Some of us are very concerned about our health and good health. So we will find the information below to be very interesting as we start the 2009 New Year – hoping for the best, but prepared for almost anything.

“No Mug? Drug Makers Cut Out Goodies for Doctors”

Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies — Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs — that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.

No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned with rhinestones that spell out B-O-T-O-X. So are pens advertising the Sepracor sleep drug Lunesta, in whose barrel floats the brand’s mascot, a somnolent moth.

Some skeptics deride the voluntary ban as a superficial measure that does nothing to curb the far larger amounts drug companies spend each year on various other efforts to influence physicians. But proponents welcome it as a step toward ending the barrage of drug brands and logos that surround, and may subliminally influence, doctors and patients.

“It’s not just the pens — it’s the paper on the exam table, the tongue depressor, the stethoscope tags, medical calipers that might be used to interpret an EKG, penlights,” said Dr. Robert Goodman, a physician in internal medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

Read more on this at: nytimes.com/2008/12/31/business/31drug.html?_r=1

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You will not agree with what they say below, but it’s interesting reading:

“Another Health Care Myth Bites the Dust”

People who oppose sweeping health care reform often try to score easy points with some variation of this statement: “American health care is the best in the world. People come from all over to see the doctors in the United States.” The reasons people come here, we are told, are shorter wait times, superior technology, and better-trained doctors.

The problem is, this is not entirely true. According to Medical Tourism: Consumers in Search of Value, a report recently published by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, the number of Americans leaving the United States to get medical treatment far exceeds the number of foreigners coming in. In 2007,  750,000 Americans traveled abroad for medical treatment, while only 400,000 foreign patients sought care in the U.S. This means health care now joins a host of American industries that add to the U.S. trade deficit – that is, we buy more units of medical treatment in other countries than other countries buy from us.

Deloitte predicts that the trend towards outbound medical tourism will continue in coming years. At the current rate of growth, there will be 6 million outbound trips by 2010, while inbound medical visits will only reach about 450,000. Thus, as the pundits extol the worldwide appeal of our great health system, U.S. citizens are voting with their feet, choosing international care in greater and greater numbers.

Details at: http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=33011

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In the festivities of Christmas and the Holidays, we sometimes have to reflect on everyday issues – like the fact that real men do read and need to encourage their children (especially boys, but girls too) to read.

I saw an article that a high school (in Spring Lake Park, Minnesota) was dealing with this problem. Information can be seen everywhere (according to the article) that the school is serious about getting children to read more in America’s schools, because our real male factor do read.

This is very essential because we know how crucial literacy (along with maths and science) is to kids who need help and tutoring to overcome learning problems and to from graduate high schools. So real men do read…not just play games and sports or watch and make movies. Men are humans and they have emotions that many are good at hiding. But the fact is they need to help and encourage kids to read by reading more and more to them.

Let all our males in America and friends worldwide who really care about kids literacy help them to read by reading to them more and more as real men do.

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