Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The literature continues to be split on the role of pregnancy in melanoma; however, most recent series show no difference in survival. Multiple studies have failed to show significant effects of female hormones on melanoma cells or on the incidence or progression of melanoma.
In my book, I describe several cases where pregnancy would “awaken” melanomas that had been removed years earlier or would stimulate worrisome growth in moles. Two of my patients had extensive metastatic melanoma during pregnancy that disappeared after the baby was delivered, in one case with my help. Both women were disease free many years later and neither had another pregnancy.
How interesting that this young woman has developed metastatic melanoma during pregnancy. I wonder how it will turn out.
My friend Steve Tucker may be the foremost expert on the Obamacare legislation. He was interviewed on Dan Proft‘s video show Upstream Ideas.
Steve has an infuriating tale about being targeted by the IRS because of his public criticism of the Obama administration. The blatant abuse of government power by this administration is an outrage and a disgrace. The migration of the “Chicago Way” to Washington DC is a story which is suppressed, and the victims are ridiculed and dismissed by the mainstream media, if they are mentioned at all.
One of the best things I ever did was go to some early Chicago Tea Party events. I met many wonderful, patriotic people. Steve Tucker is one of the best.
We spent today at Ypres an the huge military cemeteries from the battles of the Ypres Salient.
This was an early battle of WWI and the “first battle of Ypres” occurred at the end of “The Race to the Channel.” I have read a bit about the First World War but it really comes home when you are standing the place that consumed the British youth in 1914 to 1918. The First Battle ended the Race to the Sea and began the trench warfare of the next four years.
We visited the “Sanctuary Wood Museum today, and I took some photos of the trenches which were preserved all these years by then owner of the small cafe where we had a beer.
Ypres
These trenches are the originals preserved by the property owner who probably has cleaned out debris over the years. The owners of the cafe are the children of the original owners of the property who preserved these relics. Their museum has many objects no doubt excavated from the fields around.
The bodies of 21 German soldiers entombed in a perfectly preserved World War One shelter have been discovered 94 years after they were killed.
The men were part of a larger group of 34 who were buried alive when a huge Allied shell exploded above the tunnel in 1918, causing it to cave in.
Thirteen bodies were recovered from the underground shelter, but the remaining men had to be left under a mountain of mud as it was too dangerous to retrieve them.
Nearly a century later, French archaeologists stumbled upon the mass grave on the former Western Front in eastern France during excavation work for a road building project.
The road building has been suspended for now but every construction project in this area uncovered evidence of war dead. Today we visited an enormous memorial for the war dead whose bodies were never recovered. It is called the Menin Gate Memorial and the names of 54,000 dead are posted on the walls representing most of the dead from the Ypres Salient who could not be identified.
The sheer number of dead whose bodies were destroyed, or lost, is staggering.
The city of Ypres (pronounced by our hosts as “eep” has been rebuilt as it was destroyed in the war.
The cathedral was rebuilt from a stump of the tower. The bottom 20 feet to so was protected by rubble and is in better shape. The entire city was rebuilt completely.
The city is surrounded by British war cemeteries of which there are about 150, each with about 500 to 1,000 graves.
One grave that particularly interested me was that of Sir William Osler’s only son who was killed by shrapnel while serving as an artillery officer in 1917. His fathers friends had tried to save him and his last words, reflecting many young men who were wounded, “Surely this (wound) will get me home. ” His last words.
Today, we arrived at Brussels and will do some touring tomorrow of the Waterloo Battlefield. We passed on the road one of Wellington’s battle fields from the 18th century.
The TV tonight is all about the “refugees” which we saw a few of today in Brussels.
Lieb notes, that the U.S. is only seeing 350 new general surgeons a year. That is not even a replacement rate, she observed.
A few years ago, I was talking to a woman general surgeon in San Francisco who told me that she did not know a general surgeon under 50 years old. The “reformers” who designed Obamacare and the other new developments in medicine are, if they are MDs, not in practice and they are almost all in primary care specialties in academic settings. They know nothing about surgical specialties.
They assume that primary care will be delivered by nurse practitioners and physician assistants. They are probably correct as we see with the new Wal Mart primary care clinics.
The company has opened five primary care locations in South Carolina and Texas, and plans to open a sixth clinic in Palestine, Tex., on Friday and another six by the end of the year. The clinics, it says, can offer a broader range of services, like chronic disease management, than the 100 or so acute care clinics leased by hospital operators at Walmarts across the country. Unlike CVS or Walgreens, which also offer some similar services, or Costco, which offers eye care, Walmart is marketing itself as a primary medical provider.
This is all well and good. What happens when a patient comes in with a serious condition ?
Most here haven’t commented on the darting and illusory fortunes of the huge Republican field; I’d mentioned earlier that Perry would have trouble – double or triple BDS syndrome, a bit too much of an Aggie for Texas, God knows for the rest of the country. But that great t-sipper, Kevin Williamson, discusses the case for Perry after a strong speech. That’s worth reading and both Williamson & Perry are worth while.
Perry’s fighting, turning arguments around to free market principles, to the human: he did this earlier on the relatively friendly Fox’s Chris Wallace. Wallace pressed him on the number of uninsured Texans. Perry didn’t fight him on those grounds but on the far more important, far more serious, and far more consequential grounds of “access.” Access in Texas to health care has risen sharply with Perry’s policies. And, let’s face it, if there is enough access, all the assurances of insurance are pretty useless. Or, as Venzueleans found out, Chavez had promised to meet their every need – government promises of toilet paper and oil were there, access was not.
