Nutraceuticals vs. pharmaceuticals:  there's a place for both in modern medicine
posted 7-2-2014 - 10:34 pm

 
(Note: this is a shorter version of an op-ed piece that was originally posted to my op-ed blog, PoliticalEye, and addressed mainly to health care professionals; however, the subject is of interest to patients and their families, too. This post is longer than usual because a few paragraphs wouldn’t adequately tell the story, so hang in there to the end and you'll see what I mean. Thanks.)


You never know how good your hospital really is until you need it. Mine’s very good, based on objective criteria. But even an excellent hospital that does all the right things 99.9 percent of the time can still have blinders on about certain ways in which it practices medicine. It’s a question of medical mindset.

My own recent hospitalization is a good case in point. Having covered health care and health policy in the business press for most of the last 30+ years, I’m a picky customer on criteria that matter (hint: they’re not ‘housekeeping’ issues like whether the food tastes good, or the nurses are polite, or the parking’s convenient). I also didn’t choose this hospital because it was the closest one: convenience isn’t an issue when it comes to my health, and people who rank that factor highly either have the wrong priorities or are without reliable transportation. I’m lucky that this place is only 15 minutes away from my house and that I have a car – but I’d travel an hour to get there if I had to.

Michael Reese Park: A better spot for the Lucas Museum in Chicago
posted 6-30-2014 - 6:36 pm

 
Last week, the Chicago Tribune ran an article announcing the site selection for a new museum that director and producer George Lucas is hoping to build. It could have been in San Francisco, but that city blew its chance. That, the fact that we get more than double the annual number of tourists that San Francisco gets, and the fact that Lucas recently married a Chicagoan (Ariel Investments president Mellody Hobson) and lives here part time now gave the nod to us. The museum, which is obviously still in the planning stage, will shortly be renamed the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art; the tentative name had been the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum.

The name change is a minor thing. The thing that does concern me and a lot of other Chicagoans is that Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who vigorously courted the project and supposedly has a Site Selection Task Force, seems willing to let Lucas break a time-honored rule about not building on the lakefront: the proposed museum as presently imagined would tear up the existing parking lots between Soldier Field and McCormick Place. Great idea, bad location; it’s not that those lots shouldn’t be torn up and put underground anyway to create more park space – they should. But the building doesn’t belong there. I hope the Chicago Plan Commission, which has to approve the site, insists on an alternative — and I have one in mind that’s only a few blocks further south.

On naming and identities
posted 0-0-2014 - 11:23 pm

 
Some years ago at a local radio station in Chicago, there was a young intern named Mylanta. No, that’s not the beginning of a joke, and yes, it was Mylanta – I kid you not: spelled just like the trademarked antacid. (Never mind the fact that the station had a ‘smooth jazz’ format, a musical analgesic for daily life not unlike modern Muzak; let’s just set that aside as a fascinating irony.)

It wasn’t the drug that was named after a human being but the other way around. It’s not a ‘real’ name that people give to their children, like David or Jennifer or Gyorgi or Uhura, but one invented by a pharmaceutical firm for a patented product.

What happened there? How did that poor girl end up with a drug name that was sure to provoke smirks? Was that merely the first thing that her befuddled mother saw once she came out of anesthetized labor, and she decided on that without ever once considering the consequences for the girl?

Ray Bradbury: The last of the sci-fi ABCs departs
posted 6-8-2012 - 8:16 pm

 
There is a scene in the middle of The Martian Chronicles wherein a human and a Martian accidentally meet. Each has left his settlement, distracted, and wandered out in search of solitude, quiet, a chance to think. In a strip of Martian desert, past boulders in a narrow place where no one should be, a thin veil separating two realities dissolves, and they suddenly see each other. The thing is, the Martian civilization has been gone for thousands of years. Dead. To the human, the Martian is a ghost of the planet’s past; to the Martian, who is quite alive, the human is a ghost of its future. Surprised, they encounter one another, connect. And marvel.

Whenever I think of The Martian Chronicles, the first thing I remember is that scene: two intelligent beings confronting The Other in the vastness of space. It was breathtaking to me then, and still is. I thought of it again last week when I heard that Ray Bradbury had died.

I grew up reading the ABCs of science fiction: Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. Isaac, Ray and Arthur C. I encountered them by accident at a time when I was first being introduced to real science in school, and the space race was on television for everyone to see. It was all of a piece to me then: I watched the Mercury and Gemini launches on television before I got on the bus to school. I read science in class in SRA reading supplements (one of IBM’s projects) whenever I got my classwork or homework done half an hour before everyone else did, which was daily, and ran out of other things to do. In truth, I hurried to finish my own work so that I could read the SRA materials: I’d quickly run out of things to read in the school library, which was geared to babies, I thought (even in first grade, I was way past the appalling Dick and Jane, which I’d concluded was written for idiots).

The Twilight series: Parsing images in the arts
When providing politically correct criticism really doesn’t help
posted 11-19-2011 - 7:45 pm CST

 
I got an e-mail yesterday from the Women’s Media Center. I’m on their list for a reason: they have a program called Progressive Women’s Voices that spends decent money to train women like me to be op-ed writers and opinion shapers and gives them the necessary connections. E-mail from the WMC is one of the very few ways to learn when the next class term will be scheduled so that I can apply. So when I get an e-mail from them, I usually glance at it right away.

This one arrived the very same day that the Twilight film franchise’s latest installment, “Breaking Dawn, Part 1,” debuted at movie theaters nationally. The digital missive came with a link and a provocative headline: “Exclusive: Breaking Bella – When Love Equals Violence.” That raised an eyebrow.

Like many other women, I’ve read the books, and that wasn’t exactly the impression I got from reading them. Yeah, they have some serious flaws, but they’re not dangerous or evil. The premise of that headline struck me as too simple minded and not a little blindly PC, but I reminded myself that headlines can be misleading. So I figured I ought to read the column before drawing conclusions.