"hey dumbass..." abe lincoln was president in the 1860s. that was 150 years ago. do today's republicans remind you of abe lincoln? do you consider rick santorum a champion of civil rights?

LBJ and JFK also made enormous contributions to civil rights. i really don't think you can attribute modern civil rights to any single political party.

i don't think they are idiots. i just think they are bad people. is that okay?

well, i'm glad your 26 year old uninsured son just had a broken ankle, for which he could afford the appropriate care.

now consider someone in similar circumstances, except instead of a broken ankle, they have septic shock. or type 1 diabetes. or a congenital heart defect. or appendicitis. or crohns disease. or schizophrenia (~1% of the population). or got hit by a car that shattered their pelvis/skull/spine/etc.

i suppose those people should also call around and get estimates from area hospitals, so that they can make sure to go somewhere where they can afford to pay for their care.

not everyone is as lucky as your son.

Ethics is now included in the medical curriculum in most schools. Most curricula focus on medical ethics, but professional ethics are also discussed (e.g. relationships with drug companies). Whether this has an effect on the student is something that remains to be seen. Is ethical behavior teachable at this stage, or is it a reflection of the way you were raised (or even the way you were born)? I personally suspect it is the latter.

A part of the problem is that the pharmaceutical companies are incredibly effective at "teaching" doctors through their aggressive marketing. They present themselves as an information source, and not marketers. Their reps are trained to cite the evidence that supports their drug in a scientific-sounding manner. The result is that a lot of doctors are moving those drugs in the belief that it is the best thing to do for the patient. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not, but the drug reps won't tell you about that second part. It calls to question why we allow drug reps access to physicians' offices, and whether we need to bolster the scope of continuing medical education.

The American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) is urging medical schools to develop more strict policies governing their relationships with pharmaceutical companies, and banning prescribing perks, etc. This movement is starting to gain serious ground in academic medical centers. It is hopeful that similar changes will be seen in private practice, although I suspect some legislation will be necessary in the long run.

On a side note, a lot of doctors trained in an era when you were -supposed- to prescribe antibiotics "to prevent secondary bacterial infections." It's only in more recent times that the evidence has shown this to be an unnecessary and potentially harmful practice. So, a lot of doctors are prescribing these antibiotics in good faith.

Contrary to what you stated, MRSA -is- a huge problem outside of the hospital and nursing home environments. Most urban locales now have high enough rates of MRSA floating around in the community (i.e. community-acquired MRSA, or CA-MRSA) that it has required some level of empiric MRSA coverage for skin infections.

And when they do decide to pull the plug, Sarah Palin will blame it on Obama and his death panels.

The dust will flow all around the rover, since there's no gravity ... on Mars?

An external bluetooth keyboard for a smartphone? Please. That is sooo 1982. If someone develops a reliable voice input system (i.e. so you can dictate your e-mails), bluetooth keyboards will be toast.

Actually, I don't think Denver weather is bad enough to cause this problem. For this to happen, you need very windy blizzard conditions combined with sustained periods of extreme cold. This sort of thing happens from time to time in Denver, but is much more common in the Midwest and on the East Coast.

To be fair, I think that the browser wars taught Microsoft that their tactics actually do work -- to an extent. They went from being a minor player to being the dominant browser, largely by bundling and incorporating IE into Windows. Enemies in the tech community are no match for compliant sheep in the non-tech community.

Firefox isn't dominant because Microsoft withdrew their tactics. Firefox is dominant because MSIE stinks. Time will tell if the same happens to Bing

To be fair, there are a significant number of conditions seen in the primary care setting for which the physical exam is of little or no value. Many conditions are diagnosed by the clinical interview alone. A responsible way to run this virtual clinic thing would be to treat only this set of conditions over the internet, and bring the rest into the clinic for an exam. Whether this is actually what takes place is another story.

For patients who have an established relationship with a primary care doctor, virtual clinics can be a valuable adjuvant in managing many chronic medical conditions between visits. This is particularly valuable in conditions for which some level of self-testing is available at home (e.g. hypertension, diabetes, chronic congestive heart failure). Incorporating the virtual clinic model into chronic disease management can even improve the management of such conditions beyond what can be achieved through regular face-to-face doctor visits. Telemanagement programs have long had success keeping CHF [congestive heart failure] patients out of the hospital, and moving such programs from the phone to the internet is a reasonable next step for computer-savvy patients.

Unfortunately, most acute conditions that are seen in the ER are a bit more serious, and tend to require some level of physical exam for proper diagnosis. Additionally, the management of most chronic medical conditions also requires some level of examination at regular intervals. If the goal of expanding access to primary care is to provide better chronic disease prevention/management and relieve ER crowding, the virtual clinic is unlikely to achieve those goals without coexisting access to face-to-face primary care. For this reason, while virtual clinics can (and will) become an important adjuvant in primary care, they cannot replace an established relationship with a primary care doctor.

prescription drugs = drugs you have to have a prescription to get

controlled substances = drugs determined to have significant abuse potential, and therefore subject to certain prescribing rules by the DEA (e.g. no refills, can't phone it into the pharmacy, some states require triplicate prescription paper, etc.) examples of controlled substances include narcotics, amphetamines, etc.

not every prescription drug is a controlled substance. in fact, most are not.

Why did you put "works" in quotes? Office 2003 still does, in fact, work. It works just fine.

A lot of people are still using Office 2003 because the number of new features that impact daily usage seems to shrink with every new release. Why upgrade when the version you have does everything you need it to, and the new version doesn't do anything you wish it did?

There's always someone who will benefit from [insert new feature here]. But for the rest of us, Office has suffered from a paucity of innovation since 1995. If anything, things have gotten worse -- e.g. they keep trying to make Microsoft Word "smart," but the result is a program that's too smart to be obedient and too stupid to do what you actually want it to do.

The writing's on the wall for Office. If the folks in Redmond don't figure out something reeeal soon, Office is toast.