How much do you love your smart phone?

Here is an article about out love affair with our phones!   

Do you prefer your cell phone over sleep? You're not alone
Our obsession with our smartphones has grown into a full-blown addiction, according to a new survey in the iPass Global Mobile Workforce Report. According to iPass, one of every three mobile workers get up regularly throughout the night to check email on their phone, and nearly half of those surveyed admitted that they couldn’t sleep without a smartphone within reach.

And loss of sleep isn’t the only obstacle our phone addiction brings with it, as a little under one third of respondents said that their domestic partners were upset by their incessant use of technology. And that’s most likely a low-ball figure, as a good chunk of those surveyed were probably either single, or somewhat oblivious to the fact that their partners were upset.

The report claims that our mobile obsession, at least within the workforce, started when people began to value speed over quality. In many executive circles, the employee with the first response was considered to be a better worker than his more thoughtful colleagues. According to the survey, 40 percent of respondents admitted to interrupting a meeting to take a call.

Even those of us who don’t partake in the corporate America lifestyle know how annoying it can be to try having a conversation with someone whose main priority is their current SMS exchanges. What’s funny is that, along with the 40 percent who admit to interrupting meetings for phone calls, an additional 40 percent agree that doing so is unacceptable behavior.

An old gout medicine + a new patent = HUGE price increase of an old drug

Jay Parkinson brought this to my attention:

Colchine has been used to treat gout for decades. Gout is a relatively common painful kind of arthritis. Colchicine has been around so long that nobody had ever bothered to patent it. It was a few pennies a pill and very effective. In steps URL Pharmaceuticals. They realized it didn’t have a patent so they quickly did some studies to determine its effectiveness. Of course the studies showed that it was safe and effective. They took their studies to the FDA who quickly approved “their” colchicine. URL then had exclusive rights to sell colchicine as a branded drug at over $5 a pill. And then they successfully sued the companies who had been making colchicine as a generic for years. They’ve won the cases. And now people who depended on colchicine for their daily lives must pay $5 a pill instead of 5 cents.


Now a few members of Congress want answers.

Too late. What URL Pharmaceuticals did was just business right? That’s the American medical industry…

Drug use

Here's a neat post about how different drugs cause different amounts of harm among the following categories:

• Mortality
• Damage
• Dependence
• Impairment of mental functioning
• Loss of tangibles
• Loss of relationships
• Injuries to others
• Crime increase
• Environmental degradation
• Family breakdowns
• International turmoil
• Economic cost
• Loss of community cohesion and reputation

 Think you know which drug scores as the most destructive?  Click here to find out!

Fitness Triumphs over Medicine -- one Aussie's thoughts

Here's an article from an Austrialian talking about the Triumph of Fitness over Medicine.  The article is his but I have to say I agree with a lot of what he has said.  I am looking forward to hearing what you think.....

.......You're not wrong.



Here's an article I drafted recently based on the Australian experience - where despite record levels of spending on medical care, the health of the population continues to decline.


I don't like the word 'prevention'. 'Preventive health' is medical speak.


You don't prevent health you create it yourself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


FITNESS TRIUMPHS OVER MEDICINE


If you ever you wanted evidence that the best bet for departments of health throughout Australia was fitness not medicine, all you had to do was watch the final of the Biggest Loser.


In the race to improve the health of Australians the Commonwealth Government continues to spend infinitely more on medical research, surgeries and hospitals that it does on fitness. However, you can put down the glasses, the race is over, it’s fitness first, daylight second, medicine a distant third.

I’m a big fan of the Biggest Loser. Where else can you see people go from fat to thin, unhealthy to fit, sad to happy, all in a few short months? Certainly not in many surgeries and pharmacies around Australia


The Commonwealth Government’s timid response to the epidemic of personally generated body system dysfunctions - metabolic, musculo-skeletal and psychological - is to set up a toothless Preventive Health Agency with the bulk of the ‘illhealth’ budget still ending up in the pockets of an increasingly ineffective, expensive and bloated medical industry: preventive health $145m versus Medical industry $68B.


So, here’s the blue print for health, fitness and wellbeing in this country.


* we need to make a distinction between what's medical and what's not. Too many people are going to doctors for things doctors can't fix and for things that would best be attended to by someone else, like a nurse, naturopath, counsellor or fitness practitioner.


1. Then we need to make the distinction between what's a disease and what's a personally-generated body system dysfunction. If you've got a disease, a medical complaint or your dysfunction is too far gone, you need medical treatment. Otherwise start working on yourself.


1. Anyone with any of the personally generated dysfunctions who is prepared to donate 4 weeks of their time to work on their fitness can have free access to fitness instruction at a fitness centre close to their home. Getting fit becomes their full time job. No pussy footing, no molly codling, just 8 hours a day devoted to restoring poor function to good with a balanced health, fitness, wellbeing and nutrition program.


* the health of Australians to improve, departments of health around Australia have to lever the fitness industry into the front line of primary health care.


You know that the bulk of the illhealth problems in this country are fitness problems and you know you can’t solve a fitness problem with a medical solution.


* the current Department of Health into two to form a Department of Health, Fitness and Wellbeing on one side of the ledger and a Department of Medicine on the other, with the current budget for general practice being split evenly between general practice and the new Department of Health, Fitness and Wellbeing.


* Commonwealth Government has to publicly acknowledge that in a toxic, sedentary society, that’s under nourished, over fed and stressed to the max, the medical model is the wrong model for improving health, fitness and wellbeing. Over the last 35 years it’s had a good trial and come up short.
* Commonwealth Government has to recognize the effect that the practice of junk medicine is having on health standards, junk medicine being the prescription of medications which mask symptoms rather than restoring poor function to good.
John Miller


So....what do you think???  Click the comment icon and share your thoughts.

Better Dibetes Type II control

With diabetes (especially Type 2) running rampant in our population, here is something that might help us control our sugar levels.

We all know exercise is a great way to help the body control our blood sugar but a recent study reported Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise reports that creatine supplementation for those who are exercising works better at improving A1C levels than does exercise alone!

Interesting, a relatively easy fix and worth talking to your doc about!!