June 19th, 2010 by admin

Sometimes people want their good news delivered in convenient bite-sized amounts. If you cut out all the chatter and boil it down to just one simple thing, what do I have to do to lose weight? When experts get put on the spot, they tend to fall back on a formula. Reduce your diet to this number of calories and you will lose weight. The person does a mental calculation. That number sounds doable. Right. Let’s do it! There may be a lot of other information that should be given, other factors to take into account. But none of that is heard. The decision is based on just one number. Way back when, one of the more common formulas to see the light of day was an equation. About 3,500 calories add up to about 1 pound of fat (that’s 0.45 kg who think in metric). Keeping it simple, that means you lose 1 pound every week if you cut 500 calories a day.

When an expert is trapped into endorsing such a plan, almost everyone will say they can do it. Ah, but wait a moment. At your current intake, you may have been putting on 1 pound of fat every week. So if all you do is reduce your overall intake by 3,500, the only effect would be to avoid putting on another pound. What tends to happen as people age is their stomach capacity grows. They feel comfortable with increasingly large volumes of food inside. This fuels a progressive weight increase and a slow journey into obesity. So whatever charges you plan to make to your diet must take account of your current weight and eating habits. This is not to say that sacrificing 3,500 calories a week will not produce some weight loss. But whatever is lost is unlikely to be significant and the loss will not continue. People who diet will know that, after a month or so, their weight stabilizes at a new level. Those who are easily discouraged go back to their old eating habits and stop whatever exercise they had started. Within a week or so, they are back to their old weight. Read the rest of this entry »

June 17th, 2010 by admin

This should be an extraordinary story. The very idea of banning the establishment of new pain clinics should be absurd. Most informed opinion long ago accepted there is a need for an improvement and expansion in pain management services. Why should governments in South Florida and the Treasure Coast be among the forefront of a growing national movement to ban the establishment of new clinics? The answer is a sad reality produced by the for-profit approach to the supply of medical services. In a perfect world, there would be mixed teams of doctors, therapists and nursing staff based in every hospital, with emergency back-up in local clinics.

The best practice standards now accept that pain should be treated as a disease or disorder in its own right. So once people have been through the specialists for treatment of the underlying causes of the pain, they should be passed on to the pain department for counseling and advice on how to live life within the new physical limits. In public healthcare services, the high labor costs are absorbed by the state and paid through the tax system. This provides one-to-one care from doctors and therapists, and ensures people have the best chance of favorable outcomes no matter what their underlying physical problems. In a for-profit system, every part of the healthcare industry is for profit. That gives direct incentives to hospitals and clinics to adopt professional standards producing the highest returns, while the insurance industry finds every excuse to refuse or reduce payment on claims. The result is a system that is biased to provide the least possible care for the highest possible price. How does this work in the new pain clinic market? Read the rest of this entry »