First Automobile, part three
When I started the residency program at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, I didn’t have a car, just a bicycle. I saved my salary for four months to raise a down payment on a car– $1500. A friend from the hospital, a girl who was an ultrasound technician, took me to a Subaru dealer in Pasadena; she had a car from them, and they had treated her well.
However, the first thing I noticed at the Subaru dealership was a used Alfa Romeo Spyder, with a new convertible top. It was cream-colored and understated. The dealer allowed us to drive it around the block but said not to take it on the freeway. It had 48,000 miles on it.
On the way home (on the freeway) my friend noticed that my new Alfa was smoking a little, every time I accelerated. That was on Saturday. By Monday, the car would barely run at all. I took it back to the dealer, and they gave me a “loaner.” The next I heard from them was three weeks later, and they said it was fixed, to come pick it up.
In the meantime, someone had rear-ended me in the loaner, leaving the car a foot shorter but still driveable after I unbent the exhaust time. That was only a few days before they called me back. I took the car in and gave them a copy of the accident report: I had been rear-ended at a stop light by someone who claimed not to have seen me.
When I got the Alfa back, it was literally gushing oil, using a quart every thirty miles and spraying all over the engine compartment. Again, I had to wait over the weekend to take it back to the dealer. When I did take it back, they apologized and said they had left a bolt off the engine when they put it back together. They replaced the bolt and cleaned out the engine compartment.
After that, it ran fine, and I managed to put six thousand miles on it, mostly with the top down, from December to June. I would get an afternoon off and spend it driving around the curvy little roads in the hills behind Glendale. One of the nurses remarked that I had a nice suntan for February; I told her it was because I drove around with the top down on my car all the time.
Once they got it running, the only problem I had with it was that the top leaked when it rained. Once, after a night of being on call and a heavy rainstorm, I came back to my car to find an inch of water on the floorboards.
There was something just really fun about driving around the freeways of Los Angeles in a tiny convertible car.
After a while, though, I gave it up to go into the Indian Health Service. That’s another story.
Years later, I came back to LA and bought a new Mustang convertible that was the same color as that Alfa. It’s still fun, and I’d do it again in a minute. But after that, I gave up buying used cars.
First Automobile, Part Two
The VW dealer in Des Moines fixed the engine and I was back on the road after five days.
The van drove much better after getting a new “short block” (the top of the engine, including the cylinders.) It accelerated much better, and made it up to top speed readily. According to the manual, my top speed, never to be exceeded, was 65 mph.
Over the miles to California, I replaced one worn out item after another. At a gas station in Arizona, I had new shocks put in. At a relative’s house in Denver, I replaced the worn rear brake pads.
After I got to my girlfriend’s apartment in Livermore, I started working on the axle. I put on a new axle and wheel nut, with the proper cotter pin. I had new tires installed– Vredestein steel belted radials with aggressive tread.
My girlfriend had been working a summer job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the place where they study plutonium and other highly toxic things. She was a chemistry major, and she eventually went to graduate school to become a chemist. We stayed in an apartment in Livermore, which was a small town then, out in the desert east of Oakland. We rented bicycles and rode all over town and into the country on weekends.
We only went to the beach a couple of times, it seemed, but we did get to go bicycling in Golden Gate Park, a memory that will last a lifetime. We went with our room-mates, a pair of chemistry graduate students; he had been injured in an auto accident and had no sense of smell.
Which was fine with me because I smoked marijuana in the bathroom with the ventilator fan on and I didn’t want anyone to smell it. In those days, there was no restriction or thought of banishment of cigarette smoking from indoors, and I think I may have smoked cigarettes in the living room too.
At any rate, we packed all four of our rented bicycles into the back of the VW van; two people sat up front, in the seats that remained, and two people sat on the hump in the very back, over the engine. This snug group drove from Livermore, over the Bay Bridge, in to San Francisco, and then to the Golden Gate Park, where we disembarked. We rode all over the park and had a wonderful time. The sun was out, it was warm for San Francisco in the summer, and we stripped down to our t-shirts to ride.
We went down to the the beach at the west end of the park, and back around the twisting lanes to the east end. I had parked along a side street just a block from the park, and I left the keys in the ignition. An hour later, when I remembered the keys and returned, the window was still rolled all the way down and the keys were still in the ignition.
At the end of two months, I packed up everything I and my girlfriend had brought for the summer and my stereo system in to the van, filling it up to the level of the backs of the seats. We came close to the nominal maximum payload of the van: 1500 lb. Above the luggage and boxes, I laid a six inch thick foam mattress I had picked up somewhere. We slept inside the van each night as we drove, back to Chicago first, then on to Boston. My girlfriend drove as much as I did, and she was a good driver, but it still took us a week of driving to get across.
I took my girlfriend to her parents’ house in upstate New York, and visited with them. Her father was a WW II veteran; she said he wouldn’t talk about it, even if pressed, because he said the memories of combat were too painful. We drove on to New Haven, Connecticut, where my stepmother Vicki lived, then to my girlfriend’s college, Wellesley, in a suburb of Boston.
I continued to date her for a couple of years after that; she even came out to Chicago for graduate school. Later on, she dropped out of graduate school to get married and have kids. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I thought she was one of the most beautiful girls I have ever known, in mind and body, and she wore a mean bikini.
Finally, I drove back to Chicago, and that was difficult. I picked up a hitch-hiker in New York state and drove him back to his college in western New York State.
Leaving there, I drove overnight to Chicago and arrived at the beginning of the morning rush hour. I seemed to be driving eternally on a packed four lane highway with trucks and speeding cars, from western Indiana across southern Chicago, through downtown, and then outwards west on I-80 to Forest Park. There my erstwhile room-mate from medical school had rented a three bedroom student special next to the subway line, across from a factory that made cinnamon-scented candy on Tuesdays.
During my first semester, second year of medical school, among other difficulties which I honestly could not tolerate, the brakes went out on the van. I tried to stop at a stop sign, going fifteen miles an hour, and slid halfway into the intersection. It seems that all the brake fluid had leaked out through a ruptured gasket in the brakes master cylinder, around the rod that pushes hydraulic fluid down the lines when you step on the brake. I filled up the brake fluid reservoir, but it was obviously going down every time I stepped on the brakes. After limping home, I disassembled the brake cylinder and looked for a replacement.
Unfortunately, the specifications for the brake master cylinder had changed over the years since the vehicle had been manufactured. There were two fewer connections on the outside of the master cylinder, because a warning light connection had been discontinued. Apparently, it was no longer thought necessary to enable the brake fluid warning light that sat on the dashboard and had a special “test” button to make sure the light still worked. Some law had been passed making it unnecessary, or that’s what I had heard at the time.
As a result, every replacement master brake cylinder I was offered at the various parts departments I visited failed to match the master brake cylinder that I had in my hand and wanted a replacement for. After a couple of failures like this, I became deeply depressed and began to neglect my schoolwork. For several months, the van couldn’t be driven because of the brakes were out; it sat in the parking lot behind the church down the street, the same parking lot where they had held a fall carnival with some of those portable amusement rides.
I was particularly annoyed because the school, and the government, had reneged on some of their promises and, for example, made the scholarship taxable as if it were a regular job. That seemed inefficient, to tax the funds one had just distributed as a government grant. The Congress passed a temporary exemption to this taxation every year at the very end of the year, so we never knew for sure from one year to the next whether the grant was taxable.
Then I had given the government the address of the Dean’s office to send my monthly checks because I didn’t know what my address in Forest Park was going to be; for months I had to go down to the dean’s office every month and explain why they were getting my check; the secretaries seemed to think that I didn’t deserve the money, since it was addressed to them.
Then there was my room-mate. Actually, I had two room-mates, but only one was a problem. He was a fellow medical student in my class, and we had to study the same things. He had been blessed with an ability to learn quickly, but he preferred drinking and chasing girls to studying.
He was a “serial seducer”, that is, every time he met a potentially date-able girl, he would start to speak to her in a peculiar fashion, as if he had just fallen in love with her, that I couldn’t stand. His intent was, in every case, to get the girl to go to bed with him. His technique, I will admit, was pretty good; where he had the advantage he usually was able to accomplish his goal. Once he had a few sexual encounters with the girl, however, he lost interest and soon began to treat them badly. Usually, the girl would get the hint quickly, but I saw some girls become really hurt by his “wham bam thank you ma’am” approach.
His behavior, at first entertaining, quickly became offensive to me, particularly when he tried to seduce a girl who was, I thought, a good friend of mine. She was the girlfriend of a connection that I knew of, but she went to school with us and I was friendly (in a good friends sort of way) with her. When he met her, he immediately started to approach her, with his, for him, subtle approach.
He played the guitar and had been part of a rock group, so he wrote a song in which he plainly meant to seduce her. He compared her eyes to those of a cow, which I thought was funny; he seemed to think that she was a hick because she came from downstate Illinois. When she realized what he was trying to do, she became offended, which I thought was reasonable. To me, his approach was disingenuous.
The second room-mate was a pharmacy school student, a sophomore like us, who was a native of the South Side of Chicago, prejudiced against blacks but friendly to other white people. He looked up to us since we were medical students. He was a good natured sort, and he liked to party with his fellow pharmacy students.
One evening that fall, we held a dinner party, six of us; the pharmacy student fancied himself a cook, and he did pretty well, so he cooked a turkey. We got all the preparations together and sat down in the living room to chat and drink. We broke out some whiskey and mixed up some drinks. The medical student room-mate drank heavily.
He became thoroughly intoxicated within the hour that we sat in the living room waiting for the turkey to be done. When we got up and started putting the food on the table, I noticed that he went into his room and fell on his bed.
He lay that way without moving while we sat down to eat, and ate a full dinner of turkey, stuffing, corn, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and wine. He didn’t wake up until we had finished the meal and cleared away the dishes.
He got up as if nothing had happened and started to drink again. This time he stayed awake long enough to ask one of us to drive his date home. I was thankful that he didn’t try to drive.
He often did drive drunk, and by our junior year he did have a crash, but got away with not too serious injuries. The oddest part, I thought, was that he was dating a schizophrenic girl (her father was a professor at the medical school) who reacted badly when he dumped her. She seduced me in revenge for his behavior towards her.
By November of my sophomore year, I had visited the doctor four times complaining of pain in my neck and back. I didn’t know that it was a residual effect of the bicycle crash I had suffered when I was a junior in college. In that accident, I had struck my lower back between the first and second lumbar vertebrae on the front edge of the roof of the car that hit me.
It was a small car, and I smashed in the windshield glass with my buttocks. The impact of the edge of the roof with my lumbar spine caused a rupture of the anterior ligaments that held my spine together and pushed out (herniated) the intervertebral disks at two segments. Fortunately, there was no direct nerve injury during that accident, so I had recovered quickly. Or so it seemed.
I complained to the doctor that my neck and back would hurt, especially at night, and early in the morning. Each time, he noticed that I was getting thinner; my normal weight of about 205 pounds had dwindled to 175 by the time he referred me to a psychiatrist. I admitted that I couldn’t sleep and I felt very depressed because of several problems that I ruminated over. I certainly didn’t think taking antidepressant tablets would help, but I was willing to try anything they wanted to try on me.
The tablets, Elavil (amitriptyline) certainly helped me sleep; they also made me drowsy and constipated. I had a terrible dry mouth. Nonetheless, I took them as directed. At the two week point, which happened to be Thanksgiving weekend, I felt a feeling of– something– a good feeling. At that moment, I happened to be driving to a shopping mall to escort my current girlfriend on a shopping trip.
I felt a slightly electric feeling, a buzzing that was inaudible but nonetheless reassuring. I decided that this was a sign of improvement, and further decided to continue taking the tablets as long as they told me to. That turned out to be indefinitely, or at least “six months to a year” according to the psychiatrist.
The buzzing went away and I only felt it intermittently after that. The constipation improved with Metamucil, the dry mouth with chewing gum. I could no longer smoke marijuana because the combination of the amitriptyline and the marijuana together made my mouth so dry that I couldn’t eat or spit, and I got hoarse.
The problem was that I was still depressed, although I denied that to myself. I didn’t want to go to classes, and frequently failed to go. I couldn’t study, although I should have studied two hours every night. I couldn’t look at the slides under the microscope which I hadn’t rented. I had intended to buy a binocular microscope when I got back to school in the fall, but as a result of the many repair bills I didn’t have the cash needed.
I dated several girls who turned out to be complete disasters, including one who was schizophrenic (she was a talented artist).
Finally, I gave up on the van. I went back to visit Vicki over Christmas, and she offered to loan me the money to buy a better car. The cheapest/best alternative was a new VW Rabbit, a small boxy car that had a front engine, front wheel drive combination that gave it excellent cornering ability and traction. It was $4500. After I drove back to Chicago instead of flying, I sold the VW van through an ad in the newspaper. It went to a kid who wanted to buy some pot from me too. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any to sell him, having lost my ability to smoke it.
That was the end of my first automobile and my gay abandon in medical school. I stopped smoking marijuana, stayed depressed, and didn’t study enough. I hated my classes, especially the clinical courses. It seemed as if marijuana had tranquilized me and kept me from realizing how degrading the medical school was.
I continued to take the Elavil until the following year. I gained seventy five pounds during that period and ended up at 250 pounds. After stopping the Elavil, I lost weight and ended up at 225 pounds, a much more reasonable weight for my height (at the time) of six feet seven inches.
The second automobile was faster and handled better than the first. A small, simple front wheel drive car, the Rabbit handled well. It was green, which was an ugly color, but that was what they had on the lot the day I bought it. It seated two in the front seats and three in the rear with a squeeze, and there was a little room for luggage behind them. The engine and transaxle fitted neatly in the front of the car, right over the front wheels, so traction was excellent in forward (although only fair in reverse.) It had a stick shift on the floor and four speeds. According to the driver’s manual, it had a rated top speed of 100 mph (which was precisely how high the speedometer read.) The reason this information was in the driver’s manual, apparently, was that in Germany there are certain roads where there is no maximum speed (unless conditions would compel a prudent driver to slow down.) At that time, of course, the maximum allowed speed (when the police were paying attention) anywhere in the US was fifty-five miles an hour.
I eventually did graduate from medical school and became a doctor. The Public Health Service scholarship kept body and soul together for four years; after that I was an intern making hardly any more money. I joined up with the Indian Health Service in July 1980, doubling the salary I had received as an intern.
The Warmest Year on Record
Parts of the eastern United States were cooler than average last year, but globally 2014 was the warmest year in recorded history.
Surface Temperature Anomalies
2014 temperature anomaly
Relative to the 1951–80 average
Global surface air temperature
Relative to the 1951–80 average
Inheritance: Not Just DNA
Recent research has shown a second aspect to the cell’s system of genetic control. Most of us have heard of DNA– and know that it contains “the code of life”, the instructions for all the proteins that the body makes, in every cell.
What most of us have not, until now, heard about, are histone proteins. These proteins carry the strands of DNA like spools holding coils of wire; the six or so feet of DNA contained in a person’s each and every cell (except for red blood cells) is completely wound around thousands of these histone proteins so that it fits inside a cell that is too small to see with the naked eye. Variations in the histone proteins control the activity of the genes, so that some will not be transcribed to RNA to be manufactured into proteins, while others will actively translate into RNA and then protein. There are many variations, and it seems that it some cases changes in a single amino acid will change the character of the entire histone protein, enabling highly discrete changes in translation activity and protein production.
The changes in histone proteins cause inheritable changes during an individual’s lifetime, unlike DNA, which is unable to respond in this way. In a sense, it verifies a previously discredited theory of evolution that was known as LaMarckian evolution and was party doctrine in the Soviet Union for a long time (called Lysenkoism.) The epigenetic changes behave exactly as a Lysenkoist theoretician would predict.
So in fact, evolution proceeds by two pathways: the set of instructions, and the code for turning them on and off. Changes in histone proteins cause changes in the expression of DNA. Unlike DNA, histone proteins can change a cell’s behavior during the lifetime of an individual organism. DNA is changed by mutations, which occur almost randomly in single cells. The change is not passed on to an individual’s descendants unless the DNA in sperm and ova is changed.
Changes in histone proteins seem to occur in tandem in all cells of an individual’s body, in response to changes in the environment. Histone changes cause changes in the amount of protein that the cells produce, not in the character of the protein that is produced.
Histone changes also seem to cause cells to differentiate into the types of cells that make up different organs. All the cells in the body carry essentially the same DNA, but cells in different organs produce different types and quantities of proteins. This organ specificity of protein production seems to be controlled by differences in histones. Early in the growth of the embryo, cells differentiate into distinct types that eventually go on to produce different organs; this starts with the distinction of front from back and top from bottom, then proceeds to inside from outside, solid organ from muscle from nerve cell from skin cell from intestinal surface cell, and so on. All these differences appear to be caused by changes in histones that are responsive to the location of the cell within the embryo.
Other histone changes relate to responses to the environment of the individual as a whole; some appear to respond to the level of stress that is placed on the organism, for example. People and animals who are exposed to various types and degrees of stress during early development appear to respond with permanent changes in nerve responsiveness as well as changes in the levels of stress hormones in the blood. These changes are inheritable, a contradiction to earlier, simpler “Darwinian” theories of evolution.
More advances in biology are on the horizon. There are still many mysteries that we have not solved. But we are making progress. Now, if we can just avoid slipping backwards, we may eventually get somewhere.
Next: genetically modified organisms.
First Automobile, Part One
First Automobile
When I was a freshman in medical school, I had no visible means of support to pay my tuition, fees, and living expenses (the dorm and its cafeteria.) The day before I left Cambridge to fly to Chicago, to start my freshman year, I opened a letter from the medical school (University of Illinois at the Medical Center Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine) informing me that they had no financial support to offer me.
I called my father, and separately my stepmother Vicki, and after much remonstration received promises of enough money to get me to Chicago and pay the first month’s tuition. I was on good terms with Vicki, but I had hoped never to talk to my father again. Nonetheless, I felt that he was responsible in a way, because he had insisted that I go to medical school. Never mind that I couldn’t think of any better profession. My reasoning was that, as a doctor, I could actually help people instead of exploiting them; and, I could make a good living at the same time (or so I thought.)
After I got to Chicago, the school offered me a loan of $1800, which I accepted as it was federally guaranteed. I then applied to the United States Public Health people, who were offering a full scholarship for four year’s work in an “underserved area.”
It took a couple of interviews with my freshman dean and six or more months of waiting before I received, separately, $700 and $5,400 for my first year’s expenses, money to repay that which I had already scraped up between my separate parents and government loans.
I also, at about the same time, in April, went through our final examinations for our first year of medical school, which took three days. I finished early every day, even the day on which I overslept and arrived an hour late. I was confident of having high scores, and I was not disappointed. When the exam results came back, I was in the top ten percent of my class and was invited to join the intellectual medical school fraternity.
The money seemed to be a sort of reward for doing well in school, and I was going to spend it. First, I bought a new stereo sysem, with a gigantic open reel tape deck for high fidelity sound.
I bought a turntable, speakers, and a “receiver” (amplifier and AM/FM receiver combination.) The whole cost about $600.
Second, I went out to buy a vehicle. I was attracted to the VW minivan, in which I had slept as a teenager when my mother took us camping. I had fond memories of riding around in this big on the inside van that you could sleep in while camping. I took my girlfriend with me, and we went to a VW dealer to look at used minivans.
I fixated on the cheapest van they had, a six year old, 98,000 mile relic which had been used as a transporter for a church. It was red with a white top, and it still had all the seats installed (it could seat eight.) The tires were not so good, and the engine didn’t run too well, but I was sure I could fix any minor problems. I also noticed, as my girlfriend drove, a faint thumping noise coming from the right rear wheel area. Nonetheless, I bought it for cash: $1500.
The first thing that happened after I bought it was it ran out of oil; when the low oil light came on, I didn’t know what to do. I was driving in traffic, and I pulled over, but I didn’t turn the engine off right away. I added oil and continued driving. Soon the engine developed a miss, which got worse and worse until, in DesMoine, Iowa, the burned valve fell into the cylinder, the engine made a loud clanking noise, and then it stopped. It wouldn’t even turn over. I pushed the van over to the side of the road and made it fast, locked it up, and hitched a ride to a motel. Over the next four days, I took a taxi back and forth to the VW dealer, who replaced the engine and notified me of certain other defects plaguing the vehicle.
In addition to a dead engine, there was a stripped wheel nut held on to the axle with a large nail through the cotter pin hole. The brakes front and back were close to the metal. Of course, the tires needed replacing. Finally, the shocks were worn out.
Dr Oz, the Wizard of the Airwaves
Dr Mehmet Oz is a practicing cardiothoracic surgeon (although his operative schedule has tapered off to a hundred cases a year at Columbia) who is now known as a talk show host who promotes questionable health remedies. As a resident in the 1990’s, he did laboratory work that earned him eleven patents and numerous awards. However, he has always been “open” to “alternative medicine.” For example, he is said to be a believer in homeopathy and reiki (two treatment approaches that have been shown to be useless) and he has promoted numerous odd and unapproved remedies for obesity, insomnia, and many other common conditions.
There is little to say about Dr Oz that hasn’t already been said by much more popular writers than myself. For example, here is an article by Julia Belluz, who has been a critical follower of Dr Oz for years: http://www.vox.com/2015/4/16/8412427/dr-oz-health-claims
Ms Belluz’ criticisms of Dr Oz have made her persona non grata to Dr Oz’ publicity people, and she has been refused entry as a member of the studio audience on his show permanently. She doesn’t appear to have written anything libelous or made personal attacks on him. She has, however, reported that others have called him a “quack” or a “fraud.”
The overall picture is one of a highly charismatic individual who has been trained in cardiothoracic surgery and has done a lot of good work in the laboratory and operating room, but who uncritically believes in mythological “alternatives” to actual medicine. He has used his charisma liberally, to create an enterprise that now runs a TV show with four million daily viewers, many of whom seem to hang on his every word.
His clinic, originally called the Cardiac Complementary Care Center when it was opened in 1994 in partnership with Jery Whitworth, a certified perfusionist and registered nurse, was closed in 2000 when Whitworth left and immediately reopened under another name. Whitworth stated that the two couldn’t agree on the way Oz was promoting treatments which hadn’t been proven. Apparently, Whitworth wanted to continue experiments with these treatments, while Oz simply wanted to use them in practice. Whitworth didn’t believe there was sufficient evidence to use such treatments, and from all appearances there never will be sufficient evidence. The treatments included reiki, hypnosis, “therapeutic touch”, guided imagery, prayer, reflexology, aromatherapy, and yoga. None of these treatments has ever been shown to have the desired effects, or any effects other than relaxing the patient.
Another employee, a physician assistant who also left in frustration, stated that the clinic seemed to have become all about promoting Dr Oz rather than treating patients.
He has tapped in to patient’s loneliness, need for belonging, and need for reassurance with his TV show (since 2009), on appearances with other hosts such as Oprah Winfrey (with whom he was a regular guest since 2004), and his personal approach to patients who are managed in his clinic by his staff. He does not take the trouble to “work up” his patients (that is, perform a history and physical examination in the traditional manner) but depends on members of his staff to do the basic medical work and then feed him a summary. Many surgeons perform their functions in this manner, and this is appropriate when their purpose is to spend more time in the operating room and avoid approaching the patient’s nonsurgical problems. The idea is to have patients selected who need surgery, and then operate on them. Nonsurgical problems are normally referred to an internal medicine, or other medical specialist.
Dr Oz doesn’t do this. He uncritically promotes weight loss remedies and ineffective treatments for many other common nonsurgical conditions. He doesn’t do an appropriate evaluation to determine the patient’s needs for nonsurgical treatments– a much more complex decision-making process than finding an operable lesion (such as a blocked coronary artery.) He fails to stick to the specialty that he was trained for: cardiothoracic surgery.
Dr Oz has done a lot of good in the operating room, but he has done a lot of harm to many more individuals who consider his advice to be gospel. He has “partnered” with a number of questionable “alternative” health care companies who produce useless “medicines” that he promotes on his TV show. His promotion of homeopathy and reiki alone constitute malpractice, because these approaches have been abundantly proven to be useless, and their use diverts attention from more appropriate forms of therapy.
There is no harm in using one’s charisma to reassure patients and make them feel better. In fact, this constitutes a large part of medical practice. It is known by such names as “healing touch” or “placebo effect” and is a powerful force in helping patients. Dr Oz has not limited himself to reassurance, however; he uses his power to promote useless and dangerous treatments from which he may personally profit.
There has not been any allegation that he has taken money to promote “alternative” remedies but it seems odd that he needs the Oz Media Company to organize his “branding, speaking, and partnership endeavors” (Ms Belluz’ words.) I think he clearly profits from his promotion of unproven and proven to be useless treatments, not just in his clinic, but in TV appearances and “partnership endeavors” (using his name to endorse treatments.)
Dr Oz is an extremely dangerous person because he is highly charismatic and has used his charisma to promote useless and dangerous “alternative medicine” techniques. He has taken advantage of medicine’s extremely elastic standards of care to do his promotions and gets away with, figuratively, murder.
For more about Dr Oz, consult blogger Benjamin Mazer, currently a third year medical student at the University of Rochester. He has started a blog called “Doctors in Oz” ( http://www.doctorsinoz.com/) in which he collects stories from doctors and patients about the harm Dr Oz has caused them. For example, there is the patient who stopped taking his anticoagulants on Dr Oz’ general advice on TV after having five stents put in his cardiac arteries, didn’t tell his cardiologist about it, and had a massive myocardial infarction followed by cardiac arrest, from which he was fortunately resuscitated.
Mr Mazer is attempting to have the New York State Medical Board establish a standard for public physicians, much like the standards for expert witnesses, that requires them to do full disclosure on therapies that they promote. The idea is to force them to tell the truth, not muzzle them. Read his web site for details.
Two independent researchers have reported discovering that at least some malignant tumors secrete a protein which induces insulin resistance in other tissues unaffected by the tumor. This protein, known as IMPL-2, prevents normal cells from responding to insulin and imbibing glucose, which leads to wasting away of the normal tissues. The tumor itself overexpresses genes for the glycolytic enzyme pathway and the insulin/insulin-like growth factor pathways, rendering the malignant cells resistant to the effects of the secreted protein.
This phenomenon probably evolved in malignant cells to rob the rest of the body of the glucose it needs to function, allowing the malignant cells to monopolize the body’s energy production. In this way, the malignancy can continue to grow while the rest of the body wastes away. In a similar fashion, malignant cells are also known to secrete proteins that attract the formation of new blood vessels to feed the tumor.
The two reports are available in abstract form without charge at: http://www.cell.com/developmental-cell/abstract/S1534-5807(15)00114-8 and http://www.cell.com/developmental-cell/abstract/S1534-5807(15)00143-4 both in the journal of “Developmental Cell” (or cell development.)
Let’s Talk About Something Really Trivial
Some (really paranoid) ultra-Orthodox Jewish men will refuse to sit next to a woman on an airplane. Rather than arrange in advance for an acceptable seat, these men appear suddenly realize their plight while boarding the plane and then demand that the offending woman change seats to accommodate their sensibilities.
Here are some quotes from a New York Times article describing this “problem”:
““The ultra-Orthodox have increasingly seen gender separation as a kind of litmus test of Orthodoxy — it wasn’t always that way, but it has become that way,” said Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at Queens College. “There is an ongoing culture war between these people and the rest of the modern world, and because the modern world has increasingly sought to become gender neutral, that has added to the desire to say, ‘We’re not like that.’””
““I think that the phenomenon is nowhere near as prevalent as some media reports have made it seem,” said Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs at Agudath Israel of America, which represents ultra-Orthodox Jews. Rabbi Shafran noted that despite religious laws that prohibit physical contact between Jewish men and women who are not their wives, many ultra-Orthodox men follow the guidance of an eminent Orthodox scholar, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who counseled that it was acceptable for a Jewish man to sit next to a woman on a subway or bus so long as there was no intention to seek sexual pleasure from any incidental contact.”
Other passengers, like Andrew Roffe, 31, a writer based in Los Angeles, said he and a friend wound up debating the ethics of the situation after Mr. Roffe described his experience on a United Airlines flight to Chicago. When passengers started to board, he said, an ultra-Orthodox man stood in the aisle, refusing to move and delaying the departure for 15 to 20 minutes until another passenger volunteered to switch seats.
Joshua Schwartz
Ramat-Gan, Israel
“I am an Orthodox Jewish Israeli born in the US and travel abroad from time to time.
This seating issue and the attendant demands are foolishness.
If it is that important to the gentleman involved then let them make sure at check-in or with the airline that they are seated in a manner that is in keeping with their view of religious requirements. If it is not important enough for them to take the extra time and make the extra effort in a normal, logical and seemingly much more efficient manner, then it is not that important to them.
I, for instance, prefer an aisle seat and will take all steps necessary in advance to make sure that I get one. I will not move for this type of thing.
There is no religious requirement for a man not to sit next to a woman in public travel as the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, one of the greatest “posekim”or adjudicators of Jewish law in modern times.
That public transport puts up with this disruptive behavior anyplace makes a mockery of Jewish law and practice.
As I wrote above, let them make all necessary arrangements at ticket counters or in ordering seats in advance, but not when it comes to boarding a flight, train, or bus.”
The article elicited over 2000 comments, an unusually large number for such an article.
Here is the URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/us/aboard-flights-conflicts-over-seat-assignments-and-religion.html
They Finally Got it on Video
A couple of days ago in North Charleston, South Carolina, a police officer stopped a man for having a broken tail light. The man resisted arrest and tried to run away. First the police officer Tasered him, but this didn’t stop his headlong flight. Then, from fifteen to twenty feet away, the police officer fired eight shots from his service pistol at the fleeing misdemeanant. He was hit five times, three in the back, and fell face down on the ground. He never moved again. The police officer walked up to him and yelled at him to put his hands behind his back. When he didn’t move, the officer pulled his hands back and handcuffed him. He never touched the man again, leaving him lying face down in the dirt, unmoving.
Another police officer walked up to the pair and said something. The first officer appeared to pick up his Taser from where it had fallen, twenty feet away, and drop it next to the man’s body. A few minutes later, another officer arrives with a medical kit, and the officers are seen unreeling batches of gauze and applying it to the body.
Unbeknownst to the police officers, a witness was standing perhaps thirty or forty feet away, behind a short chain link fence and some trees. The witness used his cell phone to record the entire incident, starting with the shooting. The fact that the victim is running away and is at least fifteen feet away from the officer when he draws his gun is obvious from the video recording. The officer is seen calmly raising his gun and firing eight times as the fleeing man stumbles and falls to the ground face first. The officer never looks towards the camera. The operator can be heard saying “Oh, shit” several times.
The existence of this cell phone video was cited when the police officer was arrested; he was denied bail. There is a good argument that, if not for the video, the officer would be a free man. In fact, the officer initially claimed that the victim took his Taser.
The video is chilling to watch. There can be no question in anyone’s mind that this was a deliberate, premeditated homicide. The police officer’s apparent attitude that a man can be shot dead for running away from a traffic stop is abhorrent. The justification for this kind of behavior went out of fashion fifty years ago, although it can still be seen in old movies such as the scene in “Key Largo” where a sheriff shoots two Indian men who have broken out of jail where they were serving thirty day sentences for drunkenness.
It would be interesting to see how such pundits as Rush Limbaugh explain away this video. They can be imagined saying, “Just do what the police man says and you won’t get shot.” Why should a man have to risk being shot for the crime of having a broken taillight and being behind on his child support? There is a point at which a man will risk his life to retain his liberty. The struggles of this poor man can be enlikened to those of the protagonist in “Les Miserables.”
In fact, there is something noble about being willing to die to avoid being incarcerated again. No-one who has not experienced the soul-crushing brutality of being locked up, even for an hour, can understand the feeling of needing to just get out somehow that overcomes the prisoner. This man was willing to be shot to death just to avoid being locked up. I say he was a hero, and the police officer was a villain.
Still Fighting the Bush-Iraq War
Remember the run-up to the Bush invasion of Iraq, after September 11, 2001? Well, that’s “ancient history” now, almost fifteen years ago. It seems that a lot of people wanted to invade Iraq, including Hillary Clinton. However, they were all acting on forged intelligence. One reporter who smeared Iraq all over the headlines, Judith Miller, wound up going to jail to protect Scooter Libby when he outed a serving CIA agent to the general public. She wrote a book that tried to defend her role in the Iraq reportage and protecting Scooter, but apparently she has failed in her attempt to make herself look good.
Here’s an enlightening comment from the New York Times story about the Judith Miller book:
“From J.J. Goldberg, writing in the Jewish Daily Forward: “…four months after the September 11 attacks, Israeli national security council director Uzi Dayan met in Washington with his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice. She told him — to his surprise, he later told me — that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. A month later Dayan’s boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, met with Bush in the White House and offered some advice, based on decades of Israeli intelligence.
Removing Saddam, Sharon said, according to three sources with direct knowledge, will have three main results, all negative. Iraq will implode into warring tribes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. You’ll be stuck in an Iraqi quagmire for a decade. And Iran, a far more dangerous player, will be rid of its principal enemy and free to pursue its ambitions of regional hegemony. Bush didn’t agree.
On September 12, 2002, however, a different Israeli voice visited Washington: ex-prime minister-turned-private citizen Benjamin Netanyahu. A longtime Sharon rival, closely allied with Washington’s neoconservatives, he’d been invited to address the Republican-led House as an expert on Iraq. Baghdad, he said, was hiding mobile centrifuges “the size of washing machines.” Moreover, ‘if you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.’Bush, of course, listened to Netanyahu and the neocons…”
”
So Bush had already decided to invade Iraq before any of the bogus weapons of mass destruction reporting came out. What could have possessed him to destroy a country that was already hurting under a murderous dictator? Apparently he thought that military force could somehow rectify the situation, even though the Iraqis hated America almost as much as they hated Saddam. Once again, Netanyahu has proven to be a force for destruction in the United States as well as the Middle East.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 