects out of the running was “ideal healthy diet,” with fewer than 1% of males or females qualifying. Researchers blame the fact that bacon just tastes so darn good. The best numbers were for ideal blood pressure, where 78% of males and 90% of females met criteria, presumably because bacon works slowly. These data may be strategically important to enemies of the United States. Rather than building expensive missiles or risky plutonium centrifuges, they should simply flood the country with cheap pork bellies, then wait a generation.
Hardly working
Back when I was in residency, well before the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented humane work hour restrictions in 2003, we showed up on the wards on June 24 and walked out of the hospital 3 years later, dragging our beards on the ground and leafing desperately through old newspapers to figure out who the President was. I was out of residency 6 months before my eyes were fully adjusted to sunlight. But residents who graduated between 2003 and 2011 were protected from working more than 24 hours in a row; some of them even got suntans. With these changes came modest improvements in resident well-being and patient safety.
According to a trio of new studies in this week’s JAMA Internal Medicine, just because less is good doesn’t mean that lesser is better. When the ACGME further restricted resident hours in 2011, it seems residents didn’t get any more sleep, and the number of self-reported serious medical errors actually increased. The authors suggest this may be because while hospitals decreased resident work hours, they didn’t hire any more staff to do those residents’ jobs, leaving increasingly inexperienced docs to do the same work in less time with more patient hand-offs. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these house staff were to be admitted to the hospital themselves for exhaustion, if only they could find someone to write the orders.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Okay, let’s just state for the record that there’s nothing funny about rapper Flavor Flav’s fiancée, Liz Trujillo, being hospitalized earlier this week for what a publicist states was “exhaustion.” There is something funny about the fact that Flavor Flav’s latest business venture is the “Flavor Flav House of Flavor Take Out Restaurant.” What’s next? The Snoop Dogg grooming salon? 50 Cent commemorative coins? Beats by Dr. Dre automatic implanted cardiac defibrillators?
It must be incredibly tiring to live as a celebrity. Have you ever heard of any normal person being hospitalized for exhaustion? Is there even an ICD-9 code for that? I suspect it was just another of Ms. Trujillo’s ploys to delay the wedding in order to put off the moment when she will go through the rest of her life as “Mrs. Flav.”
All in on it
Did you ever notice that nothing energizes paranoid people like disproof of the thing they’re paranoid about? Like, why isn’t there any evidence that the Trilateral Commission has a fleet of black helicopters just waiting to introduce Americans to their new overlords as soon as we pass universal health care? Because they’re that powerful! Were the Apollo missions filmed on a Hollywood sound stage? Have Communists infiltrated academia in order to brainwash a new generation of Trotskyites whose families are paying $50,000 a year to send them to private colleges? Are Beyoncé and Jay-Z members of the Illuminati? If you ask these questions, then you already know the answers.
In that vein, I propose we never again waste another dime studying the relationship between vaccines and autism. This week saw the publication of yet another overwhelmingly definitive study demonstrating that vaccines don’t cause autism. Does this mean Jenny McCarthy will finally devote all her energies to kissing random servicemen on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve? I’m thinking if the first 24 investigations didn’t do the trick, this one won’t dissuade a single person who has drunk the (un-fluoridated) Kool Aid.
Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer at Autism Speaks (who wasn't involved in the new paper) told USA Today, "This is a very important and reassuring study. This study shows definitively that there is no connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism." Vaccine opponents responded with a call for more research into the connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism. Funds for these studies will be raised in part through the sale of special-edition tin-foil hats.
Needle in a haystack
Say the American Heart Association came up with seven criteria for a healthy lifestyle, sensible things like not smoking, maintaining a normal weight, eating a healthy diet, being physically active, and maintaining low blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol level. How many US teens do you think you’d have to evaluate before you found one who met all seven criteria? One hundred? A thousand? Four thousand six hundred seventy-three? You’re going to have to keep guessing, because that last number is how many students aged 12-19 participated in a new study published in Circulation, and not a single one of them met all seven criteria. Apparently it’s harder to find a healthy teenager in America than it is to meet a sane person in Congress.
Of all the available criteria, the one that knocked 99% of subjects out of the running was “ideal healthy diet,” with fewer than 1% of males or females qualifying. Researchers blame the fact that bacon just tastes so darn good. The best numbers were for ideal blood pressure, where 78% of males and 90% of females met criteria, presumably because bacon works slowly. These data may be strategically important to enemies of the United States. Rather than building expensive missiles or risky plutonium centrifuges, they should simply flood the country with cheap pork bellies, then wait a generation.
Hardly working
Back when I was in residency, well before the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented humane work hour restrictions in 2003, we showed up on the wards on June 24 and walked out of the hospital 3 years later, dragging our beards on the ground and leafing desperately through old newspapers to figure out who the President was. I was out of residency 6 months before my eyes were fully adjusted to sunlight. But residents who graduated between 2003 and 2011 were protected from working more than 24 hours in a row; some of them even got suntans. With these changes came modest improvements in resident well-being and patient safety.
According to a trio of new studies in this week’s JAMA Internal Medicine, just because less is good doesn’t mean that lesser is better. When the ACGME further restricted resident hours in 2011, it seems residents didn’t get any more sleep, and the number of self-reported serious medical errors actually increased. The authors suggest this may be because while hospitals decreased resident work hours, they didn’t hire any more staff to do those residents’ jobs, leaving increasingly inexperienced docs to do the same work in less time with more patient hand-offs. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these house staff were to be admitted to the hospital themselves for exhaustion, if only they could find someone to write the orders.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).