Month: January 2010

California/Health/Lifestyle/Medicine/Politics & Causes
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Is marijuana a medicine?

by Fran Johns

Of course it is, to answer this rhetorical question posed by a January 18 headline in the Wall Street Journal. New Jersey is the most recent to recognize that fact, becoming the 14th state to legalize use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. The New Jersey law, signed this week by outgoing Governor Jon Corzine, limits use to patients with specific illnesses such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis and ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and specifically forbids grow-it-yourself projects.

What’s needed now are serious studies of how good a medicine it really is, and these aren’t happening very fast. As outlined in a New York Times article this week, getting permission to study the weed is no easy task.

Despite the Obama administration’s tacit support of more liberal state medical marijuana laws, the federal government still discourages research into the medicinal uses of smoked marijuana. That may be one reason that — even though some patients swear by it — there is no good scientific evidence that legalizing marijuana’s use provides any benefits over current therapies.

Lyle E. Craker, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Massachusetts, has been trying to get permission from federal authorities for nearly nine years to grow a supply of the plant that he could study and provide to researchers for clinical trials.

But the Drug Enforcement Administration — more concerned about abuse than potential benefits — has refused, even after the agency’s own administrative law judge ruled in 2007 that Dr. Craker’s application should be approved, and even after Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in March ended the Bush administration’s policy of raiding dispensers of medical marijuana that comply with state laws.

“All I want to be able to do is grow it so that it can be tested,” Dr. Craker said in comments echoed by other researchers.

Marijuana is the only major drug for which the federal government controls the only legal research supply and for which the government requires a special scientific review.

“The more it becomes clear to people that the federal government is blocking these studies, the more people are willing to defect by using politics instead of science to legalize medicinal uses at the state level,” said Rick Doblin, executive director of a nonprofit group dedicated to researching psychedelics for medical uses.

In California, where a mish-mash of laws and enforcement policies can bewilder all but the expert — (and there are many experts) — the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that lawmakers acted improperly in amending the voter-approved legalization of medicinal marijuana to limit the amount critically ill patients might have:

The high court ruled lawmakers improperly “amended” the voter-approved law that decriminalized possession of marijuana for “seriously ill Californians” with a doctor’s prescription by limiting patients to eight ounces (227 grams) of dried marijuana and six mature or 12 immature plants.

The Compassionate Use Act, passed by California voters in 1996, set no limits on how much marijuana patients could possess or grow, stating only that it be for personal use.

In 1997, the state’s Supreme Court defined a lawful amount as enough to be “reasonably related to the patient’s current medical needs.”

The state’s quantity limits were passed in 2003 as part of a voluntary identification card program designed to protect against both drug trafficking and wrongful arrest by allowing police to quickly verify a patient’s prescription.

The court on Thursday let stand the voluntary card program but found that the limits it imposes should not “burden” a person’s ability to argue under the Compassionate Use Act that the marijuana possessed or grown was for personal use.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown said in a statement the decision “confirms our position that the state’s possession limits are legal” as applied to medical marijuana cardholders.

While conceding that marijuana may have some just-for-fun attraction too, I can’t vouch for the recreational weed. Thankfully, since I am addicted to anything that comes down the pike and question the view that marijuana is non-addictive,  it hadn’t made its way to small-town Virginia when I was experimenting with other mood-altering substances. But I do know its medicinal value. My beloved now-deceased sister could have had much suffering relieved with legal pot. Countless friends I loved and worked with during the height of the AIDS pandemic would have suffered less with legal, easily-accessible marijuana.

We are past time to establish, through definitive studies, the medicinal benefits of this natural bounty, and make it legally available to those in desperate need.

California/Environment
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Wyoming: a state of (independent) mind

by Fran Johns

Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal spoke last night, in a conversation with Climate One founder Greg Dalton, about the future of energy sources and transmission in the U.S.  The event, at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, was titled “The King of Coal” — which Freudenthal arguably is. Use of “clean coal” plus natural gas and renewables such as wind power should all be incorporated into energy policies, he said. And as for regulations, “skip the big mega-statement; pick out a clean energy standard and go do it.”

Freudenthal, who heads a state in which more than half the people (himself not among them) do not believe global warming is real, maintains that once financial benefits of energy efficiency are understood and promoted individuals and corporations will move in this direction. But for now, “solar is not the low-hanging fruit; (green jobs) are mostly wind, and components are made overseas.”

In response to Dalton’s comment about California’s state-wide building codes, Freudenthal said that in Wyoming, “it ain’t gonna happen. The only thing the people of Wyoming resist more than Cheyenne telling them what to do,” he said, “is Washington telling them what to do.”

The wide-ranging talk was filmed for re-broadcast and will be available in podcast.

California/General interest/Health/Lifestyle/seniors/Women
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When memory fades, is it all over?

by Fran Johns

Most of us know the feeling — a mom, a friend, a neighbor who’d seemed just a little spacey for the last few months has taken up residence in a “memory unit.” And some of us (OK, I’m older than you are, so you can relax now) stuff that sorrowful feeling down inside, right next to the fear that arose over where in the world I put the car keys.

Maybe we should all relax. Because anxieties can make you forget even more, and research shows that  “buying into the stereotype that memory function automatically dwindles with age could become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” according to reports just published on a new favorite health/science website of mine, RealAge.com.

At least that’s what happened in one study. When older adults (ages 60 to 70 years) were given cues that people their age tend to suffer from memory loss, they actually performed more poorly on memory tests than a control group not exposed to such cues. Likewise, older adults who felt looked down upon — or stigmatized — due to age also fared poorly on memory tests. Bottom line: Anxious thoughts about negative stereotypes may disrupt your working memory. So think positive!

The site is a new favorite partly because it has a “Find your real age” thing which determined that I am younger than 76.5 and why should one argue. RealAge does concede that positive thinking will not guarantee memory retention, but then plunges right ahead with other suggestions. Such as staying in touch with family and friends:

In a study of 16,638 older adults, people who were married, active in volunteer groups, and in regular contact with friends, family, and neighbors had slower declines in memory than their less social counterparts. In fact, declines in the most socially active types were about half of those in the least social group.

Or eating the right stuff: fish, nuts, real chocolate!; or walking a lot; or, and here’s the winner, taking power naps:

People who take daytime naps outperform non-nappers on memory exercises. And, surprisingly, a mere 6 minutes of shut-eye is enough to refresh the mind. How does a quick catnap power up your thinker? Seems the mere act of falling asleep triggers a brain-boosting neurobiological process that remains effective regardless of how long you snooze.

What’s not to love about a resource that advises hanging out with friends, eating almonds and chocolate and taking power naps? Now, if there were just something in there about where I put the keys…

Expect to Keep Your Memory – Health Tip – realage.com.

California/General interest/World Affairs
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A Miracle in Haiti

by Fran Johns

Maybe one should not call it a miracle — since hundreds of thousands of miracles are not happening there today. But the story shown on PBS NewsHour Monday night was an almost unbelievable unfolding of human drama, modern technology-to-the-rescue, sheer determination  and enduring love. If you can watch it without tears you might need to check your heart-tug mechanism.

In the video segment, Bill Neely of Independent Television News shows a Haitian man who has returned repeatedly to the rubble of a bank where his wife was when the earthquake struck. He is seen rushing to a new area being cleared and digging with his hands, certain she is buried there, and alive. It’s been six days since the disaster. Thinking he hears a noise he calls for silence, listens again and shouts, “She’s there! She’s alive!”

Neely puts a mike in the small hole from which the woman’s voice can be heard, and a brief exchange in French confirms she is indeed alive and well — and thirsty. To her husband she calls out, “Even if I die, I love you so much. Don’t forget it.”

Then a group of firefighters from Los Angeles arrive on the scene with the tools and equipment needed finally to extricate the woman. They worry about after-shocks and the diminishing amount of time left to them all: “Once it goes, it goes.” But a tiny camera inserted into the hole reveals where her hand is pinned, and as soon as it is set free she can be pulled from the rubble. She says, “Thank you, God,” and  flat on the ground bursts into song. It’s a song about not being afraid of death.

“Did you think you would live?” Neely asks, and she says, “Live? Why not?”

It has been three hours since she was discovered by a never-say-die husband. She gets into the front seat of a car, and they drive slowly away.

California/General interest/Health/Medicine
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The doctor is in… cyberspace

by Fran Johns

Getting health care — whatever happens with the health care bill — is no longer just a matter of getting to the doctor. Issues of comfort, efficiency and cost control increasingly point to the use of telemedicine, which is coming, ready or not. And one recent report suggested the medical profession isn’t ready. Pauline Chen, M.D. , writing recently in the New York Times, cited resistance by doctors and nurses alike to what some consider long-distance health care.

Telemedicine has the potential to improve quality of care by allowing clinicians in one “control center” to monitor, consult and even care for and perform procedures on patients in multiple locations. A rural primary care practitioner who sees a patient with a rare skin lesion, for example, can get expert consultation from a dermatologist at a center hundreds of miles away. A hospital unable to staff its intensive care unit with a single critical care specialist can have several experts monitoring their patients remotely 24 hours a day.

But despite its promise, telemedicine has failed to take hold in the same way that other, newer, technologies have. Not because of technical challenges, expense or insufficient need. On the contrary, the most daunting obstacle to date has been a deeply entrenched resistance on the part of providers.

Tech industry writer/elder care advocate Laurie Orlov thinks those concerns are a thing of the past. Since data was gathered for the study Dr. Chen cited, Orlov points out in her Aging in Place Technology blog, doctors, patients and technology have come a long way. “Forget the JAMA study”, Orlov says, “here come the virtual visits.”

Medical practices, hospitals, clinics are well aware of a much-changed world and consumer health care costs that can be breathtaking. American Well’s virtual visit platform use is growing, as are other virtual platforms discussed in our 2009 Calibrated Care report. They have read about transformation of self-care and virtual visits in Denmark. Given the geographic distribution of people — and the distance required to get to doctors in some states and rural areas, given the availability of technology that was barely known or completely unknown in 2006, these are going to happen, reimbursement has begun, criteria for the use has emerged, and the JAMA study (and its much-syndicated press coverage) is already irrelevant.

On a technologically lower level is the use of PC programs long in place for Kaiser patients. They haven’t asked for a testimonial, but here’s one, with enthusiasm. The e-mail your doctor program allows doctor-patient communication at the convenience of each (my primary care doc, oncologist and other specialists almost all answer queries within 24 hours or less); test results are posted immediately and can be viewed via charts or graphs to show how you’re doing; drug information or other Q&A’s are immediately accessible through personal accounts. All of the above save time, money and patient angst.

Doctors in cyberspace could be good medicine indeed for U.S. health care.

California/General interest/Lifestyle/seniors/teens/USA
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Walking while cellphoning can be hazardous to your health

by Fran Johns

Having raged and ranted about phoning/texting drivers and pedestrian-oblivious bikers, this space would now like to come to the defense of cellphoning walkers. Not, you understand, multi-tasking/app-studying cellphoning walkers, but talking walkers. Noting the attention that has recently focused on the hazards of distracted drivers, New York Times writer Matt Richtel reports on the new hazard:

But there is another growing problem caused by lower-stakes multitasking — distracted walking — which combines a pedestrian, an electronic device and an unseen crack in the sidewalk, the pole of a stop sign, a toy left on the living room floor or a parked (or sometimes moving) car.

The era of the mobile gadget is making mobility that much more perilous, particularly on crowded streets and in downtown areas where multiple multitaskers veer and swerve and walk to the beat of their own devices.

Most times, the mishaps for a distracted walker are minor, like the lightly dinged head and broken fingernail, a jammed digit or a sprained ankle, and, the befallen say, a nasty case of hurt pride. Of course, the injuries can sometimes be serious — and they are on the rise.

Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007, which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University, which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.

“It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Jack L. Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State, noting that the number of mishaps is probably much higher considering that most of the injuries are not severe enough to require a hospital visit. What is more, he said, texting is rising sharply and devices like the iPhone have thousands of new, engaging applications to preoccupy phone users.

There is the problem, it’s the apps. It is a solvable problem. Just as it is possible, without inviting death and destruction, to talk to a (non-distracting) passenger while driving a car, it is entirely possible to talk on a cellphone while walking. Many who have managed to do so without winding up in emergency rooms have the solution: don’t be accessing travel agencies and restaurant menus, just talk. Furthermore, do not give your cellphone number to anybody but your children and a few very good friends. They do not create angst while you are walking/talking, and will also understand that you turn the thing off when you get home. Anybody else can darn well call the land line and leave a message. The fact that addiction to electronic wizardry and perpetually multi-tasking with it is a fairly recent phenomenon probably explains another interesting discovery:

Mr. Nasar supervised the statistical analysis, which was done by Derek Troyer, one of his graduate students. He looked at records of emergency room visits compiled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Examples of such (hospital) visits include a 16-year-old boy who walked into a telephone pole while texting and suffered a concussion; a 28-year-old man who tripped and fractured a finger on the hand gripping his cellphone; and a 68-year-old man who fell off the porch while talking on a cellphone, spraining a thumb and an ankle and causing dizziness.

Young people injured themselves more often. About half the visits Mr. Troyer studied were by people under 30, and a quarter were 16 to 20 years old. But more than a quarter of those injured were 41 to 60 years old.

Over 60? Except for the unfortunate gentleman strolling off his porch, we don’t event merit inclusion in the data. This may add up to one benefit of being too old to deal with the technological wonders of cellphone apps, and tending to use the cellphone as a phone. The Times article, highly recommended reading for all ages, is full of interesting factoids and neurological rationale. But much still boils down to the old can’t-walk-and-chew-gum adage.

“Walking and chewing are repetitive, well-practiced tasks that become automatic,” Dr. Gazzaley (Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco) said. “They don’t compete for resources like texting and walking.”

Further, he said, the cellphone gives people a constant opportunity to pursue goals that feel more important than walking down the street.

“An animal would never walk into a pole,” he said, noting survival instincts would trump other priorities.

There could be a message here. Perhaps it is that the goal, or at least the top priority, of walking down the street should be to get to your destination in one piece. If you skip the apps and keep your eyes open for texting drivers at cross streets, it is entirely possible for someone of any age to accomplish this task — while talking on the cellphone.

Driven to Distraction – Pedestrians, Too, Are Distracted by Cellphones – Series – NYTimes.com.

California/Education/General interest/Lifestyle/seniors/teens/Women
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Facebook parenting — God help us

by Fran Johns

At the risk of sounding like a grandmother, which I quintupitally am, I have to say I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past several days being thankful I’m not raising any teenagers. This is thanks to the story of Tess of the d’Overmuch and her Facebook quest for relief from being grounded. If you’ve missed this exciting adventure, Susan Dominus summarizes it in today’s New York Times:

They feel her pain. At the Spence School and Greenwich High and Fullerton Union High and Nyack High and Narragansett High, teenagers and near-teenagers, hundreds of them, are waving a virtual flag for Tess Chapin, a 15-year-old from Sunnyside, Queens, who has been grounded for five weeks. A few days after founding the Facebook group — “1000 to get tess ungrounded” — Tess had nearly reached her stated goal, with 806 members by Friday morning; after this column about her quest was posted on nytimes.com, she surpassed it.

This is teenage rebellion, electronic style — peaceful, organized and, apparently, contagious.

So basically, Tess explains on her group page, she made an honest late-night mistake. Her parents flipped, and they grounded her for five weeks — “thats my childhood right there,” she wrote. “please join so I can convince them to unground me. please please please.”

Interesting she should mention childhood. Tess’ groundation, as she terms it, occurred after an honest late-night mistake involving drinking booze and missing a curfew, behaviors that are wisely left until childhood is past, which her parents, if not her friends, understand. To their everlasting credit — and bless their hearts for having to raise what must be a bright and feisty daughter in such a public arena — they seem thus far disinclined to let Facebook group rule.

If your parents didn’t care,” pointed out a sophomore at Ithaca College, “they would have just let you rot.” Someone agreed with Tess that “parents can be stupid.” A friend of a friend expressed hope that she and her parents would take something “grand” away from the experience. A close pal chimed in, “I love you, but your parents are not gonna unground you for convincing 1,000 people to join a group.”

It is to this last theory that Ms. Iselin Chapin (mom Jennifer Iselin Chapin, a fund-raiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council) subscribes.

“What’s your fallback strategy?” she asked her daughter Thursday night, sitting across from her in the living room of their two-bedroom apartment in Sunnyside.

“O.K., one: drive you so crazy that you’re going to unground me,” Tess replied.

Her mother shook her head. “That’s not going to do it, sweetheart.”

Times writer Dominus suggested early on that perhaps another group might be started in support of “Parents Who Believe in Consequences for Serious Lapses in Judgment and Care Enough About Their Kids to Enforce the Rules,” and reported that within an hour a Times Online reader had done just that. And bless that reader’s heart, too.

I think raising kids in the relative obscurity of pre-internet times was infinitely easier and surely effective, for proof of which I offer three excellent grown children, parents of three flawless teenagers and — in the case of son and daughter-in-law who deserve an extra blessing of hearts — two gorgeous girls who won’t be teenagers for another 6 or 8 years.

My eldest granddaughter came across the country to enter college last fall, offering joy and a learning experience to her creaky left coast grandparents. We are diligently learning about what 19-year-old college art students create, wear, enjoy and pierce. She is extraordinarily grounded and gifted and fast approaching the end of child/teenagehood — though she did exemplify the complexities of it all when assuring her mother she was not homesick while asking that she (the mom) please not talk about the dogs.

I have conceded that most of today’s teenagers will miss the pleasure of things like thank-you notes (they don’t write, they Facebook and they text,) and think it’s just as well my own college art major was in the dark ages. We did life drawing and paintings of little arrangements of bottles and fruits for starters. The college art life today is tough. My granddaughter took us on a walking tour of her dorm and its collection of depictions of violence and terrors, which prompted me to remark that there is so much angst in today’s art.

“Well, Gran,” she said with a note of weary indulgence, “we ARE teenagers.”

Big City – Teenager Taps Facebook to Protest a Punishment From Her Parents – NYTimes.com.

California/General interest/Health
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Banished by Facebook — the new justice by internet

by Fran Johns

I have been exiled from Facebook Land, a status that really should have a status bar all its own. Actually, it was just one post that got summarily banished — but still…

Facts of the case: I posted, not long ago, a brief story of interesting discoveries made by the Gerald P. Murphy Cancer Foundation that were reported in a segment on MSNBC. The foundation, headed by Dr. David Waters, DVM, PhD, works to extend longevity in pets and people through collection of vast amounts of data, much of it canine data. The news involved a 13-year-old Rottweiler named Kona.

PETA strongly supports the work of the Gerald P. Murphy Foundation. I thought I’d throw that into this report. The earlier post didn’t mention PETA, but it was clear about this fact: the foundation collects data, it does not conduct experiments using animals. The story was about clues to longevity found through data analysis.

Oh, well — dogs and research were mentioned, and flags went up somewhere in cyberspace.

The post was reported as abusive. Facebook summarily removed the whole thing, and anyone who encountered the link on my Facebook page was greeted with the message that I had been cited for abuse. No way could whoever reported me have actually read the piece.

We come now to a small detail in the U.S. Constitution usually called the confrontation clause, something about facing one’s accuser – or at least knowing what one is accused of. The framers of the Constitution didn’t know about Facebook, whose policy apparently is if someone, anyone, thinks you’ve done a bad, you’re off the page, and that’s the end of that. (You want to talk to someone about it? Try finding a Facebook face you might be able to face, virtually or otherwise.)

I have no immediate plans to sue Facebook. It seems in a way a badge of honor – I mean, how many people to you know who’ve had a post kicked off of Facebook? I am a little sorry about those folks who missed learning of an innovative nonprofit thanks to someone who didn’t bother to do so.

But now that this post is headed to my Facebook status bar, and includes the magic word combination, we wonder if I will be doubly banished.

Stay tuned.

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