Grier's Grief

Can you actually believe this!

Irresponsible freedom in public health

In Brazil health is a right guaranteed by the constitution. What this amounts to in this country is a very heterogenous map of services distributed throughout the country. Whereas in some parts even the most basic service are hard to come by, as well as shortage of even the most basic medications, in other parts patients have access to practically all of the state of the art medicine and expensive medicines for free. An example of this is the AIDS program in my country distributes many of the medications necessary for the first line of treatment and even backups for AIDS treatment in case of resistance(HAART therapy).
Much of the mortality and morbidity of many diseases come from inexpensive measures such as life style changes. A recent report in circulation (see Iestra) shows that these so called life style changes isolated have at least two times effectiveness of an isolated medication! This includes of course excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages and smoking.
Diseases generated by these two conditions generate considerable expenses for health providers. Practically all cases of lung cancer have smoking as its cause. Alcohol is associated with numerous diseases, for example, liver failure and liver cancer.
Changing life styles is very complicated but goverment should start taking its responsibility in offering services to try and help the general population with this problem because of course everyone knows that prevention is much cheaper than treatment. Instead everyone just wants instantaneous solutions, like building a brand new hospital (where, incidentally, a lot of money can be diverted...), instead of long term solutions what I'm proposing would bring.
I would go so far as to suggest that the SUS (sistema único de sáude=unique health system, Brazil's health public system), should not authorize treatment of patients that weren't at least attached to some program of trying to break the drinking or smoking habit.
Probably that wouldn't work either. City halls would pretend to make centers for rehabilitation, patients would pretend to go and hospitals would admit everyone anyway...

Moore support

All things Michael Moore are very cool, and they are as much as cathartic as anything! So here I am advertising for something that may well become his new documentary
. So go ahead tell him your stories.

Good tidings

Just to change the tide of rantings, i wanted to post this excellent site! It´s fan episodes of star trek (the original one)... They´re very well done.

Four was not enough

After two subpar years with all that temporal cold war nonsense and a whole third year involving a race that never exists later on, Enterprise's fourth year manages to be spectacular. T'pol finally seems to be a real vulcan, and they even try to make up for the fact that she hadn't been up to then. The show's finally concerned with a load of stuff that's supposed to have happened in this period and could generate many stories. That's when they decide to cancel the show!
Perhaps they would have continued it if it hadn't been so great.
At least one good thing may come out of it: Braga is leaving!