kathleen forden

10,000 Working Parents To Lose Health Insurance In Arizona

Nearly 10,000 working parents will lose their health insurance this month in the wake of state budget cuts, leaving some families with nowhere to turn as they seek affordable coverage.

KidsCare Parents, a program that provides low-income families with inexpensive insurance,  will end Sept. 30. The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, which administers the program, could not pay the $6 million annual cost following cuts by the Legislature. The state faces a $3 billion budget shortfall.

The brain’s “seeking system” is hard-wired to obsessively love Google, Twitter, e-mail, and other electronic communication devices, fueled by the opioid neurotransmitter dopamine, according to neuroscientists.

Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges’ instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don’t even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, “My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we’re out to dinner.” We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days “refreshing my search like a drugged monkey.”

http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2224932

Knee Injury

getting off airplane from DC, my foot caught in metal bar
while dodging from falling stuff foot stays, and my knee moves

meniscus tear – pain in the knee
swelling, pain, can’t straighten my leg, i’m hobbling through work last week

cane and crutches, and heat, ice, heat, ice, leg is blue and black
i take pain killers that don’t work

medical care in the US, doctor does the mcmurry test
my knee says, snap, crackle and pop
finally, pain killers that do work

only issue?  i have apathy for all around me today and i don’t enjoy the feeling

r.i.c.e – works for a while – rest – ice – compression – elevation
my day job interferes and the pain limits interaction

going to take a few days for rest, ice, compression, elevation
no surgery for this one, maybe 20 years from now when i need the hip
get both done for the same price, who knows it could happen with the new healthcare plans proposed recently

normal, active life in the horizon and i’m going to do what i have to
so i can return to normal

This is my friend Lisa and her love story

A startup company is taking a customized approach to knee replacement surgery, creating knee implants on demand that exactly match a patient’s anatomy. The company, ConforMIS, based in Burlington, MA, is bringing the technology of rapid prototyping, which converts a three-dimensional computer design into a physical object, into the field of orthopedics. The company believes that such custom-made implants can make knee replacement surgery faster, more accurate, and less traumatic to the patient.

Customized knees: A depiction of a knee implant designed to cover one part of the knee joint. Credit: ConforMIS

Multimedia Watch how a customized knee implant is made.

Knee replacement surgery repairs damage and relieves pain in patients with severe osteoarthritis or knee injury. Total knee replacement involves removing diseased cartilage and bone from the surfaces of the knee joint–the thigh bone, shin bone, and kneecap–and replacing them with an artificial joint made from a combination of metal and plastic. A partial knee replacement can also be performed on one part of the joint.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22988/