The real answer to our health care woes

Yesterday, as the Supreme Court was declaring that Obamacare is a tax, some researchers in Canada were announcing a step toward a cure for diabetes.

University of British Columbia scientists, in collaboration with an industry partner, have successfully reversed diabetes in mice using stem cells, paving the way for a breakthrough treatment.

After the stem cell transplant, the diabetic mice were weaned off insulin, a procedure designed to mimic human clinical conditions. Three to four months later, the mice were able to maintain healthy blood sugar levels even when being fed large quantities of sugar. Transplanted cells removed from the mice after several months had all the markings of normal insulin-producing pancreatic cells.

According to the American Diabetes Association, 25.8 million children and adults in the United States—8.3% of the population—have diabetes. Another 79 million people have prediabetes. The total cost of diabetes in 2007 was $218 billion.

You won't improve your health care by funneling your taxes through bureaus and agencies in Washington, which will take their share and make decisions on how or if to send it back to your doctor's office.

The current tsunami of medical discoveries will make Obamacare obsolete before it's fully implemented.

Oh, yesterday we also learned that:

• Johns Hopkins researchers have generated stem cells from skin cells from a person with a severe, early-onset form of Huntington's disease (HD), and turned them into neurons that degenerate just like those affected by the fatal inherited disorder. By creating "HD in a dish," the researchers say they have taken a major step forward in efforts to better understand what disables and kills the cells in people with HD, and to test the effects of potential drug therapies on cells that are otherwise locked deep in the brain.

• Vertex Pharmaceuticals announced positive final results from a Phase 2 combination study of Kalydeco™ and a potential cystic fibrosis drug called VX-809. Cystic fibrosis patients with two copies of the most common mutation, Delta F508, showed significant improvements in lung function while taking the combination therapy.

I say it's a watermelon

Likes Obamacare.

We live in strange times. The Supreme Court has pronounced Obamacare, under which the federal government will take over your health care and mine, a "tax." We all know it's not a "tax." Even Obamaman himself argued that it wasn't a tax.

So a law passed in late-night, weekend maneuverings on a strictly party-line vote, even as polls showed the American people opposed, and which nobody actually read before voting on it -- as Nancy Pelosi pointed out -- a law that assumes control of one-sixth of the economy, the one-sixth that will determine how long and how well we live, is a "tax."

Fine. A watermelon is a tax. Whatever.

I think we'll learn in six months that John Roberts has a brain tumor affecting his thinking.

The whole notion of federally-run healthcare is DOA. With computers, the Internet and cell phones, central control of anything is a dinosaur.

I saw a program on Bell Labs the other evening. It's where the transistor was invented -- the invention that eventually would make Bell Labs unnecessary. From its peak of 25,000 employees, it's now down to 1,500. Xerox' famous Palo Alto lab went the same way. The reason: companies today can tap into scientific minds anywhere in the world at any time -- without hiring them. They go to websites, post problems, and scientists bid on solving them.

Hierarchical corporations have collapsed -- all the action is on the edge of the network, not in the DOA ranks of middle management once needed to communicate and control.

The media were once centrally controlled. You had to own a printing press to make a newspaper or a TV network or a TV station to broadcast. Youtube anyone?

It's interesting that Obamaman has taken over student loans just as higher education is going through the "change." Middle class kids can't afford college anymore. And yet one university after another is offering courses for free online. The action is in your family room at your computer, not in an ivy-covered building on some far-off campus.

In the same way, forefront of health care is now a smart phone on a doctor's belt that can tell him everything about the patient in front of him, everything in the research about his condition, soon everything about his genetic makeup, and that can image his abdomen and help with a diagnosis.

This can not be helped in any way by bureaucrats and boards and politicians buying and selling votes and power in Washington.

The forces of change are irresistible, and Obamacare will fall under its own weight. It will just be very messy to watch.

Dan Henninger, the Wall Street Journal columnist, wrote before he knew what the decision was:

From day one, the Obama health-care legislation was swimming against the tides of history. It was a legislative monolith out of sync with an iPad world. In the era of the smartphone, ObamaCare was rotary-dial health reform. 

The signs this was so were everywhere, but Barack Obama and the Pelosi-Reid edition of the Democratic Party blew past them. Years before it arrived at the Supreme Court's door, the Obama health-care law was unpopular with the American public. With occasional exceptions, its unfavorables have been above 50% for nearly three years. And why not? It runs counter to the daily experience of virtually everyone.

Electronics, foods, fashion, entertainment, apps, social media, appliances—pretty much anything that escapes the cold hands of a public agency is laid before us in a dazzling, unprecedented array of choices. Despite all the incoming, people learned to navigate the options. Virtually everyone has become adept at customizing a personal milieu that suits them. Given a reasonably growing economy, they'll be able to sustain these choices. 

In this context, the Affordable Care Act gave new meaning to the word "outlier." Starting with the insurance mandate. Of course most people hated it. They're living in a world turning more anti-mandate by the minute, and the Democrats are ordering them all into a national health-insurance pool.

The Affordable Care Act is the exhibit du jour, but there is a disconnect nearly everywhere between governments and the reality of the way life is lived by the people they govern. Across Europe, the young are being drowned by something known as "the welfare state." It sounds more Orwellian than it did the first time. Other than the crude imperatives of survival amid a modernizing people, the Chinese Communist Party is clueless.

If you're counting on Social Security and whatever Medicare will become, you know somewhere deep in your soul that they won't be there. Neither will Obamacare (and now, with Nancy, I guess we'll have to read it to find out what the Supreme Court found in it). The future is elsewhere.

By the way, the name of Henninger's column is "Wonder Land."

It's ok to sleep through this post

Will live forever.

Many baby boomers are embracing lifestyles that could lead to a long and rewarding life – with two exceptions, new research suggests.

 More than seven in 10 centenarians – 71% – say they get eight hours or more of sleep each night. By contrast, only 38% of boomers say they get the same amount of rest. And when it comes to eating right, more than eight in 10 centenarians say they regularly consume a balanced meal, compared with just over two-thirds (68%) of baby boomers.

The report begins with some startling numbers. As of late 2010, the U.S. had an estimated 72,000 centenarians, according to the Census Bureau. By the year 2050, that number – with the aging of the baby-boom generation – is expected to reach more than 600,000. Meanwhile, an estimated 10,000 boomers each and every day – for the next decade – will turn 65.

How to reach 100?

Centenarians point to social connections, exercise and spiritual activity as some of the keys to successful aging. Among surveyed centenarians, almost nine in 10 – fully 89% – say they communicate with a family member or friend every day; about two thirds (67%) pray, meditate or engage in some form of spiritual activity; and just over half (51%) say they exercise almost daily. 

In each of these areas, baby boomers, as it turns out, match up fairly well. The same percentage of boomers as centenarians – 89% – say they’re in touch with friends or family members on a regular basis. Sixty percent of surveyed baby-boomers say spiritual activity is an important part of their lives, and almost six in 10 boomers (59%) exercise regularly.

Sleep and diet are the two areas where baby boomers come up short. Not surprisingly, the one area where boomers are more active is the workplace. Three-quarters (76%) of surveyed baby boomers say they work at a job or hobby almost every day; that compares with 16% of centenarians.

What's for dinner?

What's for dinner?

"Increasing evidence suggests that the alarming rise in allergic and autoimmune disorders during the past few decades is at least partly attributable to our lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us. As nature’s blanket, the potentially pathogenic and benign microorganisms associated with the dirt that once covered every aspect of our preindustrial day guaranteed a time-honored co-evolutionary process that established “normal” background levels and kept our bodies from overreacting to foreign bodies. This research suggests that reintroducing some of the organisms from the mud and water of our natural world would help avoid an overreaction of an otherwise healthy immune response that results in such chronic diseases as Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis and a host of allergic disorders.

"In a world of hand sanitizer and wet wipes (not to mention double tall skinny soy vanilla lattes), we can scarcely imagine the preindustrial lifestyle that resulted in the daily intake of trillions of helpful organisms. For nearly all of human history, this began with maternal transmission of beneficial microbes during passage through the birth canal — mother to child. However, the alarming increase in the rate of Caesarean section births means a potential loss of microbiota from one generation to the next. And for most of us in the industrialized world, the microbial cleansing continues throughout life. Nature’s dirt floor has been replaced by tile; our once soiled and sooted bodies and clothes are cleaned almost daily; our muddy water is filtered and treated; our rotting and fermenting food has been chilled; and the cowshed has been neatly tucked out of sight. While these improvements in hygiene and sanitation deserve applause, they have inadvertently given rise to a set of truly human-made diseases."

-- Jeff D. Leach

Miracles and wonders: escalation in war on cancer

Breakthroughs in the world of medicine.

New research shows a sharp escalation in the weapons race against cancer, with several high-tech approaches long dreamed of but not possible or successful until now. At a conference of more than 30,000 cancer specialists, scientists reported:

• New “smart” drugs that deliver powerful poisons directly to cancer cells while leaving healthy ones alone.
• A new tool that helps the immune system attack a broad range of cancer types.
• Treatments aimed at new genes and cancer pathways, plus better tests to predict which patients will benefit from them.

“I see major advances being made in big diseases” such as breast and prostate cancers, said Dr. Richard Pazdur, cancer drug chief at the federal Food and Drug Administration.

A laboratory test used to detect disease and perform biological research could be made more than 3 million times more sensitive, according to researchers who combined standard biological tools with a breakthrough in nanotechnology. The increased performance could greatly improve the early detection of cancer, Alzheimer's disease and other disorders by allowing doctors to detect far lower concentrations of telltale markers than was previously practical.

Scientists have for the first time transformed skin cells—with a single genetic factor—into cells that develop on their own into an interconnected, functional network of brain cells. The research offers new hope in the fight against many neurological conditions because scientists expect that such a transformation—or reprogramming—of cells may lead to better models for testing drugs for devastating neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

Scientists have developed a new approach to visualize how proteins assemble, which may also significantly aid our understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which are caused by errors in assembly. Understanding how a protein goes from being one thing to becoming another is the first step towards understanding and designing protein nanomachines for biotechnologies such as medical and environmental diagnostic sensors, drug synthesis of delivery.

One of the grimmest legacies of the war in the Pacific is still being fought 70 years on, but a victory over dengue, the intensely painful "breakbone fever" which that conflict helped spread around the world, may be in sight. The U.S. Army, which like its Japanese enemy lost thousands of men to the mosquito-borne disease in the 1940s, has piled resources into defeating the tropical killer. But it may be about to see the battle to develop the first vaccine won not in the United States but by French drug company Sanofi. The Paris-based firm hopes for positive results in September from a key trial among children in Thailand that would set it on course to market a shot in 2015 which would prevent an estimated 100 million cases of dengue infection each year. Of 20,000 annual deaths, many are of children.

More good news about dark chocolate

Go ahead, live forever.

Eating dark chocolate daily can reduce cardiovascular events, including heart attacks and strokes in people with metabolic syndrome, i.e. a combination of factors that increase the risk of developing heart disease and diabetes, according to a study in the British Medical Journal.

Dark chocolate with a cocoa solid content of at least 60% is rich in flavonoids that are known to protect the heart. However, the protecting effects have so far only been assessed in short-term studies. To predict the long-term effects, Australian researchers used a mathematical model to predict the long-term health effects and economic effectiveness of eating dark chocolate daily. They recruited 2,013 people who were high-risk candidates for heart disease. 

All participants were hypertensive and met the criteria for metabolic syndrome, yet they had no previous history of heart disease or diabetes and did not take medication to lower their blood pressure. 

The best-case scenario, i.e. a compliance of 100%, meant that eating dark chocolate daily would be able to prevent 70 non-fatal and 15 fatal cardiovascular events per 10,000 people over a 10-year duration. By reducing the compliance rate to 80%, they could potentially prevent 55 non-fatal and 10 fatal events respectively, which is still a substantial reduction and effective intervention. 



I'm definitely gonna comply. I may start right now. BTW, itt's gotta be the dark kind, people, not milk chocolate, and it has to have a cocoa content of at least 60-70% cocoa.

However, any kind of chocolate that comes in ice cream is okay, according to me.