June 28th, 2010 by admin

There’s new research from the University of California that states the problems surrounding older people and their sleep, while offering few solutions. This is a somewhat sad trend when it comes to research affecting the aging members of our society. When people are younger and more energetic, they will contribute to the growth and development of the American way of life. Equally important is their personal earning capacity. To maintain their quality of life, they will often pay the medical profession well. Those who are older have less to contribute and, while some do have money, there’s less that can be done to improve the quality of life when bodies have aged. Although Sarah Palin was exaggerating the threat of “death panels” to drum up opposition to reform, we have a comparable effect already in the rationing of research into the health problems of the old, and in the poor quality of healthcare services in the geriatric sector. People do have shorter lives in the US than in many other countries around the world.

According to the research, about half the seniors in the US complain of difficulty in sleeping. It’s suggested that lack of sleep increases the risk of illness and early death. The question, therefore, is why seniors do find sleep more difficult. The answers are not directly related to age as such, but to the facts that older people are more prone to diseases and disorders, use more medications which have insomnia as a side effect, and find their circadian rhythms disrupted. Unfortunately, the research also finds the healthcare service is not sympathetic to these problems and fails to properly diagnose sleep disorders or give the appropriate treatment (including simply adjusting the dosages in medications probably contributing to the sleep disorder). At present, there’s no financial incentive for hospitals and clinics to divert resources to treat these problems. Although seniors can use their own savings to go to professional sleep laboratories for overnight assessment with a polysomnogram, the necessary follow-up treatments through counseling and cognitive behavioral therapy is often neglected because it’s not considered cost-effective. Necessary dentistry or, where appropriate, surgery is a one-off cost and preferred where appropriate. But, for the most part, seniors are left to fend for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

June 28th, 2010 by admin

One of the things supposed to make America the best place in the world to live is its free market economy. If you listen to the propaganda, you believe you can buy anything you want in the US and, for the most part, the power of competition forces all traders and service providers to keep their prices low. Supposedly, if you don’t like the price or the quality of what’s on offer from one supplier, you can take your business elsewhere. This is all great in theory, but it breaks down when you get on to the subject of intellectual property rights. Now you can’t download music from anyone except iTunes and the roof falls on your head if you start up a business selling sodas and call it Pepsi. The idea of copyright or trademarks is simple. If you wrote the music and the lyrics, you own the rights and everyone has to pay to listen to them. Equally, anyone who brands a business gets a monopoly on the use of the name. No other business can copy your name and pass off its products as the brand. The predatory way in which all this works is most obvious in the patent market where anyone with a new idea can get a monopoly to exploit it. If anyone else tries to copy it, courts are quick to issue an injunction and damages follow. You can’t have failed to see news of the big cases between the technology companies, arguing who has the rights to mobile phones and hand-held devices.

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