Monthly Archives: October 2007

The risk of witch doctors

Posted on by
Reply

snakeoil.gifIt never fails to amaze me that seemingly rational people continue to seek out witch doctor treatments for anything more complicated than a massage:

On the same shift I saw two very sick patients, both of whom were under the care of chiropractors before they decided to pay us a visit in the Emergency Department. The first was an old woman with a one week history of dyspnea, chest pain, and a cough. Her chiropractor had diagnosed her with a ìdisplaced rib,î and had been dilligently popping it back into place every day for the previous week. After a simple set of vital signs revealing low blood pressure, a slow heart rate, and a slightly low temperature, not to mention a chest x-ray which showed a huge unilateral pleural effusion, it was not hard to come up with the diagnosis of pneumonia with sepsis.
ìHe [the chiropractor] said she didnít have a fever and she wasnít coughing anything up,î said the sister. [. . .]
The second patient was a 70-year-old man who finally came in after a week of ineffectual adjustments for ìmuscle achesî and general malaise which had evolved, by the time we saw him, into a vague intermittant chest pain related to exertion but which the chiropractor insisted, apparently, was some kind of subluxation. The EKG told the true story, an evolving myocardial infarction. My patient would have probably died if his son hadnít raised the alarm and insisted his father see some real doctors.

Meanwhile, this article reports that researchers have determined that acupuncture works. But the same research study concluded that fake acupuncture, where the needles are inserted shallowly and in the wrong places, also works:

The results suggest that both acupuncture and sham acupuncture act as powerful versions of the placebo effect, providing relief from symptoms as a result of the convictions that they engender in patients.

My conclusion: On one hand, if you stick pins in people who are complaining about something, then some of them will eventually quit complaining. On the other hand, if you take pins out of some people who were previously complaining, then some of them will also stop complaining.

The end of socialized medicine

Posted on by
2

ronald-reagan-socialized-medicine-lp2.jpgPeter Huber is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, an MIT-trained engineer and a lawyer who has authored several books, including Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists and Galileoís Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom. In this provocative City Journal article, Huber observes that the complexity of modern diseases virtually assures that a “one-size-fits-all” socialized medical system will fail:

That is the real crisis in health careónot medicine thatís too expensive for the poor but medicine thatís too expensive for the rich, too expensive ever to get to market at all. Human-ity is still waiting for countless more Lipitors to treat incurable cancers, Alzheimerís, arthritis, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinsonís, and a heartbreakingly long list of other dreadful but less common afflictions. Each new billion-dollar Lipitor will be deliveredóif at allóby the lure of a multibillion-dollar patent. The only way to get three-cent pills to the poor is first to sell three-dollar pills to the rich.
With almost $30 trillion under management, Wall Street could easily double the couple of trillion it currently has invested in molecular medicine. The fastest way for Washington to deliver more health, more cheaply, to more people would be to unleash that capital by reaffirming patents and stepping out of the way.
On the other side of the pill, molecular medicine can only be propelled by the informed, disciplined consumer. Any scheme to weaken his role will end up doing more harm than good. Foggy promises of one-size, universal care maintain the illusion that the authorities will take good care of everyone. They reaffirm the obsolete and false view that health care begins somewhere out there, not somewhere in here.
Neither Pfizer nor Washington can ever stuff health itself into a one-price uniform, One America boxónot when health is as personal as ice cream, genes, and pregnancy, not when every mother controls her personal consumption of carbs, cholesterol, Flintstones, and Lipitor. But the thought that government authority can get more bodies in better chemical balance than free markets and free people is more preposterous than anything found in Das Kapital. Freedom is now pursuing a pharmacopoeia as varied, ingenious, complex, flexible, fecund, and personal as life itself, and the pursuit will continue for as long as lifestyles change and marriages mix and match. Given time, efficient markets will deliver a glut of cheap Lipitor for every glut of cheap cholesterol. And given time, free people will find their way to a better mix.

Read the entire article here.

The insecurity of big-time college coaches

Posted on by
Reply

big-money.jpgThe Dallas Morning News’ Kevin Sherrington observes that the NCAA’s the absurdly-high salaries of big-time college football coaches has a high price:

Football coaches at most Top 25 programs draw salaries equivalent to Fortune 500 CEOs, but they don’t generate similar revenues.
How do they rate their paydays then? Coaches simply benefit from an arms-race mentality in college sports. You can’t compete without an indoor practice facility, luxury suites, a weight room the size of a football field or a head coach drawing less than seven figures.

As noted in previous posts here, here and here, big-time college coaches benefit from the NCAA’s regulation of compensation for players. Inasmuch as the NCAA does not allow direct compensation of the players for the money being generated, the money has to go somewhere — i.e., into the wallets of the coaches. However, if the players were paid market compensation for the income that they generate, then the money paid to the players would not be available for the coaches. In all likelihood, the compensation of coaches would decrease.
As I’ve noted on several occasions, big-time college sports is an entertaining form of corruption. But if the institutions want to continue competing at that level, treating big-time college sports as a true business and compensating the players for the income they generate sure seems like a more honest way to approach it.

Kling on GMU Economics

Posted on by
Reply

GMU_PLogo_RGB.jpgArnold Kling provides this interesting TCS Daily op-ed on the innovative George Mason University Economics Department, whose members have done a remarkable job over the past several years promoting the understanding of economics issues through the blogosphere. As Kling noted earlier here:

I like to put it his way: at [the University of] Chicago, they say “Markets work well. Let’s use markets.” At MIT, they say “Markets fail. Let’s use government.” At GMU, they say “Markets fail. Let’s use markets.”

The Chronicle’s vacuum of baseball analysis

Posted on by
6

Chronicle logo.jpgIt may be football season, but that doesn’t stop Chronicle sports columnists from continuing to bludgeon us with their seemingly insatiable capacity to analyze the Stros and matters relating to Major League Baseball badly.
First, there is this blog post from the inimitable Jose de Jesus Ortiz, who already has quite a legacy of poor analysis of the sport that he covers for the Chroicle:

Willy Taveras, who holds the Astros franchise record for consecutive games with a hit, has been a difference maker for the Colorado Rockies heading into the third game of the National League Championship Series.
The Rockies obviously valued his speed and defense, which is why he was added to the NLCS roster even though he hadn’t played in three weeks because of an injury.
In Game 2, he was the player of the game after making an awesome game-saving catch in the seventh inning and then driving in the game-winning run with an RBI walk. Oh, he also had doubled and scored a run in a game that was 2-2 heading into extra innings. [. . .]
General manager Tim Purpura and Phil Garner weren’t fired until August, but they hurt the franchise tremendously by never understanding the true value of Willy Taveras. They valued Chris Burke out of position over Taveras at his natural position. Because of this mistake, the Astros’ pitching staff suffered.
It’s pathetic to see Taveras starring elsewhere when he should have been playing here. Cecil Cooper and Jose Cruz saw something special in Taveras and kept working with him in 2006. Unfortunately, Cooper wasn’t the manager then.
Do you miss Taveras?

In this prior post, I explained why Ortiz is simply wrong about Taveras’ value as a Major League player. But in his latest blog post, how can Ortiz overlook that Taveras had a pathetic .250 on-base average and an even worse .222 slugging percentage during the National League Championship Series? Or that the Rockies won 17 out of their last 18 games to get into the NLCS without any contribution from Taveras, who sat out those games with a hamstring injury?
What Ortiz simply does not understand is that anecdotal flashy plays do not prove that a player is a good Major Leaguer. It only proves that the player is capable of making a good play every once in awhile. To be a good Major Leaguer, a player has to be able to generate more runs consistently for his team than what the team’s alternatives would likely generate using the same number of outs as the player. Not only is it far from clear that Taveras did that this season for the Rockies (and the Rockies’ late season streak without him suggests that he did not), the fact of the matter is that the Stros’ CF-RF combination of Hunter Pence and Luke Scott was far more productive this past season than a Taveras-Pence tandem would have been.
Meanwhile, the equally foggy Chronicle columnist Richard Justice chimes in with this recent column in which he bemoans the Stros’ poor evaluation and development of minor league players (for a far more insightful analysis of how the Rockies developed their World Series team, see this Alan Schwarz NY Times article). This revelation comes from the same columnist who contends that the Stros blew this season because the club elected not to re-sign aged free agent pitchers Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, and who continues to beat the drum that Stros owner Drayton McLane made a terrible mistake in allowing former Stros General Manager Gerry Hunsicker to resign after the 2004 season. Of course, Hunsicker’s tenure as Stros GM coincided with most of the period from 1997 to date during which the Stros’ minor league system has been in decline. Apparently, in Justice’s odd world, the man in charge of the Stros’ player drafts during those years had nothing to do with the failure of those drafts to produce enough good Major League-quality players for the Stros.
My purpose is not to be overly critical of either Taveras or Hunsicker. Taveras is still a young player who, although a below-average National League player so far in his career, could develop into an above-average player. Similarly, despite his deficiencies in overseeing the Stros’ drafts during the period from 1997 to 2004, Hunsicker is still the best GM that the Stros have ever had. My point is simply this: Why do Ortiz and Justice refuse to provide a balanced analysis of them?
It’s not all that important in the big scheme of things, but are Ortiz and Justice really the best the Chronicle can do for baseball analysis?

Immune to reason

Posted on by
4

vaccines.jpegPaul Howard is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Center for Medical Progress and the editor of the blog Medical Progress Today. In this Washington Post op-ed, Howard addresses the potential danger to public health of indulging in the current wave of trendy skepticism toward vaccinations:

Sadly, too many parents have lost faith in vaccines. Partly, this is because of a “generation gap.” In 1940, U.S. infant mortality rates stood at 40 deaths per 1,000 live births. Tens of thousands more children would go on to be killed or maimed by measles, polio and chicken pox. Today, infant mortality averages about 7 deaths per 1,000 live births, and those other diseases have been largely vanquished by vaccines. A childhood free of serious illness is now taken for granted.
When mysterious disorders like autism strike seemingly healthy children — at about the same age when childhood vaccines are typically administered — frustrated parents lash out at doctors and pharmaceutical companies. And today’s vaccine inventors must contend with a powerful force that had yet to arise when Jonas Salk created his revolutionary polio vaccine — mass litigation.
The birth of “liability without fault” in pharmaceutical litigation in 1958 — captured in Dr. Paul Offit’s riveting book The Cutter Incident — set the dangerous precedent that vaccine companies would be held liable for side effects even when their products were made using the best available science and according to government regulations. [. . .]
The debate over vaccine litigation has thus shifted from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. While the number of major studies that have failed to find any substantive link between vaccines and developmental disorders or autism is now in the double-digits (including a September 27th CDC study in the New England Journal), critics are effectively demanding that scientists prove that thimerosal does not cause illness — an impossible standard.
The very success of vaccines has become their downfall. As Dr. Offit writes in Vaccinated, “When [vaccines] work, absolutely nothing happens. Parents go on with their lives, not once thinking that their child was saved.”

The entire op-ed is here. This earlier post addresses the devastating impact that the Cutter Incident had on the production of vaccines and public health.

Dyer dissects Judge Kent’s case

Posted on by
1

sam%20kent.jpgFolks are finding it pretty easy these days to pile on Galveston U.S. District Judge Sam Kent over the recent reprimand that he received from the Judicial Council of the Fifth Circuit (previous posts here). As regular readers of this blog know, I’m wary of the mobs and simple morality plays that tend to form around such matters, so I was pleased to learn that Bill Dyer had decided to pass along some thoughts on Judge Kent’s case.

I perceive to have been a serious campaign of distortion in other publicity about Judge Kent by people who do, or at least should, know better. They say Congress ought to commence an impeachment investigation ó but they’re not telling you something very important that you ought to know in forming your own opinion on that subject.

Check out the entire insightful post.

Anthony Alridge does it all

Posted on by
Reply

Anthony%20Alridge.jpgIn several of my weekly local football reports over the past two seasons, I have been regularly touting the feats of Houston Cougar running back, Anthony Alridge. Alridge is the most exciting UH running back since the consensus All-American Chuck Weatherspoon back in the Run ‘N Shoot days of the early 1990’s.
Alridge is listed as 5’9″ tall and 175 lbs, but my bet is that he is closer to 5’7″ and 160 lbs wringing wet. After toiling in relative obscurity as a slot receiver for his first couple of years at Houston, Cougars head coach Art Briles began to use Alridge as a RB midway through last season and the results have been astonishing. Combining blinding sprinter’s speed, incredible shiftiness and surprising power for a player his size, Alridge quickly became one of the nation’s top running backs. During the Cougars 2006 championship season, Alridge rushed for 959 rushing yards on only 95 attempts, resulting in an NCAA Division 1-A leading rushing average of 10.1 yards per attempt.
Alridge has picked up this season where he left off last season. As noted here yesterday, he was extraordinary in Houston’s win over Rice last Saturday, scoring 4 touchdowns while rushing for 205 yards on 24 carries, including 111 yards and 2 TD’s in the 4th quarter alone. ESPN ranked Alridge’s incredible 50-yard TD run that put away Saturday’s game as No. 4 on its top-10 Plays of last Saturdey. Here is the Barry Sanders-type run:

Even after that performance, the video below reflects that the effervescent Alridge still had enough energy after the game to do a pretty darn good job of directing the Spirit of Houston Marching Band, much to the delight of the band members:

First it was the moldy roof, now this!

Posted on by
Reply

minutemaidday%20101607.jpgAt this rate, Drayton McLane is going to make a full-time living out of suing subcontractors who were involved in the construction of Minute Maid Park.
McLane’s latest lawsuit, reported in this Houston Business Journal ($) article, seeks to recover the cost of repairing improper insulation of the pipe system that pumps chilled water for the air conditioning system at Minute Maid Park. Minute Maid Park is cooled by a chilled water system that pumps water through miles of conduits to create chilled air. Insulation is needed to prevent moisture buildup, corrosion, leaking and possible failure of the complex system.
However, as a result of the improper insulation, condensation has developed at various points in the system which, if left unrepaired, would eventually lead to even bigger problems. Inasmuch as retrofitting the pipe system with new insulation could require major infrastructure construction work at Minute Maid, the cost of the repair job could run as much as $70 million.
From the nature of the lawsuit, it appears reasonably clear that the Stros will not be left holding the bag for the repair bill and that it’s just a matter of the responsible parties figuring out how to allocate the cost of repair equitably among them. The four defendants are Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum Inc (HOK), M-E Engineers Inc., Way Engineering Co. Ltd., and Performance Contracting Inc. Inasmuch as the repair work needs to be done now, the Stros are proceeding with the repairs and will recover the financing costs related to the repair cost as additional damages in the lawsuit.
Longtime Houston plaintiffs’ lawyer Wayne Fisher, who is a lifelong friend of McLane, is representing the Stros in the litigation, just as he did in the litigation with Connecticut General over the disability policy on former Stros star, Jeff Bagwell. That lawsuit has since been settled.

The faux Enron whistleblowers

Posted on by
1

First, it was Sherron Watkins portraying herself for profit on the rubber-chicken circuit as a whistleblower of wrongdoing at Enron when, in fact, she was no such thing.

Now, this USA Today article raises substantial questions regarding the credibility and veracity of self-proclaimed Enron whistleblower and “corporate integrity” author Lynn Brewer:

Within the world of business ethics, Brewer is considered a star. She is a founding member of the Open Compliance and Ethics Group. She delivered the keynote address at a Sarbanes-Oxley conference hosted by the New York Stock Exchange in 2003 (there are video clips of it on her website, www.lynnbrewer.info).

She has spoken in Great Britain, India, Venezuela, Italy, Canada, Malaysia and New Zealand, and given keynote addresses at dozens of other gatherings in the USA. She’s also a regular speaker at universities, where she lectures students on the importance of ethics in business.

Brewer has even co-authored an article in Business Strategy Review with noted management guru Oren Harari showing how the leadership skills of Colin Powell could have been applied at Enron.

But to those who worked with her at Enron, when she was known as EddieLynn Morgan (she changed her name after getting married in 2000), her transformation from back-office researcher to international corporate governance heroine is astonishing.

“I don’t think people will even believe this,” says Ceci Twachtman, a former colleague, speaking of Brewer’s transformation. “It reminds me of that movie with Leo DiCaprio with Pan Am,” she adds, referring to Catch Me If You Can, a story about a high school dropout who passes himself off as an airline pilot.

“Eddie Lynn is a good nurse who is trying to claim she was a brain surgeon,” says Tony Mends, a former vice president at Enron who was her boss for much of her tenure at the company. [. . .]

When it comes to giving specifics about her whistle-blowing, Brewer contradicts herself.

In her book, subtitled A Whistleblower’s Story, she recounts her failed efforts to alert her immediate superiors to questionable actions. She also says that just before she left the company in November 2000, she called the employee-assistance help-line to complain about criminal activity at Enron.

She says she was rebuffed there, but instead of taking her complaints to the chief compliance officer at Enron, or regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Justice Department, she accepted a severance package and left.

In her speeches, Brewer dons a different mantle, presenting herself as one of the collaborators in fraudulent activity at Enron and asking her audience for forgiveness.

Read the entire article.

I swear, you can’t make this stuff up.