My plea to the undecided: Stay home!

By Jeff Greenfield

As the momentous day approaches, with epochal consequences for an anxiously awaiting world, I take pen in hand—make that apply fingertips to keypad—to renew a traditional plea I first made more than 30 years ago. It’s a plea I’ve made in print, on the air and, now, through the miracle of digital technology. But its message never changes.

It’s a plea directed to those of you who are still uncertain about which way to vote. And it’s as simple as it is heartfelt: Stay home.

The candidates have been at this for years; both President Obama and Mitt Romney began running for the presidency six years ago. They’ve made speeches, answered (or evaded) questions and raised billions to convince you of their worth—or the other guy’s worthlessness.

The media have been covering their every move and word, even when the candidates thought they weren’t. (Can you say, “Cling to their religion and guns”? “47 percent”?) The coverage has been slanted, scrupulously fair, superficial, in-depth, misleading, dead-on. With the flip of a page or the click of a mouse, you have been able to find out every conceivable piece of information you might want on their backgrounds, families, values, experience, positions taken, positions abandoned, promises made, promises broken, and the music on their iPods.

And after all this time, you’re still trying to make up your minds. The overwhelmingly likely reason is this: You have the reasoning power of a baked potato.

OK, I grant that you may be of the small minority of concerned citizens who are genuinely torn and who have not yet evaluated the relative worth of health care reform notions, the vagaries of the tax proposals or the respective approaches to the increasing power of the renminbi.

But I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.

The odds are, you’ve just been too busy obsessing about the misfortunes of the Kardashians or the quality of your ringtone, to spend any time thinking about who might be the better president.

Well, that’s your right. Unlike the Australians, we don’t compel people to vote, and it would likely be a First Amendment violation if we tried. A refusal to vote can be seen as a statement that the electoral system is rigged, meaningless or so thoroughly corrupt as to deserve contempt. (“I never vote,” one citizen said long ago. “It only encourages them.”)

And there are other valid reasons for not voting. As a personal matter, I stopped voting more than a decade ago, on the grounds that it helped me as an analyst not to think about making a choice in the voting booth.

So it strikes me as a sound, honest statement for a prospective voter to say: “Look, I haven’t given this election a minute’s thought, and it’s just not fair for me to cancel out the vote of someone who actually gives a damn.”

Indeed, it’s not just sound and honest—it’s the ethically responsible thing to do.

Men and women in my lifetime have died fighting for the right to vote: people like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered while registering black voters in Mississippi in 1964, and Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965 during the Selma march for voting rights. In these days of early voting, we’ve seen people waiting in line for hours to exercise the franchise. Countless others, who have never had to fight for it, have spent real time either trying to decide how to cast their vote or donating their time to persuading others.

So if you’re one of those folks who have stayed utterly disengaged through all of this, do the honorable thing: Honor those for whom the vote really matters by staying home.

You’ll be doing yourself—and the country—a favor.

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Young doctors: fewer hours means they’re less tired, less prepared

(Reuters) – Orthopedic surgeons-in-training said they were tired less often after rules regulating how much they could work went into place, according to a U.S. survey.

But the results published in the Annals of Surgery found the trainee doctors didn’t actually get any more sleep under the limited work hours policy, and also said they felt less prepared as doctors and were less satisfied with their education.

In July 2003, the U.S. Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education implemented new policy limiting the on-duty hours of notoriously sleep-deprived residents to 80 per week, with a minimum of ten hours off between shifts. Those changes were further updated in 2011.

The main goal was to ease young doctors’ fatigue and fatigue-related medical errors.

The work limits seem to have been somewhat successful, but they also come at a cost, according to Debra Weinstein from Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who worked on the study.

“The extent to which we restrict residents’ time in the hospital does risk (affecting) their skill and sense of preparedness,” she said.

“Continuing to further limit duty hours may not be the best way to address the goals of patient safety, resident well-being and excellent medical education.”

Some past studies have suggested that work limits improve quality of life for residents, but have a negative impact on their education. One survey published last year found that the majority of surgery residents worked more hours than the current regulations allowed.

In the new study, researchers analyzed surveys completed by a total of 216 residents at the Harvard Orthopedic Combined Residency Program between 2003 and 2009.

Compared to pre-2003 residents, orthopedic trainees in 2009 reported working fewer hours per week, about 66 hours versus 75. But they didn’t get any more sleep. Throughout the study period, they reported sleeping for about five hours every night, on average.

Residents rated their own preparedness to make clinical decisions under stress and their ability to perform the range of skills expected of them slightly lower in later years, the researchers said.

After the work-hour policies went into place, residents did say they spent fewer days feeling very tired, and a smaller proportion of them said their fatigue had a negative impact on patient care and safety.

Forty-six percent of residents said their fatigue affected the quality of care they provided in 2003, compared to 26 percent on the 2004 through 2009 surveys.

“There’s a general assumption that reducing work hours will result in more sleep for tired residents, and clearly out findings challenge that,” Weinstein said.

However, it’s possible that having more time to decompress and relieve psychological stress may improve residents’ sense of well-being, even if they’re not getting more sleep, she added.

Weinstein and her colleagues noted that their study didn’t include objective measures of residents’ performance, so they couldn’t tell whether they actually did better or worse on exams, or made more or fewer errors. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/TcFx66

(Reporting by Elaine Lies)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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CBS making $1 million donation to Sandy, announces employee match

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – CBS is making a $ 1 million dollar donation to Hurricane Sandy recovery as part of a wider effort that includes PSAs and matching employee contributions through the end of the year, TheWrap has learned.

CEO Les Moonves announced the company’s Red Cross donation in a letter to employees obtained by TheWrap, in which he thanks CBS staff working in hurricane-stricken parts of the Northeast and details its charitable plans.

Other networks are pitching in as well: ABC is devoting its programming day Monday to fundraising, and its corporate parent, Disney, has donated $ 2 million. Fox’s parent, News Corp., has donated $ 1 million. And NBC is holding a telethon tonight. All of the networks are also making viewers aware of the recovery efforts through means ranging from crawls to PSAs.

Moonves singled out employees from all corners of the company who worked through tough conditions to keep its television and radio stations going.

“I am announcing today that November, the month of Thanksgiving, will be dedicated at all our operations to supporting the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts of the American Red Cross, with whom CBS has a long partnership in times of crisis,” he wrote. “Our local TV and radio stations, and their online counterparts, will work both individually and together… to employ our unique resources to lend additional support to those relief efforts through telethons, phone banks and comprehensive PSA campaigns. Those efforts have already begun, and are expanding as you read this.”

CBS, he noted, is producing special PSAs featuring its stars. The first, with Gary Sinise, aired during “The Big Bang Theory” on Thursday. More will air during football over the weekend.

Additionally, “Entertainment Tonight” is enlisting stars to appear in PSAs that will run in syndication on affiliates of all networks airing the show. CBS will also dedicate billboards to the relief effort.

“There will not be one division of our company that does not contribute to this effort, each in its own way, and in ways to be determined by each,” Moonves wrote.

“As a cornerstone of this month-long drive, CBS Corporation will make a $ 1 million contribution to the American Red Cross,” he added. “In addition, we are also making a commitment to match your individual contributions to any Sandy-related relief efforts by making corresponding additional gifts to the American Red Cross. The match will apply to contributions that may have already been made as well as to new donations through the end of the year.”

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Florida's I-4 corridor: The mother road of swing voters

By Bob Sacha and Maisie Crow

Interstate 4 bisects the center of America's most notorious swing state, running 132 miles from Tampa, through Orlando and ending near Daytona Beach. Fifty-five percent of Florida voters live in the I-4 corridor. It is often where elections are decided in a state that has frequently switched sides, voting for Republicans seven times and Democrats three times in the past 10 elections, and voting for the winning presidential candidate 90 percent of that time.

For the final installment of our Road Trip video series for Campaign 2012, Yahoo News headed to Florida in search of the exotic, perhaps mythical, undecided voter. Here are three of our conversations.

'I have been registered to vote for seven years, and I have never voted.'

In a state filled with colorful characters, Eve Banks, 25, entertains many of them at the Mons Venus club in Tampa. She also travels extensively for her work as an exotic dancer. Eve Banks is a stage name: "I don't want girls from my sorority looking me up online," she says.

"I'm living a version of the American dream," she told Yahoo News. "It's not like the white picket fence, but I do have the dogs and I do have the husband. And I have everything I want. It's just kind of a different way of achieving it."

In the 2012 presidential election, Banks will be voting for the first time, casting a ballot for Barack Obama, she says, because of his support for women. "I generally don't care about politics because I feel like little old me does not make a difference," she said. "But this year I think is a lot different than previous years because of what's at stake right now.

"There was a lot of discrimination against women, believe it or not, not even that long ago really if you think about it. And that'll all change if we don't put the right person in the position," Banks said. "No woman wants a government to control her body or her choices."

'It has gotten pretty ugly between the two. I'm not sure I would want to be a part of it.'

Lloyd Parker, 33, hasn't decided how he is going to vote. He was working for a land development company in Lake Tahoe in Nevada until business started to slow down. His best friend lured him to Florida to become an entrepreneur by starting the Savage Race, an obstacle race in the mud. We hung out with him during their third race in Dade City.

"The Savage Race is a four- to six-mile mud obstacle course," Parker said. "It's timed. Twenty to 25 military-style obstacles that challenge you in many different ways. And afterward it's a fun gathering with live music and a party atmosphere."

Parker called Florida a Savage Race of sorts for Obama and Mitt Romney: "It is everywhere. It seems to be all over Facebook, everything. Maybe that has turned me off a little bit. That it's just been too much of back and forth and negativity, and it probably pushed me away a little bit.

"I have not been following it very much lately," he told Yahoo News. "In the last month I have been extremely busy with this course. I'm out on a ranch with no cable."

'I think somebody that's been in the farming business as long as we have—I don't think we should have to pay any inheritance tax.'

When Dave Black, 73, started in the citrus-farming and ranching business 42 years ago in Clermont, he stood on his 22 acres and saw fruit trees everywhere. Now his property is down to 14 acres, and it is hemmed in by new housing developments on three sides.

"We've got enough houses," Black told Yahoo News. "I mean we should leave a little open space."

Black is voting for Romney because of his opposition to the inheritance tax, in the hope that he can pass his property to his children undivided and tax-free.

"The Electoral College, I don't care for," he said. "I want the people to decide, not this state or that state. You know, Bush, the first election, he won on electoral votes. He didn't win on popular votes. Gore beat him on popular votes. So, that's wrong. That's just my opinion."

Bob Sacha is a multimedia producer, a documentary filmmaker, a photojournalist and a teacher. Maisie Crow is a documentary photographer, a filmmaker and a visual storytelling teacher. Earlier this year, Bob Sacha and Zach Wise traveled to Nevada to talk to Hispanics about the presidential election. In October, they talked to small-business owners along Colorado's Colfax Avenue. In July, Bob Sacha and Miki Meek traveled to Northern Virginia to talk to Mormons about what a President Romney would mean to them. In March, they drove Ohio's I-71 and talked to Republicans before Super Tuesday.

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Nurses Who Saved NICU Babies Remember Harrowing Hurricane Night

Nurses at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at New York University’s Langone Medical Center have challenging jobs, even in the best of times. Their patients are babies, some weighing as little as 2 pounds, who require constant and careful care as they struggle to stay alive.

On Monday night, as superstorm Sandy bore down on Manhattan, the nurses’ jobs took on a whole new sense of urgency as failing power forced the hospital’s patients, including the NICU nurses’ tiny charges, to evacuate.

“20/20″ recently reunited seven of those nurses: Claudia Roman, Nicola Zanzotta-Tagle, Margot Condon, Sandra Kyong Bradbury, Beth Largey, Annie Irace and Menchu Sanchez. They described how they managed to do their jobs – and save the most vulnerable of lives – under near-impossible circumstances.

On Monday night, as Sandy’s wind and rain buffeted the hospital’s windows, the nurses were preparing for a shift change and the day nurses had begun to brief the night shift nurses. Suddenly, the hospital was plunged into darkness. The respirators and monitors keeping the infants alive all went silent.

For one brief moment, everyone froze. Then the alarms began to ring as backup batteries kicked in. But the coast wasn’t clear – the nurses were soon horrified to learn that the hospital’s generator had failed, and that the East River had risen to start flooding the hospital.

Vanishing America: Jersey Shore Boardwalks Washed Away Watch Video

“Everybody ran to a patient to make sure that the babies were fine,” Nicola Zanzotto-Tagle recalled. “If you had your phone with a flashlight on the phone, you held it right over the baby.”

For now, the four most critical patients – infants that couldn’t breathe on their own – were being supplied oxygen by battery-powered respirators, but the clock was ticking. They had, at most, just four hours before the machines were at risk of failing.

Annie Irache tended to the most critical baby — he had had abdominal surgery just the day before – as an evacuation of 20 NICU babies began.

“[He] was on medications to keep up his blood pressure,” Irache said, “and he also had a cardiac defect, so he was our first baby to go.”

One by one, each tiny infant, swaddled in blankets and a heating pad, cradled by one nurse and surrounded by at least five others, was carried down nine flights of stairs. Security guards and secretaries pitched in, lighting the way with flashlights and cell phones.

The procession moved slowly. As nurses took their careful steps, they carefully squeezed bags of oxygen into the babies’ lungs.

“We literally synchronized our steps going down nine flights,” Zanzotto-Tagle said. “I would say ‘Step, step, step.”

With their adrenaline pumping, the nurses said, it was imperative that they stay focused.

“We’re not usually bagging a baby down a stairwell … n the dark,” said Claudia Roman. “I was most worried about, ‘Let me not trip on this staircase as I’m carrying someone’s precious child, because that would be unforgivable.”

When the medical staff and the 20 babies emerged, a line of ambulances was waiting. A video of Margot Condon cradling a tiny baby as she rode a gurney struck a chord worldwide. But Condon said she had a singular goal.

“I was making sure the tube was in place, that the baby was pink,” she said. “I was not taking my eyes off that baby or that tube.”

Like other nurses, she did not feel panic. Her precious patient helped keep her calm.

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Colin Firth, Michael Fassbender set for A. Scott Berg adaptation ‘Genius’

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender will star in “Genius,” directed by Michael Grandage, with Film Nation handling international sales, the company announced on Thursday.

Based on A. Scott Berg‘s biography “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,” the tells the story of the relationship between Thomas Wolfe (Fassbender) and editor Max Perkins (Firth), the screenplay is written by John Logan.

“Genius” will be produced by James Bierman for the Michael Grandage Company, launched at the end of 2011 by Grandage, the former artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse. Bierman served as executive producer at Donmar and co-formed MGC with Grandage. MGC is producing Logan’s new play, “Peter and Alice,” to be directed by Grandage, as part of a season of plays in London in Spring 2013.

FilmNation is selling the film at the AFM. CAA will arrange the financing and represent the film’s North American distribution rights. Principal photography is scheduled to start early in 2014.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Romney, Obama look for edge as campaign nears end

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. (AP) — Three days. Nine states — give or take. A magic 270 electoral votes. For President Barack Obama and rival Mitt Romney, the final touch-and-go stretch of campaigning is down to the numbers.

New hiring reports or a new jobless rate. Spending totals or early vote totals. Percentage points and rhetorical points. Frequency of stops or size of crowds. In a game of metrics, each camp is looking for that last measure that will separate them at the finish line.

After holding mostly small and mid-size rallies for much of the campaign, Obama's team is planning a series of larger events this weekend aimed at drawing big crowds in battleground states. Still, the campaign isn't expecting to draw the massive audiences Obama had in the closing days of the 2008 race, when his rallies drew more than 50,000.

Obama's closing weekend also includes two joint events with former President Bill Clinton: a rally Saturday night in Virginia and an event Sunday in New Hampshire. The two presidents had planned to campaign together across three states earlier this week, but that trip was called off because of Superstorm Sandy. And, of course, there is always Ohio, the top battleground of them all.

In a whiff of 2008 nostalgia, some of Obama's traveling companions from his campaign four years ago were planning to join him on the road for the final days of his last campaign. Among them are Robert Gibbs, who served as Obama's first White House press secretary, and Reggie Love, Obama's former personal aide who left the White House earlier this year.

Not to be outdone, Romney hosted a massive rally Friday night in West Chester, Ohio, drawing more than 10,000 people to the Cincinnati area for an event that featured rock stars, sports celebrities and dozens of Republican officials. It was a high-energy event on a cold night designed to kick off his own sprint to the finish.

Romney arrived in New Hampshire close to midnight on Friday after an 18-hour day on the campaign trail that took him from Virginia to Wisconsin to Ohio. He was attending a morning rally on the New Hampshire seacoast before making an afternoon appearance in Iowa, and two more in Colorado. He shifted an original plan to campaign in Nevada on Sunday in favor of a schedule likely to bring him back to Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Aides stress that his schedule is fluid and may change with little notice as they evaluate where his time is best spent.

On Saturday, Obama's first stop was in Mentor, Ohio, then he was campaigning in Milwaukee and Dubuque, Iowa, and ending the day in Bristow, Va. On Sunday, he was taking his campaign to New Hampshire, Florida, Colorado and, yes, Ohio.

Polling shows the race remains a toss-up heading into the final days. But Romney still has the tougher path; he must win more of the nine most-contested states to reach 270 electoral votes: Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, Iowa and New Hampshire.

Romney has added Pennsylvania to the mix, hoping to end a streak of five presidential contests where the Democratic candidate prevailed in the state. Obama won Pennsylvania by more than 10 percentage points in 2008; the latest polls in the state give him a 4- to 5-point margin. Romney will campaign in the Philadelphia suburbs on Sunday. Obama aides scoff at the Romney incursion, but they are carefully adding television spending in the state and are sending Clinton to campaign there Monday.

The final frenzy of campaigning comes in the wake of Superstorm Sandy that has dominated much of the news coverage for the past several days as New York, New Jersey and Connecticut recover from the brunt of its force. Friday also offered an economic finale to the campaign with the release of October jobs reports that contained better than average economic news but gave both campaigns a talking point. Employers added a better-than-expected 171,000 jobs last month, but the jobless rate ticked up to 7.9 percent from 7.8 percent — mainly because more people jumped back into the search for work.

In crucial early voting, Obama holds an apparent lead over Romney in key states. But Obama's advantage isn't as big as the one he had over John McCain four years ago, giving Romney hope that he could make up that gap in Tuesday's election.

About 25 million people already have voted in 34 states and the District of Columbia. No votes will be counted until Election Day, but several battleground states are releasing the party affiliation of people who have voted early. So far, Democratic voters outnumber Republicans in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio. Republicans have the edge in Colorado.

___

Kuhnhenn reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Julie Pace and Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this report.

Follow Jim Kuhnhenn on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jkuhnhenn

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Painkillers not as addictive as feared: study

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Fewer than five percent of patients prescribed narcotics to treat chronic pain become addicted to the drugs, according to a new analysis of past research.

The finding suggests that concerns about the risk of becoming addicted to prescription painkillers might be “overblown,” said addiction specialist Dr. Michael Fleming at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

“If you’re a person that doesn’t have a history of addiction and doesn’t have any major psychiatric problems, narcotics are relatively safe as long as your doctor doesn’t give you too much and uses the right medication,” Fleming, who was not involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.

Some recent research has concluded the same thing, but another expert remained skeptical about the new report because many of the studies it included were not considered the best quality research, and they varied widely in their results.

“I think the jury’s still out” on how worrisome prescription opioid addiction is, said Joseph Boscarino of the Geisinger Clinic in Danville, Pennsylvania, who studies pain and addiction.

Opioid painkillers, which include oxycodone, fentanyl and morphine, have only recently become available for patients with chronic pain, said Boscarino, who was not part of the new study.

In the past, the drugs were almost exclusively reserved for cancer patients and people with short-term pain – on the theory that in the first category of patients the need outweighed the risk, and in the second group, short term use was unlikely to lead to long-term addiction.

“They opened up (to chronic pain patients), and since then there’s been a wave of addiction, especially in the last five years,” Boscarino said.

One recent study found that the number of people diagnosed with a substance abuse problem increased by 70 percent from 2001 to 2009, and doctors suspect the increased popularity of prescription painkillers is a primary driver (see Reuters Health story of October 22, 2012).

Of course, not all these cases reflect patients who are using the drugs as directed – or who even have a prescription to treat chronic pain.

To get a sense of how addictive opioid painkillers are for those patients who do have a prescription, researchers from The Cochrane Collaboration, an independent group that reviews research on medications, collected the results from 17 studies covering more than 88,000 people.

All of the patients had been prescribed opioids to treat chronic pain, and nearly all of them had pain unrelated to cancer.

In 10 of the studies, patients used the painkillers for anywhere from three months to several years, while one study included just short-term use of several days and the others did not report the length of time patients were on the drugs.

Taken together, the studies found that 4.5 percent of people developed a dependency on the painkillers.

“It’s a low percentage,” said Dr. Silvia Minozzi, lead author of the study and a member of the Cochrane Drugs and Alcohol Group in Rome.

Although 4.5 percent was the most common rate of addiction among the studies, Minozzi pointed out there were large differences in the rates each study found – ranging from zero to 31 percent.

For instance, a study by Boscarino and his colleagues that was included in Minozzi’s review found that 25 percent of patients became addicted.

The group of patients Boscarino surveyed had a high rate of alcoholism and illegal drug use, though.

He said the disparities among the various studies could also be a result of how people were surveyed about their behaviors.

“We surveyed the patients about their pain in their homes (where) they were relaxed,” he said. “I think they were more inclined not to try to hide their symptoms.”

Minozzi’s review found that, among the three studies with information on substance abuse, people with a history of drug use were more likely than other patients to develop an addiction to their prescription pain pills.

For most people, addiction “does happen, but it’s not very common,” Fleming told Reuters Health. “But if you give a big bottle of Percocets to someone who has an addiction history, who may or may not be using cocaine and marijuana at the same time, they have pain and maybe they should be treated, but they’re much more likely to get into trouble with that.”

Knowing this can help physicians screen patients to judge who might be the most vulnerable to becoming addicted and get them into the appropriate interventions, he said.

Minozzi noted the fact that her review found a “deficiency of good-quality” studies on this subject, “seems to stand in contrast to the widespread concern of doctors and authorities relating to the prescription of opioids for pain.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/U0ye5P Addiction, online October 18, 2012.

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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