We’re getting a lot of questions about what’s going on with Sarah and all of her blogs … we’re going to have to ask all of you to be patient for now, because we really can’t get into it publicly until we’re sure it’s OK to do so. There are bad things going on in other parts of the net, and we’re observing a temporary “radio silence.”

I promise that we’ll spill the beans as soon as we’re allowed.

U.S. threatens suit if Maine probes Verizon ties to NSA

The Bush administration is threatening to sue if Maine regulators decide to investigate whether Verizon Communications illegally turned over customer information to the National Security Agency.

And it also makes me … afraid.

I’m not one for conspiracies … and i seldom give such things two consecutive seconds of thought … but this is today’s paper, our real paper, and not some tacky tabloid. Although the Portland Press Herald has a liberal slant, you don’t see this sort of thing in there very often.

Verizon … is a large company. Not just local to Maine. Is Verizon illegally selling your phone information to the government?

If they are … you’ll never find out. Apparently, the government will prevent you from trying!

I’m all for getting rid of Verizon, AND the current government! :o(

Got up this morning to discover that the blogs wouldn’t come up … but that didn’t worry me. I knew they were going to move the servers to a new location.

Something wasn’t right though … one of my two blogsplot.net email addresses was working. It shouldn’t have been. If you have several lights on a power bar, and you turn off the power bar, everything without its own power source will go out. If my email and the blogs were down because the servers were still “en route” to their location, or not set back up yet, then … that one little email should not have been working.

I could feel a bit panic begin to build …

I opened a tech help ticket explaining my surmise … telling the techies we’re renting the server space from that I understood that things happen sometimes, even when we’re careful, and that if they were honest with me about what was really going on, I would be a grateful client.

In short order, I got a reply … yes, there was a problem, but they didn’t know the extent of it. My heart sank. I thought of my 5 blogs, Dr. Engel’s, Sarah’s several blogs, Eric’s blog, Wolfbaby’s blog … all of our posts … our time intensive themes …

… and then realized that this is also my first day back to school. Need to go to the hospital and interview someone in the HIT field, and need to some research, and analyze what I’ve found … besides my daily classroom postings.

Have you ever had that feeling that it was just going to be too much work?

After a few emails, the hosting company wrote back and informed me of the worst … well, the very next to the worst. The server had finally been made to come up, but when it did, it was empty. They managed to save our databases, so our posts, comments, links, etc., are all still here … but they lost everything else. All the themes, the pictures, etc..

So … some good - all the posts were still there. I could have gotten most of the posts back from Bloglines or another RSS feed, but this is nicer. But for those of you who know, the themes are where the real work comes in. Dr. Engel’s blog was practically done from scratch … and in a comment on someone’s blog a few days ago (I think it was Dr. Anon) I wrote something like: I’ve been wanting to change my theme for a long time now, but because I have so many gizmos in my sidebar, etc., every time I think about doing it I get an instant headache.

Ayuh.

Well, for now … we have “vanilla” default themes. I have to apply myself to my school work, and to another crisis which my extended family is going through right now, but the themes will be restored, a little at a time. We just won’t look so great until I can get around to making it happen.

My techno-savvy son, Dougie, and I just went through and restored all of the blogs … all 12 of them … one at a time. Poor Dr. Engel must have been beside himself, because he sounded pretty dismayed on the phone … and then when I emailed him that his was back up without a theme, he put several posts up so quickly that I think he was waiting to hear from me with his finger on the upload button! *grin* Now I’ve got to get over there to see what he wrote about!

I also noticed that Sarah has some of her themes back up …

I’m afraid I won’t be so quick - too much else is going on.

But … at least … we’re back. The blogs are basically intact … they just need to be built back up into “power blogs” again.

Please, visit us anyway … just try to ignore our dust …

(Pssst! Dr. Anon! Got anything for blog-addicts who have been forcibly deblogged? *sniff!*)

Ohhhhhh yeah. Indeed! I just read the hilarious comments on Dr. IBear’s “Words that Should Never Be Said In An Emergency Department.” I was still laughing about the cute story that Dr. Scan Man shared in the comments there, when I was forced to utter the same words he ended the post with: “Thank you Mr. Murphy.”

I usually keep this sort of thing off my public blog - but really, this is just too much. Turn off your whine meters … pull on your hip boots … things are gonna get deep!

A week ago today, I developed what I recognized as a neuroma under my left foot. I rolled my eyes in disgust, and went on with my day … in fact, I went on with my week. It was not the first one of those, and it will not be last. I hobbled and hopped … and for the better part, tried to minimize the “turning the air blue” phenomenon that seemed to accompany activities like putting a shoe on.

By Thursday, I realized that the fun had only just begun. My little ouchy was rather quickly being obscured by something far ouchier. By Friday I wondered if I’d ever wear a shoe again, and by Saturday, I had that awful: “Why do these things always happen on a week-end?” feeling …

I was having my first ever experience with … gout. I was grateful to the foresight that caused me to remove my cute little toe rings on Friday, because by Saturday, it would not have been possible.

It was late yesterday before I realized that I still had the darn neuroma - same foot - but the gout had taken so much of my attention that the neuroma was completely obscured! So … if you ever get a neuroma, I have great advice for making the pain seem as if it’s not even there … *cough* …

Anyway, I was still surviving, and things had begun to improve a bit by this morning. Ayuh! I was starting to feel pretty cocky!

I hop-hobbled into the kitchen, avoiding every obstacle along the way … and managed to make it all the way into there without resorting to too much, erm, “colorful language.” Once in there, I looked down at my poor sore foot, and noticed that I had a bunch of bruises I hadn’t seen before. One more thing to wonder about …

I raised my poor, angry looking foot, and bent forward just a wee tiny bit to point out the bruises on my leg to my son, when I felt something *FLASH* somewhere in the lumbar region of my back. Hoo yeah. And I thought a little sore toe was a big deal!

Feeling completely defeated, I decided that whatever I’d gone to the kitchen for wasn’t all that important after all.

And now … all I can do is join the chorus with Dr. Scan Man and say “Thank you Mr. Murphy!”

Alternative medicine common in kids; docs unaware

Here’s a quote from the article at the above link:

In places as far apart as Wales and Australia, about half of the children seen at pediatric hospitals are using complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), investigators report.

In a second study, British researchers found that children with chronic diseases were three times more likely to use CAM than healthy children.

In both studies, reported in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, the researchers found that parents and their children were unlikely to discuss CAM use with their doctors.

If the study is really representative of what’s happening across the civilized world, then I’m not only concerned about the obvious - the health of the children, but also about medicine as a profession for tomorrow. Children absorb whatever they’re exposed to … a child who is taken to a Chinese medicine specialist whenever he’s sick, is more likely to consider that practice as a valid profession when he’s old enough to decide what he wants to study. How many young minds across the globe are going to be lost to allopathic medicine in favor of the alternative and fringe pseudo-sciences?

Let’s carry that a step further … the children who grow up seeing alternative practitioners, whatever field they enter into as adults, will also be more likely to do the same with their own children … carrying the problem into yet another generation.

This could cost medicine dearly … through those who would have gone into research … all the way to those who would have become Generalists. Fewer people going into medicine is going to slow the advance of our research, and lower the quality of health care across the board. There already aren’t enough physicians going into the Generalist fields.

Here in the states, I keep reading that doctors are giving up their practices because of the condition of our medical system. Most of the doctors who’ve said that were either Internists or Family Practitioners. Compounding that problem is the fact that fewer medical graduates are choosing a General Practice, and a growing number of those who aren’t choosing to specialize along a “classic line” are going into the “newer” branches: e.g. hospitalists, intensivists … etc. …

I believe that in a generation or two, all of these factors are going to come together to create a health crisis in our country the likes of which we’ve never seen before … if medicine can continue as it has for another few generations.

I envision with dread my grandchildren hanging herbs above their babies’ cribs in the hopes of preventing illness … or having to travel untold distances to find a medical doctor. Unless things change, future generations will see the regression of the advances we’ve made thus far, and the progression of a “touchy-feely,” superstitious pseudo-science, which is masquerading as real medicine, and dragging us back into our own medical “dark ages.”