Gotta Love It. Even the daycare.......

So the other day I go to pick up my oldest and the businesswoman who runs the show said to me "I have a question" I quickly see her Time Magazine with the cover which asks "Can we change our genes"

I immediately launch into a diatribe about epigenetics. The current state of epigenetics is even murkier than micro RNAs. I basically go on a rant and at the end she says "So can those cigarettes I smoked as a kid screw up my grandson?"

OMFG!!! This is why I hate TIME magazine. AND the lay press, AND the secondary education system in this country...AND.........

Ok, here is the real take on Epigenetics. It is a control system, plain and simple, just like these RNAs and whatever else may control t he rate at which DNA does its dance.

Monogenetic disease importance is pretty clear....

Gene Broken (of important protein/etc) + No Repair = Disease Phenotype

But when you can compensate with other genes, or even multiple copies of the same gene or EVEN by upregulating similar genes to carry the load, you have a different story. Which is the story that you will soon hear being told.

The reason our organism exists here is because:

1. We repair our DNA damage pretty well, when we don't we die, usually of cancer

2. We have redundancy mechanisms which, we will find out have epigenetic control

3. We pass these adaptations on to our kin in multiple ways through behavior as well as, ribonucleic acids, as well as methylation and acetylation and......G-d only knows

Do we have any idea how the "F" all of this works. No, which is why I beg all of you hungry reporters working as freelance or as staff reporters for the will known as Time, please stop hyping "the NEXT BIG THING"

God Damn now I am gonna have to deflate the epigenetics balloon too????

Pretty soon everyone will be saying, WE HAVE A RIGHT TO A PROPER EPIGENTICALLY MODIFIED GENOME! I can see it now.......

The Sherpa Says: How about extra methylation causing cancer? How about low methylation ALSO causing cancer? Don't believe me? Pub Med it.......

I'm All for Change, But this?

I hope you can get a deep understanding of how absolutely and completely worse off we will be with this complicated system. You can say, "well can't the US government track submarines underwater while also tracking missles overhead and STILL collect taxes?" They can, but this is even more complex. Listen, it would be nice to have a cheaper Not For Profit system out there to pay for care.

Remember, having access to health insurance, is NOT having access to healthcare.......

It's having access to health insurance. I don't know if anyone reads Investors Business Daily, I do and on Wednesday I read something which almost made me $h!t my pants. The House bill went public all 1018 pages of it.....

On Page 16 there is something very, very scary on it.........

From IBD (Not to be confused with Crohn's Disease)


By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, July 15, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Congress: It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "Health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure



When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:

"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington's coverage.

The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, "fizzle out altogether."

What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.
The legislation is also likely to finish off health savings accounts, a goal that Democrats have had for years. They want to crush that alternative because nothing gives individuals more control over their medical care, and the government less, than HSAs.

With HSAs out of the way, a key obstacle to the left's expansion of the welfare state will be removed.

The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.

Washington does not have the constitutional or moral authority to outlaw private markets in which parties voluntarily participate. It shouldn't be killing business opportunities, or limiting choices, or legislating major changes in Americans' lives.

It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It's scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we'll come across in the final 1,002.

AS Jon Belushi said in Animal House

"Holy $h!t"

This is crazy. If this becomes law, it in essence will prevent you as an individual from changing plans, unless of course you go on the government plan. No more individual policies.......EVER

This may not be a big deal for someone in bad health, but for a health 40 year old who wants access to specialists without issues or waiting periods, this could soon become illegal......

The Sherpa Says: If you think that these changes will enable Personalized Medicine, think again.........Besides, the real costs in this system are drugs and hopsitals. Why bother with the providers?

Family History and Stroke Risk

This week at the American Academy of Neurology's annual meeting results from a study were announced. Persons who had a brother or sister who suffered a stroke were almost 2 times as likely to have a stroke. All strokes in the study were due to an occlusion of a blood vessel which either resolved in less than 24 hours (TIA) or not. Of note the risk to Mexican Americans was even higher. Not surprising to me especially because they have a higher rate of metabolic syndrome in their population. Interestingly this risk was almost 3 fold in Mexican American men! My questions are many fold and will be found out over time. What role do hormones play? What about epigenetic changes in sperm? The list goes on forever.

So once again family history rules the day. I hate to tell all of these testing companies, but family history is the cheapest and best genetic test you have. Now if we can only convince physicians that family history is never noncontributory unless you believe in spontaneous generation!

True there are those like myself with only half a tree and that is where targeted testing guided by a physician will play a role.