The American health care system is ill. Life expectancy among Americans is declining; in 1980, Americans lived about as long as other developed countries. Today, we’ve slipped to 11th. It isn’t just that Americans aren’t living longer; our lives are getting shorter. It’s not just the poor who are pulling life expectancy down. Even among…
The Idaho Legislature is engaged in a Holy War against abortion. And the thing about letting religious zealots have their way is that, blinded by their holy mission to deny women control of their own bodies, they lose sight of the consequences of their actions. That’s what’s happening in Idaho now. The Idaho Legislature has…
This is an immensely complex area of medicine. WC is not a virologist or an immunologist, although he has read fairly widely in those fields. Additionally, to make this discussion manageable, WC has necessarily simplified but not, WC hopes, over-simplified. WC’s recent post on two Idaho legislators’ effort to block use of all mRNA vaccines…
Probably forty years ago now, WC was defending a permafrost house case. (Notes for nor non-Alaskans: permafrost is permanently frozen soils, often laced with lenses of ice. When the permafrost melts, anything built on it is likely to collapse. If a house is built on permafrost, the results are often catastrophic. Because it can take…
In amazing abuse of America’s nonprofit laws, there’s a “charity” called “America’s Frontline Doctors” that consists of quacks, a small number of physicians and health care workers who are represent the very worst in American medicine. They spread false information about COVID, advocate for dangerous and discredited treatments, engage in fearmongering about vaccines, and attempt to influence…
Give my feet to the footloose Careless, fancy free Give my knees to the needy Don’t pull that stuff on me — John Prine, “Please Don’t Bury Me,” 1973 WC’s right knee is a train wreck. After an October 2021 MRI, the radiologist described WC’s right meniscus – the wad of cartilage that cushions the…
Readers already know that in 2021 the Republican Party had enthusiastically opposed every governmental effort to limit the casualties from the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s just part of what WC believes to be the Republicans’ tendency over the last few years to embrace policies and positions that are contrary to survival. WC will offer a few…
As we approach 900,000 Americans killed by COVID-19, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided the ongoing pandemic is not a safety or health issue, so the Occupational Safety and Health Administration can’t address the epidemic. It’s medical malpractice committed by a bunch of lawyers. What happened was President Biden directed the U.S. Occupational Safety and…
WC mentioned recently that blog posts here at Wickersham’s Conscience might be interrupted by a surgical procedure. Many of you took time to wish WC well, and a speedy recovery. WC appreciates and thanks you for those thoughts. Even more of you wanted to know what was going on. The short answer is that WC’s…
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R, Texas), a man on the shortlist for Most Embarrassingly Ignorant Man in America, recently tweeted: Background: Big Bird, the iconic Sesame Street character, has been urging children get vaccinations since at least 1972. Big Bird’s tweet last week about the recently-approved COVID-19 vaccination for children was just the most recent…
There are two recent studies, one out of Michigan and a more recent one out of Iowa, showing that White-tailed Deer in those states have high levels of antibodies for COVID-19. That strongly implies a human-to-deer jump of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in humans, SARS-CoV-2, as well as transmission between deer. In the Michigan…
WC, who is well past the 65-years old eligibility, has just received his Pfizer booster shot. It’s the socially responsible thing to do. Idaho hospitals don’t need any more patients, and WC’s aging immune system needed a hand to keep the evolving coronavirus at bay. Idaho’s vaccination rate remains at a miserable 41%. That’s the…
Welp, there went September, in a dismaying and ongoing stream of crises that saw WC’s home state, Alaska, and adopted state, Idaho, both forced to triage standards of health care. And both cursed with governors who refuse to do much beyond talk about statewide orders that might, you know, actually reduce the carnage. Because “freedom.”…
According to the Center for Disease Control, the C.D.C., the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed “about 675,000 in the United States” and about 50 million worldwide. It was the worst pandemic of the 20th Century, and one of the worst in American history. Not the worst any more. The COVID-19 pandemic has an official…
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal might be the most famous sustained pice of satire in the English language. But it provides the seed for a solution to the problem Idaho and other states are suffering as the Delta variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus packs our health care facilities with critically ill unvaccinated and unmasked citizens.…
David Donley is a member of the Municipality of Anchorage School Board. He’s also one of those politicians who won’t let niceties like procedural rules, common sense, truth, the public interest or simple decency get in the way of his public posturings. School bird member Donley, you see, objects to Anchorage students being required to…
WC understands that most folks refusing to get vaccinated for COVID-19 don’t have rational reasons.1 But on the chance that facts can overcome irrational behavior and unreasoning fear, WC wants to point readers to the data. WC shares with Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen the faint hope that simple numbers can move people to get…
WC is 70 years old, and by reason of age, if nothing else, highly interested in remedies, or at least treatments, for COVID-19. So WC was pretty intrigued when the Food & Drug Administration approved Gilead Lab’s remdesivir (the brand name is Veklury). Remdesivir is a previously developed general anti-viral. The drug was run through three…
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Corona. Corona who? And that’s the point, isn’t it? The failure of the federal government – the failure by the Executive Branch of the federal government – to provide adequate coronavirus test kits in the face of the pandemic, means we don’t know who may be infected with the virus. Because…
It’s Remdesivir. It’s not a magic bullet. It doesn’t cure COVID-19. It’s certainly not a prophylactic for COVID-19 (although we can expect President Trump to claim it is). What it does do is reduce the amount of time for recovery. By about 30%, based on a limited clinical trial. Remdesivir was developed as a treatment…
Years ago, a drunken college student WC did not know climbed up on a dining table in the University of Oregon Student Union and declaimed much of “The Night Before the King’s Castration” before passing out. WC was impressed, and even took notes. It’s much too vulgar and stupid to set out here, but for…
A third of the way through the year already. How did that happen? It’s time for the very nearly regular process of having a look back at the month just passed, following up on blog posts written, looking at topics that didn’t make it to a blog post and generally shuffling through the virtual files.…
One of the reasons we are still on lockdown is that we cannot tell who has COVID-19 and who does not. The virus is sneaky. People can wander around sharing the virus with everyone near them and not display any symptoms themselves. For two and a half days. We desperately need to be able to…
In the early 1980s, WC had a call at his office one morning from the late Dr. Bill Doolittle. Bill said he had a patient with very serious heart problems, who didn’t have a will and wanted to make one before he died. It was extremely urgent, Bill said, a matter of hours. WC grabbed…
Idaho Governor Brad “Do” Little has put the State of Idaho into collective quarantine. We are to stay in our homes, for the most part, for the next 21 days. For those of WC’s friends who are similarly locked down, WC will be offering tips for coping. Here’s the first: If you enjoy reading books,…
Donald Trump, the president of our country in this time of plague, is the worst possible person to have in charge. Trump is incapable of admitting error. He is numb to empathy, even to sympathy. He is completely narcissistic, even in the face of the worst health crisis in more than 100 years. He seems…
Idaho has child protection laws. If there are reports by police, teachers or neighbors that children are being badly abused, the State of Idaho has the power to remove the children from their parents of guardians. A judge can even order medical treatment necessary for the health of the child. Unless the children are dying…
WC is indulging his penchant for irony, of course. We’ve known since the seminal 2005 studies by then-Professor Elizabeth Warren and her colleagues that the largest single reason Americans file bankruptcy is medical bills. The paper has since been attacked – often by researchers funded by the health insurance industry – but WC’s personal observations,…
Sometimes the way to demonstrate the utter insanity of the American health care system is to study a specific case. The late Leon Lederman provides an interesting and instructive example. Professor Lederman was one of the great physicists of the 20th Century. From the early 1950s to the first years of the 21st century, Prof.…
If you’ve been following this blog long, you know WC has a puppy, Tali, whose tail is such a menace we’ve given it a separate name, “the Tallywhacker.” Well, the Tallywhacker nailed our collapsible wooden loon basket last night. You can see the freshly glued crack at the curve of the loon’s neck. The Tallywhacker…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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