America the…

...health care crazy.

A long but interesting article about health care and America.It looks at the causes of illness, the views of the different groups that make up America (8) and has a very interesting pharmacy-ethics- freedoms thing going for it.This excerpt is from near the end. It captures the spirit of the “thing” I mentioned.

In the One America vision of things, better government would deliver better diets and also more Lipitor to all, and that would make health care, perhaps even health itself, equitable and uniform. But however clear a health problem may be, and however simple and cheap the cure, molecular medicine is riddled with lines that the nanny state just can’t cross. Who would ever have thought, for example, that the pursuit of thinner thighs might cause 1,000 birth defects a year, many as dreadful as thalidomide’s—and do it in the teeth of a federal scheme to save children from those very afflictions?

In 1998, the Food and Drug Administration resolved to slip a certain drug into everyone’s food. Dr. David Kessler, the FDA’s head at the time, preferred to call it a “pharmacologically active ingredient,” but what’s the difference? Folic acid (vitamin B9) promotes normal embryonic growth quite as powerfully as thalidomide inhibits it—a healthy dose keeps a baby’s spinal cord inside his spine, saving him from a lifetime in a wheelchair. The unborn baby needs a full ration in the first six weeks after conception, however, and roughly a quarter of young women have diets that fall short. So in 1998, Dr. K. directed that a modest dose be added to almost all flour, cornmeal, pasta, and rice flacked as “enriched.”

Doctors of jurisprudence, however, have concluded that no one can force an expectant mother to eat her risotto, least of all for the benefit of what may be growing in her womb. And on the advice of low-carb guru Dr. Atkins, millions of fertile young women stopped eating at Kessler’s diner shortly after he adopted his stealth-health menu. The late 1990s’ dramatic decline in “neural tube” birth defects began leveling off in 2004. The public cure for a nutritional deficiency reached its limit, apparently, in a private cure for gluttony.

The spina bifida baby isn’t responsible for his fate, but his mother certainly is in charge of hers—the Supreme Court says so. And many people, it seems, are reasonably comfortable inside their own skin, warts and all, don’t wish to change or medicate their lifestyles, and recoil at the thought of trying to jigger their children’s genes. Stealth-health medicine worked brilliantly in the war against contagious germs—by stemming contagion, vaccines and antibiotics protect the unvaccinated, too—but it can hardly touch gluts and genes. Freedom includes the freedom to burn your candle at both ends, though it will not last the night. Full Article