Julian Assange is getting too much attention, what with the accusations of sexual abuse against him, and his finely-honed ability to prove that diplomats can be childish and snotty – well, I just couldn’t take it any more.

I’ve decided to release my own Wikileaks document. It’s from my insurance company, and it reveals what they’ve really been doing with the money I’ve been sending them all these years.

I’ve engaged in a lot of soul searching before deciding to release this document. I’ve considered that it might make people even madder at the insurance companies than they already are, and some workers in the insurance industry might receive even less respect from people who get sick and have to pay doctors – in other words, everyone. I may soon have to go into hiding and, like Assange, carry all my data on laptops and USB drives and treat other people badly, including former associates, because like Assange, I might just be smarter than everyone else. (Or at least as smart as my wife – see her blog this week.) But before I show you this document, I’d like to point out two things. I’m neither as smart nor as arrogant as Julian Assange, and I don’t want this document to harm insurance workers, who often have to spend their workday telling us we’ve incorrectly filled out their claims forms. No, it’s the insurance company CEOs that I’m after here. Oh, and I hope that this document doesn’t shock you too much, because if you get a heart arrhythmia or dizziness, you aren’t covered for that.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that an insurance company would send out a letter about why your coverage is going to suck even more. I notice, also, that they are cleverly explaining the reasons they might have to kill existing policies and charge us more:

It’s all somebody else’s fault.

Hospitals charge too much, so insurance companies have to pass that cost along. Illegal aliens and other uninsured criminals cost the rest of us lots of money. Regulatory compliance is so expensive – it would be way cheaper if these companies could go on screwing us like always. Finally, nobody in America is exercising, so it’s our fat fault that insurance is so expensive. All that is perfectly clear.

But look farther down in the letter, and you’ll see the real surprise. Yes, it’s about the pony for the CEO’s daughter. And the other pony for the CEO’s other daughter. Wow.

I didn’t even see the part about paying for the country home, I was so busy looking up the numbers on compensation for insurance company executives. According to Forbes, Aetna’s top guy is compensated to around $30 million a year, and Cigna’s gets $28 million a year. Wellpoint’s CEO is a pauper, pulling in only $10 million annually, and Humana’s CEO only gets $3 million a year. How the hell can that guy afford health care? If you look at other sources for these compensation packages, the numbers vary but they’re still pretty high.

I’m thinking about the CEO’s daughter crying if we took away her pony. That is so sad. But not nearly as sad as the millions of Americans who can’t afford the high cost of health insurance.

(We often hear that the number of uninsured Americans is 46 million. But if you fact check that, it’s actually closer to 36 million Americans who are uninsured. Well. I feel much better now.)

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

The reason they call Whole Foods “Whole Paycheck” is that while walking its hallowed aisles you can find the most expensive red peppers that ever lived, and also the most expensive salt, and even the most expensive yogurt imaginable. Some of this is justified. The peppers, for example, listen to Mozart as they grow and watch “Baby Einstein” videos. The salt comes from the tears of extremely pure Buddhist nuns living at high altitude. At least, I think so. I’m not really sure, because I’ve been a little fuzzy of late as we try to feed two people on less than $150 a week, and that means we’ve been subsisting solely on Whole Paycheck’s organic carrots, organic apple peels and organic hummus parceled out a teaspoon at a time. Can you hang on a minute? I’m having a dizzy spell again. Ok, I’ve had a sip of organic water and I feel better.

Is it worth it to eat organic? Worth the money? Worth the hunt for the store that sells organic? Worth the travel woes when there is absolutely nothing to eat in a hotel and a Cheeze Doodle is staring you down at night in a strange town?

I can back away slowly from a snack food vending machine in a hotel. But what about a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that suggests organic food has no nutritional benefits over ordinary food?

Whole Foods, can I have my money back?

Not so fast. Let’s look at the data. The researchers reviewed 162 scientific papers published over the past 50 years. They found the nutritional value of organic food wasn’t all that different from the cheap stuff.

“A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance,” said Alan Dangour, one of the report’s authors.

Bummer. I might be trying to justify my purchase of organic broccoli costing, by weight, the same as a handful of diamonds, but I have to ask: Did those researchers ask the right questions? Should we only consider nutritional value? People argue that organic tastes better, and research studies show that some organic foods contain more antioxidants associated with preventing heart disease and cancer. But there’s one argument in favor of organic that I really can’t get around.

How many different kinds of pesticides would you like to eat for dinner?

A study conducted at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and Community Medicine found that children who ate conventional food carried “significantly higher” metabolites derived from pesticides than children who ate organic. The conventional food kids were, you’ll pardon the expression, pissing pesticide derivatives.

Monsanto, the company that makes RoundUp, the stuff you spray on weeds, also made Agent Orange, the stuff sprayed on Vietnamese, and partnered in 1967 with IG Farben, the German company that made Zyklon-B, the stuff Nazis sprayed on Jews in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Monsanto does a brisk business making the pesticides sprayed on your supermarket produce. Suddenly that non-organic supermarket carrot starts to look pretty sinister. How did it get so orange, anyway?

The good news is you don’t have to buy organic everything – conventional onions, sweet peas and avocados are ok – here’s a full cheat sheet from Dean Karnazes’ blog in Runner’s World.

In the meantime, I am prepared to make you an offer on that tiny container of organic shaved Parmesan.

An example of fractal geometry in nature

500 Words on Thursday | by Lee Schneider

I was in a room with people cheering about fractal geometry. Not a small room and not a few people — a couple hundred of them. Later, I was in another room to hear a doctor speak about female menopause and I stayed for the whole talk. Yes, the speaker covered prostate screening also and I was working, covering the event for the Huffington Post, but the speaker was that good. I looked around the room during both talks. Lots of everyday people. All ages. Hip and unhip. No Phi Beta Kappa keys in evidence, though one of the talks, the fractal geometry one, got technical as it delved into Mandelbrot Sets. There are times that I’d rather drive into oncoming traffic than try to understand what a Mandelbrot Set is, but the speaker was so good we were all on board.

It was science for the people.

The event was the I Can Do It conference in San Diego and it covered topics like integrative medicine, how to live in a state of happiness, (“Would Vermont work for that?”) and some fringy stuff, at least for me, like past life regression. (Why in their past life was everyone a king or a queen? Wasn’t anybody a garbage man in the Middle Ages?)

How do you get people to cheer for fractals? Science education is top-of-the-list for a lot of people. Educators worry that kids are turning away from careers in science. American Idol seems the shorter route to fame and fortune, and you don’t even need to know how to sing.

Elliot Washor

Elliot Washor is one of the people who’s thinking hard about how to fix this. In the US, one student drops out of school every 12 seconds. Elliot is co-founder and co-director (along with Dennis Littky) of Big Picture Learning. Big Picture has started new schools and changed existing schools. They’re willing to get their hands dirty – literally. Elliot wrote recently about a welding simulator that he thought was really cool. It empowered the operator to learn a real-world skill and some math, too. Michael B. Crawford, author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” has written compellingly about how people who work with their hands might be happier than people who push ideas around on computer screens.

Dr. Bruce Lipton

If you take the body out of learning – well, it’s just a lot less interesting to learn things. Why not keep it in? Include the tactile and physical part of learning and learning stays relevant. Why did those speakers I heard have people cheering? The answer is also about the body. The speakers were Dr. Bruce Lipton and Dr. Christiane Northrup, and they both had everyone’s attention for one reason. They were giving us vital information about our wellness, and everybody’s interested in that kind of science.

Science for the people reaches out to include persons of every age and gender. I might even go to another menopause talk if Dr. Northrup is speaking.

Dr. Christiane Northrup

500 Words on Thursday | by Lee Schneider

Wearing Vibram fivefingers is a lesson in guidance systems. For those who’ve not seen them, fivefingers create the feel of barefoot running. When I use them, every pebble is an acupressure point. My left heel can’t bang on the ground like it used to. This is running carefully observed, and it’s recharged my faith in the idea that the body self corrects. You just need to listen to pain. Yes, pain. Pain is part of the runner’s guidance system.

Now, something’s happened to the guidance system at Goldman-Sachs. There was pain in investments designed to fail. The guidance system is kicking in now, because people outside Goldman-Sachs are paying attention. I’ve been thinking about investing in a stock and a bond fund and I asked the brokers, “Is there any exposure to Goldman-Sachs in either of these funds?” They told me I wasn’t the first person to ask. Lots of potential investors want to steer clear of Goldman-Sachs. That’s what I mean by a guidance system. There’s a moral compass, and it always points north.

Something’s happened to the guidance system at Johns Hopkins University’s surgical training program. Recently I wrote about animals used in surgery training and in labs. I found out that only three medical schools in the country, Johns Hopkins, University of Tennessee College of Medicine at Chattanooga, and USUHS, allowed students to operate on animals. I wrote each school and asked why. The Tennessee folks declined to comment. The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) said “animals are only used where no acceptable computer, simulation or other educational alternative exists,” which ducks the question, because alternatives do exist, and they are more than “acceptable.” An article in the Journal of Surgical Research has called simulation the new paradigm in surgical education.

Then there’s Johns Hopkins, where the director of surgery, Dr. Julie Freischlag, wants students to operate on pigs. The students get two surgical lab sessions and use pigs to try out various surgeries.

Dr. Freischlag has been quoted in Nature news saying that the sessions help students decide if they want to go into surgery. The lab also trains those who won’t become surgeons but still need to know how to start intravenous lines and work with sutures.

“The first time our graduates stitch you up in the emergency room as interns, they will have already done that on live tissue before. They will be safer and better. I think most of us would hope they have actually done that on someone or something else before us.”
Dr. Julie Freischlag, quoted in Nature news

Every year, about fifty pigs give their lives at Johns Hopkins. A lot more pigs give their lives to become bacon. Still, we’re talking medical school here, not Denny’s. There’s a standard to uphold, and the majority of US medical schools find that students learn more by working on simulators. A student surgeon will have supervised operating room experience as well. So the image of a first-time surgeon saying “Wow, I’ve never operated on a real person before – hand me that sharp knife thing” is just false.

Gerald Moses, who heads the simulation lab at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, put it like this: “Sparing animals discomfort elevates the whole paradigm of learning.”

Do we really train compassionate doctors by bringing suffering to animals? If it causes pain, shouldn’t we be listening? I’m going to think about that on my next run, feeling every pebble underfoot, and self correcting.

Photo credit: MonkeySimon via Creative Commons License.

Is there any circumstance when animal experimentation or the use of animals in medical education would be warranted?

“No.”

That brief, to the point, and definitive answer came from John J. Pippin, MD, a cardiologist and senior medical and research advisor for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). I was doing a phone interview with him after attending “The Art of Compassion,” an event celebrating PCRM’s 25th anniversary. They gave an award to Marilu Henner, a vegan who’s been working to reform the Child Nutrition Act so kids at school can eat something other than chicken fingers. Good cause. But it was another issue – the use of animals in experimentation and education – that really got my attention. I figured that if a surgeon was going to cut me open, he or she better practice on a pig first, right? Actually, wrong. I thought if an experimental medication was to be proven safe and effective on people, it had better first be tested on animals, right? Also wrong.

Only three accredited medical schools in the whole country use animals to teach surgery. According to PCRM, the schools are Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Chattanooga campus. Dr. Pippin told me there’s a good reason all the other 150-plus medical schools in the country don’t use animals in surgical education: There are better ways to teach surgery. Surgical simulators and supervised operating room experience work just fine. Harvard and Yale don’t see the need to use (or kill) animals, so why do those three schools still do it?

“They don’t want to use the new methods because they’re comfortable with the old methods. But we all have to change our beliefs when the science changes,” Dr. Pippin told me. A paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine backs him up, asserting that simulators are effective training devices for medical residents.

What about animals who give their lives to test new medication? Bad for the animals, but good thing for people, right? Actually, no.

“The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades – and it simply didn’t work in humans.”
Dr. Richard Klausner, a former director of the National Cancer Institute

Dr. Pippin said that using animals to study human diseases is “an abject failure.” Look at the track record for pharmaceuticals. The former vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline has said, “The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people.”

If pharmaceuticals only work for half the population why do we still need to test them on animals? Bottom line: Money. “If funding is available to do research on animals, they do research on animals,” Dr. Pippin pointed out. The money is there. According to a Freedom of Information Act request initiated by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Institutes of Health reported that 42 percent of its research grants involved animals. The NIH budget is $30 billion – 42% of that, some $12 billion, is a lot of animal research funded by taxpayers like you and me. Can you get your tax check to the IRS out of the mailbox? Hmm, too late.

I’d like to know why those three medical schools still use animals for surgical training – so I’m going to ask them and tell you what they say.

Photo credit:  Lee Schneider