History of Patient Modesty – Part 1: How Bodily Exposure Went from Unacceptable to Required (Patient Modesty & Privacy Concerns)
I have a guest post today on the #1 medical privacy blog. Part one describes what medicine used to be like before it was based on modern, anatomical theories of disease. Well into the 19th century, doctors did not expect patients to remove their clothes.
U.S. Raises Value of a Life, and Businesses Fear Impact (NYT)
How much should the government spend to prevent a single death? Environmental, consumer, and worker protection standards have been going up, despite protests from business.
How Never Let Me Go gave up and died (Guardian)
Film about human clones created for their body parts misses the point: the acquiescence of the weak to their exploitation by the strong. Film’s organ donors are comparable to “the lackeys of capitalism [who] compete to become employee of the month.”
A close call on health inequalities (Guardian)
BMJ study, plus Sir Michael Marmot’s. There’s more to life expectancy than a simple north-south divide of UK. Wealth determines health. Some of the starkest differences occur not between regions but between neighbors.
Northerners ‘20% more likely to die under 75′ than southerners (Guardian)
The underlying causes of the divide, the ’causes of the causes’, are social and economic. “This means tackling the wider, social causes of ill health and early death as well as addressing individual healthy lifestyles.” Amen
Trends in mortality from 1965 to 2008 across the English north-south divide: comparative observational study (BMJ) (PDF)
More deaths in northern than southern England. Worse for men. Possible factors: socioeconomic, environmental (including working conditions), educational, epigenetic, lifestyle. Causes may act over the whole life course, possibly over generations.
Image: The Nerdy Nurse
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