AlphaMale

OMG, nearly one in 10

AlphaMale — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 13:14:37 -0400

First sentences from two Associated Press news articles this week.

First sentence from news article #1:

In a spectacular turnabout, hospitals are treating almost all major heart attack patients within the recommended 90 minutes of arrival, a new study finds.

So what percentage of hospitals are STILL screwing up the care of people with severe heart attacks, probably costing some of them their lives? Nine percent. That's 9 percent, or almost one of every 10. After a years-long campaign to persude them to get it right.

So here's the headline found almost everywhere:

Hospitals giving faster heart attack care

First sentence from news aricle #2:

INDIANAPOLIS — Nearly one of every 10 midsized or big employers expects to stop offering health coverage to workers once federal insurance exchanges start in 2014, according to a new survey from a large benefits consultant.

And what percentage of midsized or big employers expect to drop health coverage under Obamacare in 2014? Eight percent. That's 8 percent, or "almost one of every 10." Buried well down in the article is this sentence: "A large majority of employers in both studies said they expect to continue offering benefits once the exchanges start."

So here's the headline found almost everywhere:

1 in 10 companies will drop health coverage

And America's news readers think that hospitals are doing a great job with heart attack patients, but the sky is falling on our company health insurance, thanks to President Obama.

My problem with all this:

Reporters can and do slant a story's message by how they write the lead. And editors are almost all too busy to read the story critically, and one editor somewhere writes a quick-and-dirty headline based on the first sentence, and everybody in the online world picks up that headline, usually word for word. And that becomes gospel fact.

This is scary.*

*Give hospitals credit for improving. In 2005, more than half of them were not following the standard guidelines for treating severe heart attacks.

*If I were that AP health insurance writer's editor, I'd fry his ass for writing a deceptive lead that he must know will be treated as pure truth, rather than the oversimplified crap that it is. (I'd do this if I weren't too tired to care, which could be the AP's problem.) But give him credit for ultimately writing the facts.

Dogs can sniff out early-stage lung cancer

AlphaMale — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:55:07 -0400

Sniffer dogs can be used for early detection of lung cancer, according to research published in the European Respiratory Journal.

The dogs found 71 out of a possible 100 lung cancer cases by sniffing samples of a patient's breath. They also could dependably rule out lung cancer in 93% of the cases they were tested on -- 372 out of 400.

Earlier studies showed that dogs could also detect prostate, breast, ovarian and bowel cancer. Current diagnostic tests often fail to detect cancer in the earliest stages and at the same time expose a patient to the harmful effects of radiation, as a reporter mentions in Science Daily, where the dogs story is reported.

I bet the dogs, no matter how good they can become at cancer detection, no matter how low-cost the detection program, will never be used commercially. You can't patent the dog's sniffing ability, so you probably can't find a way to make a billion from canine cancer consultants.

I'd love to be proved wrong.

Dramatic improvement in survival

AlphaMale — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:59:52 -0400

Say you're over 70, and you have lung cancer. You can live a little longer if you take a single kind of chemo treatment, and the complications, such as losing all your hair and feeling like you're sick with the flu all the time, are relatively mild.

Ah, but you can do better, say some French researchers. They say you can "gain significant benefit" from aggressive, double-barreled chemotherapy. You can do every bit as well as the young people who have lung cancer.

Sure, the toxic side effects are more common. But we're told that survival rates are much higher. Even a skeptic refers to a "dramatic improvement in survival" for those getting the heavy-duty chemo. How dramatic?

Well, on average, you live six months on regular chemo, 10 months on the double whammy.

You can't expect to live a year, no matter which you choose.

It's very expensive, you can be sure. The side effects can be terrible. But you just might manage to hang on for another four months. This is what's called dramatic improvement.

Yearning to breathe free

AlphaMale — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 08:36:46 -0500

The most famous lines of "The New Collosus," the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, are these:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

That last line seems perfect for an Alpha with lung disease, doesn't it?

The guys who did this video thought so, anyway. The two-minute video ends with an image that can't possibly be legit.

But it looks pretty convincing, doesn't it?

Full Tilt Boogie...

AlphaMale — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 11:24:20 -0500

...is the name of a song by singer/songwriter L.J. Coon.

It's also a line dance, created and performed by 75 or so people with COPD who are dancing to draw attention to COPD and how good an idea it is to do something fun -- like dancing -- to keep yourself active and fit.

Katelyn Harding at the COPD Foundation interviews Donna Lee, one of the line dance's creators, here.

Or hear the song and see the line dance.

Blood on the cover

AlphaMale — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 09:58:08 -0500

There's a new cover for the Alpha-1 Coded Testing (ACT) brochure.

Here it is.

Q: Is that a good cover photo?

The brochure tells about the Alpha-1 Coded Testing Study at the Medical University of South Carolina. If you'd like to get tested for Alpha-1, but you're afraid to have the test on your medical record, you can get free, confidential testing here, thanks to the Alpha-1 Foundation.

The cover shows Michael Campos, MD, lifting lung cells, including Alpha-1 cells, from a super-cooled tank at his lab. Somebody suggested the cover photo SHOULD show a finger and a card with three little spots of blood on it. You need to do a home finger-stick and donate three spots of blood for the test. You get a little kit that makes it easy and painless, (I tried it; I wasn't sure I'd done it till I saw a little drop of blood forming at the tip of my finger.)

But a picture of blood might scare people off. No?

What do you think?