Urine tests show America’s wealth being pissed away

https://goo.gl/6TLJWu

Why have these marvels not greatly improved American’s health and lifetimes? That is a complex question, with no obvious answer.

But there is another question, even more important. Economist Ed Dolan discusses it in a report at the Niskanen Center. We pay so much more (a fantastic 18% of GDP — two or three times what our peer nations’ spend. For that we get few or no extra benefits. America groans under the expensive of our mad health care system. It comprises the largest share of the massive government liability that so terrifies conservatives.

Where does the money go? For a small but illustrative example, he points to a recent study with some amazing results.

“The cups of urine travel by express mail to the Comprehensive Pain Specialists lab in an industrial park in Brentwood, Tenn., not far from Nashville. Most days bring more than 700 of the little sealed cups from clinics across 10 states, wrapped in red-tagged waste bags. The network treats about 48,000 people each month, and many will be tested for drugs.

“Gloved lab techs keep busy inside the cavernous facility, piping smaller urine samples into tubes. First there are tests to detect opiates that patients have been prescribed by CPS doctors. A second set identifies a wide range of drugs, both legal and illegal, in the urine. The doctors’ orders are displayed on computer screens and tracked by electronic medical records. Test results go back to the clinics in four to five days. The urine ends up stored for a month inside a massive walk-in refrigerator.

“The high-tech testing lab’s raw material has become liquid gold for the doctors who own Comprehensive Pain Specialists. This testing process, driven by the nation’s epidemic of painkiller addiction, generates profits across the doctor-owned network of 54 clinics, the largest pain-treatment practice in the Southeast. Medicare paid the company at least $11 million for urine and related tests in 2014, when five of its professionals stood among the nation’s top billers. One nurse practitioner at the company’s clinic in Cleveland, Tenn., single-handedly generated $1.1 million in Medicare billings for urine tests that year, according to Medicare records.

“Kaiser Health News, with assistance from researchers at the Mayo Clinic, analyzed available billing data from Medicare and private insurance billing nationwide, and found that spending on urine screens and related genetic tests quadrupled from 2011 to 2014 to an estimated $8.5 billion a year — more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. The federal government paid providers more to conduct urine drug tests in 2014 than it spent on the four most recommended cancer screenings combined.

“Yet there are virtually no national standards regarding who gets tested, for which drugs and how often. Medicare has spent tens of millions of dollars on tests to detect drugs that presented minimal abuse danger for most patients, according to arguments made by government lawyers in court cases that challenge the standing orders to test patients for drugs. Payments have surged for urine tests for street drugs such as cocaine, PCP and ecstasy, which seldom have been detected in tests done on pain patients. In fact, court records show some of those tests showed up positive just 1% of the time.

“Urine testing has become particularly lucrative for doctors who operate their own labs. In 2014 and 2015, Medicare paid $1 million or more for drug-related tests billed by health professionals at more than 50 pain management practices across the U.S. At a dozen practices, Medicare billings were twice that high.

“Thirty-one pain practitioners received 80% or more of their Medicare income just from urine testing, which a federal official called a ‘red flag’ that may signal overuse and could lead to a federal investigation. ‘We’re focused on the fact that many physicians are making more money on testing than treating patients,’ said Jason Mehta, an assistant U.S. attorney in Jacksonville, Fla. ‘It is troubling to see providers test everyone for every class of drugs every time they come in.’ …


This String Quartet Was Composed by Brainwaves

Some inspiration porn, but still an acknowledgment that social support includes everyone...
https://goo.gl/oCwqzr

This is a fascinating project in which neurology and music collide in a moving way. (Oliver Sacks would’ve loved it.) It’s about the creation of a string-quartet composition called “Activating Memory,” and its creators are called the “Paramusical Ensemble.” Each of its members is a severely motor-impaired individual at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London, England.

The composers generated all of the parts using nothing but brainwaves. They were connected via electroencephalogram electrodes to a brain-computer music interface (BCMI) system that allowed each person to compose their part on-the-fly by selecting from among four phrases for live musicians to play — really, it’s as much a performance by the composers as it is by the musicians.

The project was led by composer Eduardo Reck Miranda for the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) at Plymouth University.

A couple of the patients communicate at the end of the video how they feel about their performance. This video by cinema iloobia is wonderful.


The 1977 Disability Rights Protest That Broke Records and Changed Laws

https://goo.gl/Gu8XcN

undreds of people arrived to the planned protest march in San Francisco on April 5, 1977, weighed down by backpacks bulging with food, medication, and basic supplies. Adults, teenagers, and parents accompanying their children came from around the Bay Area and from varied socioeconomic backgrounds. The crowd was largely comprised of individuals who were deaf, blind, using wheelchairs, living with mental disabilities, and living with paraplegia and quadriplegia.

In cities across the United States that morning, similarly diverse groups assembled for the same reason: to picket the regional offices of the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Philadelphia, New York, and Seattle, as well as the HEW headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Most of the protests ended that day as planned. The San Francisco protest did not. After marching past the security guards at the local HEW office without resistance, over 100 protesters unpacked their knapsacks and began what became known as the 504 Sit-In. The landmark takeover remains the longest non-violent occupation of a U.S. federal building in history. Though there is some disagreement about the exact length of the protest, it is often cited as 26 days. (Some protesters stayed in the building a few days after the larger group dispersed.)

After years of pushing for federal civil rights protections for people with disabilities, disability rights activist groups believed HEW secretary Joseph Califano, newly appointed by President Jimmy Carter, must be compelled to sign binding regulations. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 included the little-noticed Section 504, which was based on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and mandated integration of people with disabilities into mainstream institutions. But the language was broad, only noting that “no qualified individual with a disability should, only by reason of his or her disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

It was up to the head of HEW to sign and implement guidelines specific to Section 504, which would further inform other agencies including the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). By 1977, disability rights activists weary of asking nicely for their civil rights, decided to move—into the HEW offices, that is.


Help for How to Be Fragrance-Free

https://goo.gl/ekQ6Ex

All it takes is a decision to go fragrance-free!

It should be easier than quitting smoking since there aren’t supposed to be addictive chemicals in fragrances, right?…

Due to the fact that so many people are now experiencing adverse effects from fragranced products (34.7% in 2016), we are well on the way to having fragrance-free policies everywhere for the sake of protecting public health just as was done with smoking bans. It’s not just those of us who suffer immediate and disabling adverse effects from the products (1st, 2nd, and 3rd hand), but for everyone.

Here are some great resources (in no particular order) to help you go fragrance-free: 

For event planning

It’s important to be inclusive from the beginning and reinforce it on all communications. If accessibility isn’t included at the beginning stages,  people will miss it and you and your events will not be safe or accessible. 

Accessible Meetings Guide (also) Addresses Chemical and Electrical Sensitivities 
https://lindasepp.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/accessible-meetings-guide-addresses-chemical-and-electrical-sensitivities/ 

3 Steps to Organizing A Fragrance Free Event
http://dualpowerproductions.com/2011/03/26/organizing-a-fragrance-free-event/ 

Things and processes to think about:

Think Again Training » Fragrance Free

Renegades Join Forces for Affordable Insulin

https://goo.gl/JvCUxY

Jim Wilkins pulled a test tube from the freezer of his home on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, stuck it in his pocket, and jumped on his Ducati ST4 motorcycle. He crossed the Bay Bridge to Oakland and pulled up in front of the rambling, two-story Omni Community Center, which once housed a heavy-metal bar and before that a social club for Italian garbage scavengers.

Wilkins came bearing a gift. The flask in his pocket contained a special strain of yeast that had been genetically engineered to carry the DNA sequence needed to make human insulin. Inside the Omni, at a DIY biotech facility called Counter Culture Labs, a band of biohackers led by Anthony Di Franco and Yann Huon de Kermadec had been eagerly awaiting their present. De Kermadec and Wilkins went to work, seeding the yeast onto a biological scaffold to start a new colony.

Wilkins’s ride across the bay opened a new chapter in an effort with big ambitions — to disrupt the $25 billion insulin market with a cheap, generic version. After two years of work in their Oakland labs, Di Franco, de Kermadec, and other collaborators had managed to engineer E. coli bacteria to produce proinsulin, a precursor to insulin. But E. coli can’t produce mature insulin directly. With additional bioengineering, yeast like what Wilkins delivered may present a more efficient method.

If anyone in this cross-bay collaboration ends up producing high-quality generic insulin, it would be a major breakthrough. The three companies that make nearly 90 percent of the insulin sold in the world nearly tripled the price in the U.S. between 2002 and 2013. In sub-Saharan Africa, low access to insulin means children diagnosed with diabetes have a life expectancy of one year.

The partnership might also offer lessons on how much garage biohackers can achieve on their own. If the crew at Counter Culture Labs are rebels trying to storm the biotech citadel, Wilkins is a reformer who wants to change the industry he’s been part of for three decades. He has been a senior scientist at Genentech, a vice president at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, and a research professor at Yale. Now he has a research appointment at the University of California, San Francisco, studying proteins.

“Both of us want to supply insulin to people who can’t afford it or can’t get adequate supplies,” Wilkins says. “It’s just a slightly different approach to achieving the same ends.”