Years ago, I was shocked into muteness to find out that incarcerated women sometime suffer the practice of giving birth in shackles? Really? In the United States? In the post-antebellum United States (as in the Civil War, not Lady Antebellum)?

I first found out about it nearly a decade ago, when I met Kemba Smith at a criminal justice conference and heard her recount the story of her own shackled childbirth. The whole idea of such a thing seems incredibly cruel, not to mention absurd. What is the fear — that an incarcerated woman in labor is bound to go all “Kill Bill” on someone any second… mercilessly taking out the hospital room staff and karate chopping her way to freedom? It makes about as much sense as passing the newborn through a metal detector before entering the nursery.

Tonya Williams of SPARK Reproductive Justice Now has spent two years researching the treatment of pregnant incarcerated women in the state of Georgia. Not so shockingly, it ain’t a pleasant story. Dignity, anyone? She wrote an article about this issue a few months ago. And now, after decisions in Washington state and Arkansas found that the practice violates civil rights and a major class action suit pending in Illinois, NPR has also picked up story.

I’m willing to admit that I am nocturnal. I was raised by a nocturnal family. My body kicks into high gear and my brain starts pumping out rapid energy after sundown. Funny this feels a bit like a source of shame. Nocturnal people are far less socially acceptable than morning people.

Members of team early bird watch the sun emerge and brim with satisfaction over how motivated their morning schedule is. They schedule 7:30 AM meetings and smile smugly as people like me struggle to sound coherent when we attend. They send out bright and chirpy daybreak email messages, and wear the time stamp with pride. While we save our 1:30 AM drafts to send later, so that people don’t think we’re manic. Night people bear the stigma of wannabe rock stars or infomercial addicts.

My strategy for compensating has been to attempt major sleep deprivation: struggle to go to bed early, fail, then set the alarm clock at a completely unrealistic hour, press snooze repeatedly, and wake up with inadequate sleep. Sometimes my hand seems to reach for the snooze button by its own will. I don’t even remember doing it. Other times, I justify that I am doing something productive during each snooze window, like planning what I want to wear.

Anyway, it must end. The snooze button dependency must end. It’s like sleep dieting, and sleep, unlike food, is not healthier in smaller portions. For creative strategies on snooze avoidance and a device created by an MIT student that actually makes your alarm clock run away from you, so you can’t disable it, check here.

So, I’m shopping for ice cream (one of my weaknesses) at the local grocery store. Two women and a young man are walking through the aisles. The young man is wearing a surgical mask. One of the women announces, “Everybody, he has swine flu.” And they continue shopping. He’s picking stuff up, browsing, etc. Seriously? Is anyone supposed to be reassured by the mask and the announcement? Did he really need to be at Kroger that bad? Bad swine flu etiquette.

Regina Holliday

Woman in DC paints murals for health care reform.

The health care debate is clearly a big deal right now. Yet, as in the past, most of us don’t understand all that much about what is going on.The good news is that regardless of what happens in DC, there are some wonderful new models for improving care and revolutionizing medicine. Ironically, some of the best lessons for the future may come from looking to the past.

I studied health care policy, employing a human rights approach. Basically, using human rights for health policy means looking for ways to achieve the highest possible standard of health, given available resources. Human rights require nations to do the best they can to ensure that people have what they need to be as healthy as they can — realizing, of course, that healthy living is also a matter of personal responsibility and the consequences of a passion for chicken wings are ultimately an individual problem to manage.

I guess that I might be a bit cynical about the outcome of health care reform. I think that I am just a realist. At best, I expect that reform will mean that we might get some sort of mandated minimum coverage for catastrophic instances and not true universal coverage to comprehensivre health care. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t knock it. It’s better than nada.

I wouldn’t go looking to DC to keep us well but I was happy to hear President Obama mention the need to give doctors an incentive to provide quality care, instead of focusing on quantity. What came to mind as a good model for people to look at are micropractices. Basically, they offer the future of quality care by stepping into the past. Think trusted family doctor of the past who spent lots of time with each patient and really had a relationship with you.

The beauty is that such practices are actually facilitated by modern technology. It gives doctors the ability to practice as they want to and become part of a community with their patients, which would be a step forward. Best of all, this is a bit of progress that hopefully DC could support but it can be done regardless of how the health care stalemate turns out.

“Why Walgreens Is Building Its Own Universal Health-Care System“
(Fast Company)

Interesting article. Walgreen’s foray into becoming a health care provider might be a little preview of one possible direction for access to health care in the US. Depending on the size of the company, clinics like this might prove much more cost effective for employers than providing health benefits. Likewise, people who self-insure might consider this a viable option for cheap access to basic care.

Combined with catastrophic coverage (i.e. a low cost policy if you’re in good health and your main risk is getting into a nasty spill or something), this might work out for the young and healthy. However, the big issue is still higher risk patients (sicker and/or older) and more expensive varieties of treatment. That’s where the costs are high and the insurance and care providers can’t make money. I don’t yet know of any enterprising private market solutions to address those concerns (but suggestions are more than welcome). And making health insurance a requirement for everyone, like car insurance, also won’t necessarily mean that the coverage that you can afford and are forced to buy will sufficiently cover you in a pinch.

Bottom line: we’ll probably see more of these and they might work out, to an extent. Just don’t get really sick, expect comprehensive care or have a chronic problem yet in the US without lots of money or a comprehensive benefits plan.

Eating healthy is not an inherently bougie lifestyle choice but it sure can be expensive. In my quest to eat fruit that tastes like fruit and fresh veggies that weren’t concocted in a laboratory, I have had to spend a bit of cheddar. So I have to commend my East Atlanta neighbors for seeing the disparity in who gets access to food that hasn’t been dyed, fried and laid to the side (which is especially important in Georgia, a state that tops the scales and has all the related health crises).

Check out a story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the East Atlanta Village Farmers Market‘s participation in a program that matches the amount that food stamp recipients can spend on all the fresh, locally grown deliciousness that they dispense. Folks can basically get double for ther money on food that doesn’t rival a hair salon in terms of chemical processing.

Actor Rupert Grint

Harry Potter’s Ron Weasley admitted that he had a case of swine flu, fueling my speculation that it must be Voldemort behind this whole thing.

From BBC News…

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around “as high as a kite”, a government official has said.

Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, said the kangaroo-like marsupials were getting into poppy fields grown for medicine.

She was reporting to a parliamentary hearing on security for poppy crops.

Australia supplies about 50% of the world’s legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.

We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles. Then they crash Lara Giddings, government official

“The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” Lara Giddings told the hearing.

“Then they crash,” she added. “We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”

Rick Rockliff, a spokesman for poppy producer Tasmanian Alkaloids, said the wallaby incursions were not very common, but other animals had also been spotted in the poppy fields acting unusually.

“There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles,” he added.

Retired Tasmanian poppy farmer Lyndley Chopping also said he had seen strange behaviour from wallabies in his fields.

“They would just come and eat some poppies and they would go away,” he told ABC News.

“They’d come back again and they would do their circle work in the paddock.”

Some people believe the mysterious circles that appear in fields in a number of countries are created by aliens. Others put them down to a human hoax.