The emergency contraception Plan B (what a name!) was recommended by the FDA to go over-the-counter, but the secretary of HHS, Kathleen Sebelius, put the kibbosh on that idea in a rare Administration override to an FDA decision.

Sebelius is a career politician, has served as governor of Kansas, has been Barak Obama's Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA. 

Looks like a lot of these doc rating sites get their data from a small number of review sources.  The ongoing problem of lack of data credibility on the web affects medicine as well.

This from Barbara Duck--

I think George Carlin was on the mark when he said there are no rights.  If a country can imprison its own citizens (as in the Japanese internment camps during WWII) with no due process, there are no rights.

So where does that leave health care?

I think the word "dignity" is more apropos than "right" when it comes to health care.  The ability to see a doctor, to have a hospital nearby, to have a pharmacy nearby with good medicines and a skilled pharmacist, these are human dignities.

Dr. Richard Leff weighed in about resident work hour rules yesterday over at KevinMD.com.  I couldn't resist responding here.  Now InteractMD.com ain't KevinMD.com, but I thought I would like to add my two cents to the fray, for what it's worth.  Let's just say the intervening six years that have passed since residency have not diminished my interest in the question of how to create a more hospitable work environment for residents.  I think every doc that was once a resident needs to think about how the medical field can make things better for residents.  We all reap the benefits of our residency training, so it behooves us to try to incrementally improve the system.

An occasional ongoing series of my results as I train my classifier.  I have over 400 abstracts in the training set, and I still get dreck sometimes.  Hope this is of some assistance to someone....

1: PMID 20677480 Endometrial ablation with paracervical block.

2: PMID J Reprod Med. 2009 Oct;54(10):639-44. Breast mass in a patient with ovarian cancer: a case report.

From the machine learning algorithm this morning, culled from over 3,000 new abstracts posted overnight.

1: Refractory rickets in the tropics.

2: "Functional food" for acceleration of growth in short children born small for gestational age.

3: Changes in opioid use and healthcare costs among U.S. patients with diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain treated with duloxetine compared with other therapies.

1: Discontinuation of Cholinesterase Inhibitor Treatment and Determinants thereof in the Netherlands: A Retrospective Cohort Study.

2: Low-dose doxepin: in the treatment of insomnia.

3: Borderline personality traits and disorder: Predicting prospective patient functioning.

Today I saw a patient with a Heimlich valve.  What a neat concept--a one-way valve you can attach to a chest tube, that allows air to escape the lining of the lung.  In other words, it fixes a pneumothorax without a wall suction device.

They give these out to soldiers so they don't die if they get shot in the chest.  What a great idea--this alone has probably saved hundreds of lives.

However you feel about the guy, you gotta admit "You Don't Know Jack" was a well-done movie.

Certainly Jack Kevorkian is a controversial guy, and there are strong opinions on either side.  

I can imagine they'll be watching this movie in "Medical Ethics" classes in med schools for years. 

Looks like CBS News killed it with a story today on the secrets our digital copiers are retaining--when they get sold as used equipment.  I have to admit, I'm a pretty tech savvy guy, but I never even thought of this.  Copiers these days retain thousands of documents in their internal memory, and if the copier gets sold, any purchaser has access to the digital documents.

These copiers are great, but they have a dark side.  You don't exactly get a button on there that says "wipe memory because I'm selling the copier."

CBS found retained papers from a police sex crimes deparment and a health insurance company.  Wow.