San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Health

Direct Action Journal: Overcoming Fear

by

Another episode with anxiety knocks me to my bedroom floor. Rational thought forsakes me. My body shakes with the strangled sobs of a man ashamed of his tears. Alicia bends over me. Her dark brown eyes – normally calm with the consistent rationality characterizing her personality – are wide with concern and weariness. We’re only several nights removed from the last episode. She must think, “Oh god, not again.”

Alicia seeks to hold me. I find a deep comfort in her touch – and a deep revulsion. It’s not her. The contradiction is born from the lies fear instills in me. Somewhere in the darkness, a voice reminds me that I am unlovable. I crave love but the voice whispers my lack of reasons to be loved. The closer Alicia gets to me, the closer she’ll get, I fear, to hearing those whispers, too. The closer she’ll get to realizing a man who cannot love himself should not be loved by anyone.   [Read more…]

Dr. Billionaire, Meet Dr. Salk

by

Can we conquer disease without concentrating wealth in a precious few pockets? Not-so-distant history offers a clear and encouraging answer.

By Sam Pizzigati / Inequality.Org

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong has helped make a little medical history. The good doctor holds over 95 patents. He pulled off the first pig-to-human cell transplant to treat diabetes. And one of the drugs he designed and developed, Abraxane, keeps cancerous cells from dividing.

How much of a personal reward does Dr. Soon-Shiong merit for contributions like these? No one, of course, can definitively say. How much in personal rewards has Dr. Soon-Shiong actually collected over the course of his medical career? That figure we can pin down. Dr. Soon-Shiong, the wealth trackers at Bloomberg tell us, has amassed a personal fortune worth $9.7 billion. And plenty more is coming.

Dr. Soon-Shiong currently serves as the CEO of NantKwest, a San Diego cancer research firm. The pay deal he cut last year, we’ve just learned from required filings, will bring him at least $148 million for his CEO labors — and maybe as much as $330 million.   [Read more…]

Transportation Justice for San Diego: Our Message From the Start

by

By Environmental Health Coalition

A recent KPBS article reports that The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), the organization responsible for planning the transportation in San Diego County, spent close to $1.5 million on a publicity strategy for the regional transportation plan.

The plan, passed last October, put freeways before people, ignoring recurring community requests for improved transit, biking and walking infrastructure before expanding freeways.

The article exposed SANDAG’s developing media talking points to support the regional transportation plan; talking points that made the plan sound like a good option for our communities.

In reality, the plan is not a good option for our communities, and no media strategy or talking point covers this up.

Today, the truth remains the same: The regional transportation plan does not meet the community’s needs, and it is not a good plan to improve the public health, safety and sustainability of the San Diego region.   [Read more…]

Nuclear Shutdown News – April 2016: Chernobyl + 16 – It’s Far From Over

by

Chernobyl + 16: It’s far from over

By Michael Steinberg / Black Rain Press

On April 26, 1986, a nuclear disaster began at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, then ruled by the USSR. Thirty years later, that disaster is far from over.

In their 1990 book, Deadly Deceit: Low Level Fallout, High level Cover-Up, authors Jay Gould and Benjamin Goldman devote an entire chapter to the Chernobyl debacle. The doomed Chernobyl nuke was one of 4 reactors operating at the site at the time. It took until 2000 for the other 3 to be permanently shut down.
  [Read more…]

The Death Gap

by

The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

By Sam Pizzigati / OtherWords

Rich people live longer than poor people. No big news there — we’ve known that health tracks wealth for quite some time now.

But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating.

Since 2001, American men among the nation’s most affluent 5 percent have seen their lifespans increase by more than two years. American women in that bracket have registered an almost three-year extension to their life expectancy.

Meanwhile, the poorest five percent of Americans have seen essentially no gains at all.   [Read more…]

Working Without a Net

by

By Tom Sullivan / Digby’s Hullabaloo

David Dayen shares scenes from his life in the “gig” economy, or what he calls “the 1099 Economy.” They are tales a lot of freelance writers can relate to, I imagine, as well as anyone working for themselves and receiving no benefits. Perhaps the most startling bit of data from research by Princeton’s Alan Krueger and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz is that the growth in those sorts of jobs accounts for pretty much the entire growth in the job market over the last decade. It is one key reason, Dayen argues, why voters are angry:   [Read more…]

Meet a Doctor Who Provides Abortion Services Because of His Christian Faith

by

What made a Christian doctor start what Esquire magazine deemed “The Abortion Ministry”?

By Valerie Tarico / AlterNet

What kind of person becomes a full-time abortion provider, traveling across state lines to end unhealthy or unwanted pregnancy despite screaming protesters threatening death and damnation? Whatever image you may have in mind, Dr. Willie Parker probably doesn’t fit it.

Parker is a bald, athletically built African American whose soft-spoken presence contrasts his size. A committed Christian, Parker says he provides abortion care not in spite of his faith but because of it. When filmmaker Dawn Porter met Parker, she was inspired to spend the next phase of her life making the documentary Trapped, which focuses on the challenges faced by abortion providers—and Parker in particular—in the Deep South. Parker was “so open and thoughtful in talking about the work and about the whole political climate that it got me thinking about the intersection of politics, abortion and power. So I asked if I could follow him,” Porter says.   [Read more…]

The New Liberty Station Public Market – A First Look

by

As a recognized “foodie” I have anxiously awaited the opening of the Liberty Public Market. The one thing I miss most about living in the Bay Area is the “Berkeley Bowl” – a converted bowling alley turned into a multitude of food shops. From all I had heard, this new venture was a cross between the Bowl and the Seattle “Pike Place Market.” Even at my age I have not yet learned not to expect too much.

My friend Irene and I decided to take a look at this new venture on a Friday morning during the first week it was opened. Parking was relatively easy – but we noted it was packed when we left shortly after noon. We also found that most of “stores” did not open until 11:00am. But that suited our purpose, because we were just “lookie-loos” this first time around. Unfortunately, it might just be my “last time around.”   [Read more…]

How Planned Parenthood Helped a Friend

by

By Anne Haule / Musings of a Boomer Feminist

Lately there has been a lot of negative press about Planned Parenthood. Recently I wore pink and “stood with Planned Parenthood”. This got me musing about the past and a very special second-hand experience I had with Planned Parenthood in Chicago about 20 years ago.

My memory of that day is vivid. It was a beautiful crisp fall day as only Chicago can have with its bright blue sky, puffy white clouds, and tree-lined street of orange, red and yellow leaves.

I had just arrived home from an otherwise unremarkable day at my law office.

As I opened the door and said, “I’m home”, Lindy and my daughter came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with a teapot, mugs, and cookies. They each hugged me and then we all sat down to have some tea.

  [Read more…]

Fukushima + 5: the Disaster Continues – Nuclear Shutdown News for March 2016

by

On March 9, two days before the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Wall Street Journal ran this story, “Japanese Court Orders Shutdown of Nuclear Reactors.”

The paper reported that the court “issued an injunction to shut down two of the four reactors recently restarted” by Kansai Electric Co. because the utility failed to prove to the court’s satisfaction that it could operate those nukes safely.

Driving the process, the Journal reported, were organized and outspoken community members “worried about a repeat of the March 2011 Fukushima disaster.”   [Read more…]

Transportation Justice Victories: What We Have Accomplished With People Power

by

By the Environmental Health Coalition

Through the process of advocating for a Regional Transportation Plan that prioritizes affordable and accessible public transit, biking and walking, our communities grew stronger and more united.

Doing much of this advocacy work in partnership with City Heights CDC and MAAC Project, we organized community support in unprecedented ways. We brought the concept of transportation justice to our neighbors, to community meetings, to City Council and SANDAG. We led bike rallies to celebrate a future where pedestrians have safe places to ride bikes and walk. We taught each other the importance of having transportation alternatives to improve our quality of life and encouraged each other to get involved in the planning process and build healthy neighborhoods.

We accomplished the following by raising our voices and spreading hope for the past two years.   [Read more…]

CEO Revolving Door at Tri-City Costly to Taxpayers

by

Tri-City Healthcare District Chairman of the Board, Jim Dagastino, gushed last week about the appointment of the hospital’s third CEO in three years, the promotion of chief financial officer, Steven Dietlin. “Mr. Dietlin made an immediate impact on Tri-City medical center’s financial well-being as CFO when he arrived at the hospital in 2013.”

The board chairman had to keep a straight face in his praise of outgoing CEO Tim Moran for his “leadership. Moran, the San Diego Business Journal’s Most Admired CEO of 2016, lasted less than two years before being canned by Tri-City. He collected $600,00 in severance pay and a year of medical and dental coverage.

What Dagostino didn’t mention is that the CEO they fired three years ago brought Dietlin to Tri-City in early 2013. Larry Anderson needed help to fix serious problems with the hospital’s financials. Like Moran, Anderson had been named Most Admired CEO by SDBJ in 2011, apparently the kiss of death for Tri-City executives.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry