Having had a lot of experience with the health care world lately, I’ve become amazed at how pricing is set. When trying to pick which insurance company to go with, I called my doctors and the hospital to find out what my expenses would be. I discovered that what they charge depends on what insurance you have!
Recently our doctor billed us $1230 for a visit and our insurance company agreed to pay $291.92 and the doctor’s office called it good! I wondered if I could have negotiated it down that much if I’d been paying without insurance. Well, this guy did too. He called several hospitals and asked if they would negotiate if he was uninsured. Here’s what he found out:
# The list price varies by 75% ($1,013 to $3,970).
# The best uninsured price varies by 92% ($204 to $2,600).
# List price discounts range from 0% to 86%.
# To get many of the discounts hospitals offer the balance needs to be paid in full at the time of service or a large down payment made, to receive it.
# Some hospitals are unwilling to divulge the price over the phone and others will not call back.
Women’s biggest concern about drinking alcohol during pregnancy is "what
about those drinks I had before I knew I was pregnant?" This is the first study I’ve seen about what affect drinking early in a pregnancy has: MedlinePlus: Prenatal drinking may boost baby’s stress response. Basically they found that two drinks a day early in pregancy cause a baby’s stress response to be greater than normal. When you are stressed your heart rate goes up and your stress hormones go up. That’s bad not only for your health but for your ability to learn.
For the record, there are lots of other things that also affect a person’s stress response.
I bet many a couple has had the "circumcision" debate but hardly anybody talks about it. This medical student feels very strongly that boys should not be circumcised and she explains why here: Tales from the Emergency Room and Beyond….
She says that less than 20% of boys in Canada are circumcised. According to this website, just over half (55.9%) of boys in the United States were circumcised in 2003 but it varies greatly by region from 31.4% in the West to 77.8% in the Northeast.
As I wrote this, I realized that I am very, very anti-female circumcision and not so anti-male circumcision simply because of my culture. I’m going to have to rethink my values.
If your baby is allergic to milk, switching him or her to soy based formula is not the answer. Being allergic to milk is not the same as being lactose intolerant. Babies with milk allergies should proabably be switched to a hypoallergic or amino-acid based formula. BBC NEWS | Health | Milk allergy in babies ‘missed’.
(Note that the article also alluded that soy based forumulas could cause long-term fertility problems!)
Ever wondered why things don’t taste good after brushing your teeth? It’s because of something called "sodium laurel sulfate." It blocks the sweet sensors on your tongue and enhances the sour and bitter sensors.
This plane is flying around Vietnam not just performing eye surgery on people that can’t afford to go to a hospital for surgery but it also has a teaching room to teach local doctors to perform the surgery themselves. Flying eye hospital aids world’s poor – Yahoo! News.
The front section of the plane has been converted into a classroom, complete with a medical library and a big screen that broadcasts close-up interactive surgeries from the operating room, located in the middle of the aircraft.
It’s always good to teach people how to do it themselves and this is a great idea on how to bring training (and handson, live training) to the people that need it.
I recently quit breastfeeding; see my post on it here.
While I was breastfeeding, I was losing 2-3 pounds a week and eating lots. (Two lunches, seconds at dinner, lots of brownies, etc.) I’ve figured out why:
This first week after breastfeeding, Caleb is eating 700
calories a day. Assuming he was consuming 700/day breastfeeding,
that’s 4900 calories/week which is about 1.5 pounds a week and that
doesn’t count production costs!
Am I sorry I quit? Nope. I’ll just use all my extra time to get some exercise, which I have really missed.
I’m going to post about deciding to stop breast feeding because I couldn’t find hardly anything at all about deciding to stop breastfeeding on the web. As much information as there is on the web, some topics are very hard to find!
I decided to stop breastfeeding after a month and while I was considering it, I searched the web extensively. While there is a ton of extremely helpful information on breastfeeding on the web, it is all centered around solving any problems you might have, not in making a decision one way or the other. (And if it is about making a decision, they spend pages and pages telling you how good breastfeeding is for your child.) There’s also no information about, when you decide to quit, exactly what you are supposed to do. Stop cold turkey? Gradually phase it out? I did find three pages of information on stopping breast feeding:
Ending breastfeeding. This poor woman had obviously already decided to stop breastfeeding (a hard decision!) and the expert answering her email first questioned why she’d made the decision. The expert did answer her question about how to stop breastfeeding and said to gradually wean the baby by cutting out a feeding every day or two.
Life After Weaning: Ending the breastfeeding relationship. This was actually the most helpful webpage. It’s an excerpt from a book and actually talks about both the physical and the emotional effects on the mother and the emotional effects on the child. (Note that the emotional effects on the child tend to be largely those that breastfeed for several years. It doesn’t talk about the effects on an infant.)
ending breastfeeding….what happens? This was a very short discussion between moms about what happens. Like the previous article it suggests weaning slowly and points out that you should never completely drain your breasts if you want your milk to dry up.
Deciding not to breastfeed is a very hard decision because while nobody says it’s wrong not to breastfeed, the minute you become pregnant you are inundated with literature and people telling you how good breastfeeding is for your child and offering all sorts of support. (In particular the hospital staff and nurses were awesome. They were extremely supportive, very helpful and offer all sorts of free services to help and encourage nursing moms.) And when I asked friends and family what they thought everyone was very careful not to say anything one way or the other. Although all offered support either way! And many pointed out that there are plenty of healthy children and adults who were not breastfed.
So why did I decide to quit? It wasn’t health reasons, it wasn’t because I couldn’t nurse Caleb and it wasn’t because Caleb wouldn’t nurse. (Those seem to be the “acceptable” reasons to give for stopping breastfeeding.) I quit for many reasons, although it basically boiled down to the fact that I didn’t like it. Here are the reasons I didn’t like it, pretty much in order of importance to me:
Time. It was extremely time consuming. During the day Caleb wanted to eat every 1.5 to 2 hours. And he ate for 30 minutes. So that means that 25-30% of my waking day was spent feeding him. That’s a lot of time! And planning around that is very difficult. (And it’s really hard to pump milk so that you can leave him with someone else for an hour or two when you are already nursing all the time. We ended up using formula in those cases and Caleb didn’t seem to mind going back and forth at all.)
Worry. I was always worried he wasn’t getting enough to eat (why did he want to eat so often!) or that what I was eating or drinking might affect him. (How many diet coke’s should you drink? Probably none, right? So what about the two you just drank?) And it turns out he probably wasn’t getting as much in the afternoon as he wanted because he’s much less fussy now. But the doctor said he was getting plenty because he was sleeping 4-5 hours at night and gaining plenty of weight.
Sore nipples. A month is a really long time to have sore nipples. And yes, he was latching on and eating correctly. I think just feeding him 30% of all waking hours made them sore. I’m sure eventually they would have toughened up.
Of course I have doubts and regrets. Most of them centered around the health benefits. Breastfeeding is supposed to help kids’ immunity and decrease their long term odds of obesity. Those are the two I worried about the most. But I’m confident that there are lots of other factors that also influence Caleb’s health and the two of us being happy is one of them! (I realized I never talked to him when I was nursing him except to wake him up continuously and to ask him if he was done yet. When I feed him a bottle I talk to him the whole time and it’s fun!)
I feel a little bit like I’m airing my personal diary in this post, but I wanted to make the information I found available to others and I wanted to add my own experience and decision to the pool of knowledge so that others might feel more comfortable making a decision one way or the other.
A study of 61 male university students found those who were hungry were attracted to heavier women than those who were satiated.
They also said that societies where food is scarce tend to value heavier women and societies like ours where food is abundant tend to favor thinner women.
Selection pressure means when parents have traits they can pass on that are better for boys than for girls, they are more likely to have boys. Such traits include large size, strength and aggression, which might help a man compete for mates. On the other hand, parents with heritable traits that are more advantageous to girls are more likely to have daughters.
And it goes on to say that beautiful parents are more likely to have girls because being beautiful is a bigger advantage to girls. And engineers and mathmaticians are more likely to have boys because it’s a bigger advantage to a boy to have those talents. So, again, taking it with a grain of salt (or perhaps a shaker of salt!), I figure that since Frank and I are both engineering types and Frank is definitely big and strong, we were destined to have a boy!
(So to the answer to the blog’s title, why do beautiful women marry unattractive men? According to this theory it’s because there are more beautiful women in the world because beautiful people tend to have girls just like strong people tend to have boys. Don’t forget that grain of salt. 🙂
