It used to be that we watched NBC, CBS, and ABC for all of our news.  Newsman, Walter Cronkite, was the most trusted human being in the United States.  Then, during the Clinton Administration, our media began to change as MSNBC and Fox came on line with a very different brand of edutainment.    Sergeant Joe Friday’s “The Facts, Ma’am, nothing but the facts,” became a myth.  Instead of the news, we could select which slant of the news we would prefer, and for many people, feeding at the trough of the one that most represented their views became a regular daily activity.

In college we learned about semantics and were taught the destructive force of improperly slanted communications.  We were also given examples of how these slanted interpretations influenced the masses.  Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s PR man, did an astounding job of reaching the lower middle classes of Germany.  He used terror and hatred to influence their opinions on everything from literature, to war, to Jews.  He positioned his boss, Adolf, that smarmy little dude, as the leader of the “not so free world.”

A friend of mine was in the home of a prominent millionaire at the end of October in 1989 soliciting support for a not for profit organization.  During their meeting the phone rang, and the host excused himself to answer it.  The conversation went something like this, “No . . . absolutely not.  No, not this week;  not until next week.”  After the call he returned to my friend and said, “Do you believe it?  Those guys wanted to tear down the Berlin Wall this week.”

The following week, 28 years after it was constructed, the Berlin Wall came down – November 9^th, 1989.

Influence comes in many forms, and it was obvious to my friend that a few very wealthy people had a great deal of influence in the way our world operates.  Many of those individuals or their offspring now control the media oligopoly, a group of people that went from thousands to less than a dozen major owners internationally, a reality that can create a lack of competition and diversity while providing completely biased political views reflective of what will benefit them directly.

With these New Rules in mind, I’ve decided to give you two different views of Obamacare for 2014:

Right:   Obamacare will result in Death Squads that will determine the fate of our loved one.

Left:      Obamacare will result in the saving of thousands of babies who would have perished due to         previously unavailable pre-natal care.

Right:    Obamacare will result in the complete loss of ownership of our medical records due to EMR’s (Electronic medical records) being available to the government.

Left:      Your Medical Records will soon be available to you no matter where you are in the country and will contribute to a higher quality of care.

There you have it.  Pick which side of the road you want to live on as you watch the cars go by, but then understand that you really don’t have much control of the direction in which they are moving.  Big media can keep us immersed in the deep concerns of the Kardashian family, feed us genetically modified white bread and send us to the Coliseum while Rome burns or we can VOTE.  The problem with voting is that we really should have enough objective information to allow us to make an informed decision, and, unless it’s a Tweet, that’s very unlikely.

Keep in mind, too, that our vote will be influenced by the lobbyists whose clients will benefit the most from the election.  As one talking head said, “I just wish they’d dress like NASCAR drivers so that we could determine who owns them.”   I, for one, am fed up with this polarity.

Let’s find some middle ground and try to save ourselves and our country.

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I have been working to create and grow integrative holistic medicine centers, satellites and programs in New Jersey health systems.  (Integrative refers to evidence-based, world medicine practices and holistic refers to body, mind and spirit.)  My work helps to fund, recruit and place individuals and physicians trained in integrative modalities like functional medicine, acupuncture, massage, bio-identicals  into those systems so that habit change processes in life planning can be implemented.

With about $115B a year being spent on Integrative Medicine related services and products internationally at a 10% annual growth rate, these transformational avenues to wellness and prevention are making huge differences in healthcare costs and treatments.  By doing Integrative medicine assessments, education, coaching and life planning, these centers for well-being are changing the health of their region’s population.  This is being done through evidence based diet, exercise and stress management programs where healthy behavior habit practices and holistic diagnostics focusing on root-cause issues are first identified and then addressed.   The other good news is that these programs are being reimbursed through the Accountable Care Act at $100+ dollars per visit up to 72 visits a year.

Thirty million U.S. citizens will have health insurance in January of 2014.   In the new world order of American healthcare,  we will be providing population health for people, tens, even hundreds of thousands of people who have typically only ever seen physicians in an Emergency Room setting after the illness has become acute.  These urgent practitioners have served as their family physicians since they were small children, and prevention and wellness have been distant realities in their world.

We also live in a country that inundates us with advertisements, billboards, and jingles about manufactured food that has been specifically engineered and designed to be addictive through its sodium and sugar content and its man-made scientifically analyzed texture.  We have fallen into a style and standard of living that has produced sedentary and obese citizens; 26 million diabetics and 70 million pre–diabetics.  It is a system that is costing us $35B in diabetic treatments, and has a bottom line price tag of $2.4T a year.  Why not reach out to medical practice techniques that are thousands of years old?

Integrative Medicine approaches your health in a common sense manner, teaches you how to break bad habits, immerses you in nurturing activities that address your whole being, and allows you to become introspective about your own health so that root cause affects can be addressed and ameliorated.

Finally, medically directed nutraceuticals, herbs, vitamins and healthy foods along with other  modalities such as acupuncture, massage, music, art, aroma and humor therapies are proven methods of treatment that are being embraced at places like Duke University , The Cleveland Clinic, Scripps, Atlantic Health, the VA, the DoD and over three dozen major medical and academic centers in the United States.  The due diligence has been done.  It’s time to shift your personal paradigm and embrace this opportunity to make yourself healthy.

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It’s easy to be a remote dashboard video driver at a NASCAR race when someone else is assuming all of the pressure and risks behind the wheel.  Oftentimes that’s what my job feels like.  From my perspective I can observe the healthcare world and not personally be directly impacted by the fallout that others face on a daily basis.  The good news for both of us, however, is that this neutral and objective viewpoint gives me valuable knowledge that is both significant and in many cases critical to those of you who are still doing the driving.

For example:  Last week I heard about a hospital that had chosen to drop a clinical program that has been part of their service menu for years.  The incredibly interesting aspect of this decision to lay off several highly skilled individuals was that over a year ago the Affordable Care Act had changed the reimbursement for this program in a manner that produces exponentially better financial benefits to the organization.  Consequently, that decision would appear to be an uninformed or at least a minimally informed decision;  a potentially lucrative, multi-million dollar program is being eliminated while other health systems are currently initiating that very same program due to its value proposition in wellness, prevention and economic benefit.

Even the least informed of us have determined that the only way to survive the onslaught of change that the industry is now facing is through a serious and concentrated effort in dealing with population health.  Along with supply chain, consolidation, and attention to HCHAPS, hospital acquired infections, readmission rates and transparency;  population health is a critical pathway to address the balancing of the teeter totter of healthcare finance.

With 45% of the newly insured falling into the Medicaid ranks and somewhere between 7000 and 10,000 Baby Boomers moving onto the Medicare ranks on a daily basis, our hospitals will be inundated with medical vs. surgical cases that would have or should have either been prevented or at least ameliorated to some degree through public health efforts, education, and outreach.

For example, one medical issue that we don’t regularly hear about in the nonmedical-civilian world is the epidemic of inflammatory disease that is impacting our country.   Unless or until we move into our at-risk populations and address the urban food deserts, analyze the human impact created by the paragraphs of chemical additives to even our most basic foods, and deal with the endless consumption of sugar and salt in our manufactured diets;  heart disease, cancer, and dozens of other inflammatory related afflictions will fill the hospital beds and lead to the $2,000,000 work-ups that take us down one diagnostic rabbit hole after another and into Detroit City-type deficits.

Coupons for fruits and vegetables, green pathways for walking, bike paths, other forms of diet, exercise, stress management and socializing activities, and integrative medicine education would have a significant impact on the general health of our population.  So too would anti-bullying campaigns, anger management programs, and job creation.  Obviously, healthcare can’t be the panacea for all 316,000,000 or so people in this country, but, by immersing ourselves into areas of population health we will contribute significantly to our collective future.

The old adage of “common sense being uncommon” hits heavily on this topic because we all know that even Superman had his vulnerabilities.  Our kryptonite has become our addiction to all of those things that common sense would tell us are absolutely not logical in terms of lifestyle, consumption, work-schedules, video-addictions, nutrition starved diets, sodium and sugar consumption.  Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s find a corner of a couch and plant ourselves firmly into that spot for eight or so hours at a time.

We must embrace ways to reach our populations and care about them before we end up spending every healthcare dollar ineffectively caring for them while never addressing the root cause of their problems.

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Hospital prices have come under seemingly ever increasing scrutiny recently in various forms.  The TIME magazine article by Steven Brill, “The Bitter Pill,” which was a comprehensive outsider’s analysis of The Charge Description Master (CDM), has certainly generated some interesting discussions at not only social events, but also in most C-suites and hospital board meetings.

Almost simultaneously, the Medicare program’s recent release of hospital charge data has generated significant national media attention to this issue.  The dialogue regarding the growing influence of consumer-driven utilization of health care services and pricing transparency has taken on a life of its own as we enter this new era of healthcare delivery.

Everyone familiar with the inner workings of the health care industry knows that the CDM’s patient prices represent a very complicated issue.  And while a few healthcare consulting firms have been on the leading edge regarding this matter, fewer still have taken the steps to recommend that hospitals and health systems implement the wide range of policies and procedures needed to begin to appropriately address it.   These steps can include initiating suitable charity policies and installing processes that allow you to estimate patient liability , but even these do not produce a solution that will help to ameliorate the challenges raised by this new national transparency.

One crucial task that a hospital should perform is the development and implementation of a thoughtfully considered and carefully structured CDM patient pricing methodology, but delivering that solution has been consistently elusive.   

One firm however, SunStone Consulting, LLC, has incorporated its years of experience into the development of Pretium, a new web-based CDM pricing solution.

In their work as financial consultants to over 250 hospitals and health systems in the United States over the past 30 years, SunStone’s consultants have performed literally hundreds of pricing analyses and rate setting engagements. These engagements have been for hospitals ranging in size from 35 to 1,250 beds and including academic medical centers, major teaching hospitals, for and not-for-profit health systems, community and small rural hospitals.

Developed with SunStone’s expertise, and based on each user hospital’s customized structured charging methodology, Pretium offers a high degree of confidence in CDM pricing.   Other pricing software tools most frequently provide the user with plenty of information, but ultimately leave the identification of the actual CDM price to someone’s judgment.  This is not so with Pretium which calculates a CDM price and provides comprehensive documentation relating to exactly how each and every price was determined.

As most professionals in the healthcare finance business know, CDMs contain complex algorithms with large amounts of internal relational logic.  Pretium allows a user to incorporate all of these unique pricing considerations present in many patient services with individualized, specific, detailed pricing issues.

Pretium also provides a state-of-the-art Pricing Review screen that equips the user with powerful analytics that ensures that calculated proposed prices make sense in the context of the hospital’s pricing philosophy. This Pricing Review screen permits the user to quickly and easily make pricing changes and to determine immediately the estimated impact on gross and net patient revenue.  This feature then makes it possible to identify CDM prices that will protect the hospital’s net revenue stream while being sensitive to the local market, individual hospital’s cost and other internal and external benchmarks.

Finally, Pretium facilitates the user’s ability to explain detailed patient prices while keeping the organization in compliance with specific pricing regulations and guidelines.  These features, combined with SunStone’s expert pricing consultants’ advice, provide a powerful tool that can be used to accurately recommend pricing for the entire CDM.

Pretium is profoundly different from typical software pricing tools, and with the availability of continuous software upgrades in this heavily scrutinized environment, this CDM program can make these complex decisions and changes more accurate and dependable on an ongoing basis.

For more information or to schedule a demonstration, please contact Leonard Brauner at 212-622-9393 or via email at leonardbrauner@sunstoneconsulting.com

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I recently saw a rather robust list of apps that apply to your health.  If you don’t know what apps are, you might want to consider reading a different blog, but if, like me, you’re old but still curious, you’ll keep on reading.  So, these apps can be used on I phones, Androids, and tablets.  Some of them are relatively incredible, some aren’t; and some are just fun, but, no matter, they are the future.  App Health.  

The first app is called Brush DJ.  One of the less impressive genes that my grandkids seem to have inherited from me is teeth related.  You see, my teeth were always referred to by my mom as “soft teeth.”   As a kid, growing up without fluoride and having an aunt with a penny candy counter in her store, I just thought soft meant rotten teeth.  Cavities happened a lot to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I brushed ‘em, but, probably not often enough.  Then, after the dentist would fill my teeth with all of that wonderful mercury, he’d give me a lollipop.   

So Brush DJ goes into your telephone or tablet’s music collection, randomly selects a song and plays it for two full minutes while showing you where you should be brushing and at what time.  Cool, huh? 

I have mixed feeling about this one.  It’s called Depression Screening.  This app helps to identify depression issues; it assesses and tracks feelings of possible depression.  I haven’t tried it yet because it seems somewhat depressing.  ( Okay, I know, not PC.)   

Gene screen is described as a fun way to learn how recessive genetic traits and diseases are inherited and how certain diseases are more prevalent in different populations.  It also provides information on some recessive genetic diseases and screening programs.   

Let me be fully transparent here because, once again, I haven’t tried this one.  I don’t think that I  really want to know why my mid-section is now about a foot and a half shorter than my overall height or maybe, just maybe, I don’t care which one of my grandfathers or potentially grandmothers contributed to my excessive bodily hair which is everywhere but on my head.   

The next one is called, I prevent running injuries. It’s supposed to protect you from injuries.  I wasn’t even going to download it because the last time that I ran was to the dinner table. On the other hand, I have had friends who, while running and not paying attention to their surroundings, ran into street signs and had to have stitches.  Oh, and another friend fell into a sewer, but was very lucky and swam to safety.   

So, if you’re a runner or a swimmer you might consider that app.   

Finally, the Nottingham Hip Fracture Score Calculator wins it all.  This nifty little app will predict mortality in patients over 65 with a fractured neck or femur, and the app allows for rapid calculation of the score.  

Even though all of my old relatives are dead, I may just download this one for the fun of it.  So, Aunt Amy fell out of the tub?  Should I bother to cover her with a sheet and call the ambulance, or . . . what the heck?   This sounds like an app that was either created by a cold hearted actuarial, a surgeon who is calculating the maximum surgical time or possibly, an ambulance chasing attorney?   

First of all, why do you need to calculate this situation so quickly?  Is it part of the Death Panels of the Affordable Care Act?  (For you NSA guys with those little bomb filled drones, that was a joke.)  

Finally, this is America!  We are entitled to spend as much as we want on healthcare; no matter how stupid the outcome.

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I’ve spent the last year dealing with changes, some good, some okay, some not so good and some that are simply amazing.  I learned a long time ago that regardless of our desires, rivers keep flowing, trees keep growing, and life goes on around us.  Interestingly enough, however, lots of people don’t seem to see things that way.  It feels like about 40 percent of us want time to stop and are longing for a make-believe era when things were utopian.  (I was alive then.  It wasn’t all that great.)

Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-American writer and poet who is the third best selling all time poet behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu, once wrote, “Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge. ”  To say that I’ve been perplexed by some of the changes that we’re facing would be a colossal understatement, but I do remain completely curious.  It seems to me that if we cease to be curious, stop seeking knowledge, or think that we know it all and don’t care if we learn anymore, that’s when we get into trouble.  That’s when we dig in to defend beliefs that have been completely debunked,  have always been  false, or are just downright stupid.

My grandfather, for example, refused to wear pants with zippers.  He’d say, “Those new fangled things are ridiculous.”  More importantly, however, I think he might have been afraid of them because, not unlike the scene from “Something About Mary,” things can occasionally get caught if you’re not paying attention.  So, it appears that a lot of people are just downright afraid of change.

Believe me, Pasquale wasn’t a stupid guy.  He loved fun, people and life, but when changes bothered him, he’d dig in and be so stubborn that it was almost incomprehensible.  Let’s put this into even more perspective.  He left home at age 13, made his way to the port of Naples on foot from the middle of Italy, got on a boat and came to America . . . alone.  Then, he found a job, went back years later and found a wife. He raised his family here while learning to speak English and play the stock market.  No change involved in that story, huh?

When I try to explain the coping mechanisms needed to embrace change, I usually fall back to a quote from Morgan Freeman who said, “I always tell my kids if you lay down, people will step over you. But if you keep scrambling, if you keep going, someone will always, always give you a hand. Always. But you gotta keep dancing; you gotta keep your feet moving.” 

That quote grabs me because dancing is a good description of coping.  Think about it.   When you are dancing, say, at a holiday party or a wedding, you’re typically not in control of the music selections, the order in which they are played or even the style of music that you’ll be dancing to during any given set of tunes.  It’s like life.  Things keep coming at you that you can’t control.

Dancing is creative exercise, a way to move around the floor, and, most importantly, a way to have fun.  In the late 60s, Sly and the Family Stone (It was Freddie, Rose and Sly Stone; hence the name.) performed a song called “Dance to the Music.”  At the beginning of the song, one of the musicians screams to the audience demanding that they, “Get on up…and dance to the music!”

Well, that’s what we’ve been doing, and that’s what the heck you need to do, too.  Get up and dance to the music.  Turn it into entertainment, enjoy the changes, and see just  how flexible you can be because unless or until the plug is pulled or the battery runs down, change is gonna be with you, and it only stops being fun when you stop trying to dance.

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I’m not exactly sure why; maybe it’s because of my carefully tracked reading habits? Then again, maybe it’s because of the specific types of credit cards that I have, a much more likely scenario. But either way, I have been receiving unsolicited, unpaid for copies of Wired magazine for the last several months.

For those of you who are not familiar with Wired, it’s a magazine dedicated to being just that, wired.  Don’t confuse the new Wired with the old meaning of wired which was often used when referring to an  over-energetic kid, like, “That kid is WIRED.”  Of course, that version of wired has now evolved into “That kid has ADD or ADHD.”  And no, it is also not the old reference to someone who is personally connected.  “You need to meet Tom. He is totally WIRED.”

This WIRED is the computerized wired.

One of the articles that captured my interest this month had a lead story by Bill Wasik that was promoted like this:   “In our houses, cars, and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do.  Now they are beginning to talk to one another.  Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives.”

In view of the fact that my Verizon cell phone records are being data scanned by the government, and my phone can tell anyone where I’m located every second; that my internet typing strokes are being monitored by secret cookies and program language that is hidden in every program; and that my Social Security number is with virtually every vendor in the entire world, it struck me as kind of funny that these intrusions into my privacy by Big Brothers of all kinds could actually be programmed to be helpful.   If anything, I’m been regularly thinking that we should be a little paranoid that they might be programmed to subtly do the exact opposite.

With 7.5 billion people consuming Mother Earth at nearly the speed of light and with 7,000 to 10,000 people turning 65 on a daily basis in the United States, it just struck me as odd that life enhancing peepers, drones, bots and apps would become popular.

Here, however, is a sneak peek into what our connectivity might end up meaning to us.    “Imagine a house with a nervous system, where the sprinklers take orders from the moisture sensors.”    Here’s another quote from the article, “This is the language of the future; tiny, intelligent things all around us, coordinating their activities.  Coffee pots that talk to alarm clocks.  Thermostats that talk to motion sensors . . . we are seeing the dawn of an era when the most mundane items in our lives can talk wirelessly among themselves, performing tasks on command, giving us data we’ve never had before.”  (I think the Japanese already have toilet seats that do all of this?)

The folks that do this SmartThings work are referring to this phenomenon as the Sensor Revolution, “a vast ensemble that can be choreographed.”

The article became more interesting to me when it began looking at the medical applications like GE’s fully monitored beds being tested at Mt Sinai Medical Center in New York City or “a home medical monitoring system that didn’t just feed back data from diabetic patients but adjusted the treatment regimen as the data demanded.”

I’ve attended lectures and workshops on nanotechnology, on DNA analytics, and on numerous other medically oriented predictive devices and future accomplishments.  I’ve seen ears and livers actually being grown in laboratories, but the one thing that made the most sense for me came from MIT almost a dozen years ago.  They were miniaturizing all types of monitoring devices so that old people could remain living independently in their homes while being monitored 24/7.

Hook me up, baby.   I’m here for the duration.

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That title is not the usual saying, but in my case, it is right on the money. When my kids were born, I can honestly say that I loved absolutely every phase of their childhood, adolescence and now, adulthood. Don’t get me wrong, there were some rough patches along the way: tongue stuck to a street sign, hit by a truck, wild parties that were discovered after the fact, flooded bathrooms, but nothing that we didn’t get through in due course. Both kids ended up as fun, warm, loving, adults, great leaders and wonderful parents. They truly are the greatest and most rewarding part of my life.

Ten years ago, however, some things began to change. They had kids, and it was my chance to do it all over again! No one could ever have explained to me how challenging it would be to be a good parent, nor how incredible it would be to be an ornery and loving grandparent. It’s a feeling that is impossible to describe, and my view of it all is that I am literally getting to go around for the second time, but with a lot more gusto, more fun, less pressure, and all the love that I have in me.

The other day my six-year-old granddaughter said, “Poppa, how old will you be when I’m all grown up?” I turned to her and gently said, “Honey, how old am I now?” “If you add twenty or so years to that number, you’ll have a good idea how old I’ll be.” She concentrated heavily on the math, and finally I said, “Lucy, there’s more than a good chance that I’ll be gone by the time you’re all grown up.” She looked at me and with complete sincerity said, “Oh, Poppa that makes me sad.” To which I replied, “Baby, that makes me sad, too, but I’ll always be with you in your heart.”

Leaving at some point is actually part of the gig, and I truly want to leave them with good memories of me because we are all on the same train. We just get off at different stops. In my case with the age gap that existed between my grandparents and me, I feel blessed that I had any time with them at all. You see, my mom was the youngest girl of the eight siblings. My grandparents died when I was 5, 9, 13 and 26, but each one of them is still alive in me on so many levels.

The grandparent who is barely a memory for me was my mom’s dad. Even though I don’t remember him, my relatives tell me that I inherited his musical ability, his generosity, his smarts and his sense of style. (That dude was a sharp dresser!) From my mom’s mom, I acquired my ability to manage money, to appreciate sunsets, and to keep life simple. My dad’s mom was a loving person, but, my oh my, was she a worry wart! (What, me worry?) And finally, my dad’s dad was definitely the most socially liberal, the most fun, the most outrageous and the warmest. You see, with me, it’s like the old spaghetti sauce commercial: “It’s all in there,” and my relationships with all of them were incredibly important.

So, to the five little birds that are beginning to eye up the ground and think about flying, at least to the next branch, just take a minute to ask me. Let me help you avoid some of the mistakes and pitfalls that I’ve experienced. Let me teach you some short cuts and insist on the right long cuts. Let me tell you what is really fun and what is not, what is really important and what is not. Truthfully, I’ve been there, and I’ve done that, and, just like my grandparents before me, I’m only here to help.

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Finally, someone has agreed that it’s not a good thing to have an adult COACH belittle, verbally abuse, and denigrate his players by screaming explicative’s, throwing balls at their heads and faces, and using homophobic slurs to describe their performance.   Thank goodness I have lived long enough for someone to stand up and say that this type of COACHING is not acceptable behavior.  Unfortunately, as a Baby Boomer, I’ve seen this scenario dozens of times in dozens of situations, and the only good thing that has come out of it for me is that I am passionate about anti-bullying.
Mike’s dad, also a basketball stand-out, has the dubious distinction of being the only ANNOUNCER ever thrown out of a game by the NBA.  It seems to me that the acorn didn’t fall far from the tree.  Problem is, in Mike Senior’s life-time, coaches; were given a free ride when it came to this type of abuse.  How many times have I seen even midget football coaches dragging their players around by the face masks, screaming expletives at them and acting like idiots on the sidelines?  Short answer?  Too many.   It was almost as if many of the coaching playbooks had suggestions like this:  Belittle, malign, demean, debase and humiliate your team because that will make them men.
Unfortunately, in certain circumstances,  that was all that the players had ever experienced and then, they became coaches themselves, and not unlike an abused child who knows no other way to impart discipline, they  continued the circle of abuse with their players.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met orchestral conductors, math teachers and bosses who did everything but throw the ball in your face, too, and the result?  Well, sometimes the team won the championship, but decades later when they get together to discuss their abusive coaches they say things like, “Yeah, we won, but he was a jerk.”
I’m not sure what human behavior specialists, or even animal right activists say about these types of leaders, but I’ve seen it in the operating room, in traffic jams, at lines in the airport and even in fancy restaurants.  When frustration levels go up, some folks in charge retaliate by attacking, and when they get caught, they are flabbergasted.  “What did I do wrong?” they say.  (I’m sure that they probably were treated even worse.)
So, where does Mike Rice go now?  He was a Divison 1 coach . . . maybe the university in Florida that named their stadium after the company that owns for-profit prisons, the same company that has been written up numerous times for abusing prisoners, maybe they  will want to hire him?  Just think, if Sadam Hussein hadn’t been taken out, his professional soccer players were tortured and beaten if they lost games.  Mike would probably  have fit in well in Afghanistan, the Middle East or parts of Africa where beheading, limb removal and torture are still the norm.

Oh, wait a minute, didn’t one of Notre Dame’s coaches get reprimanded for abusing players, in “Under The Tarnished Dome,”  this book said that Holtz . . . abused his players at Notre Dame to the point of spitting in one’s face.  And isn’t he now a highly paid sports commentator? Maybe that’s Mike’s  ticket? To once again, follow in his father’s footsteps and become a commentator for the NBA?  Beat up kids and become a talking head.

Seriously, I have no idea what is going to have to happen to get people like this out of the business of education, coaching or youth anything, but it does seem to me that ESPN should continue to broadcast videos like this one and, not unlike when the KKK was exposed by the media , these abusive people would have their moment of fame.
As a teacher, when things didn’t go well, it was because of ME, not them.

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Last night I received an E-mail from Carnegie Mellon University inviting me to the Innovation in Health Care Technology Conference.  When I read the small print, I saw that it was for the next day, April 5th.   I wasn’t sure if I had been invited because I am an alumnus, a healthcare consultant and entrepreneur or because I write a blog, but upon arrival, my admission ID said, “Nick Jacobs – PRESS.” 

After looking at the program which included discussions on:  Healthcare Policy, Bio-pharma, Health Care IT, Entrepreneurship and numerous other intellectual topics, I responded positively to the invitation and left my condo this morning with high hopes of being academically challenged and informed. 

As a graduate student at CMU back in the late eighties and early nineties, my most often asked question to our Dean was “Why is this all so quantitative?”  Kind of like when I began running hospitals and kept asking, “Why do you do things like this?”  It has been a subject that I’ve revisited numerous times, “quantitative vs. qualitative,” and it continues to be a source of severe discomfort for me personally. 

The irony for me is that everything I read about good leaders comes back to the fact that the best of the best have tremendous qualitative skills, skills that are heavily weighted in emotional quotient capabilities, yet we dedicate so much academic time to “the failed promise of technology.”

To my dismay, the speakers talked about things like quantum mechanics, complexity theory, quantum physics and quantum biology.  In fact, the only glimmer of hope that I had was when one of the speakers listed the word music on his opening slide. 

He discussed Schrödinger’s Proposal, the great thought experiment that puts forth a theory that involved a cat in a box.  (From Wikipedia:  a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.  (Get it?) 

Our speaker then showed a cartoon of another cat with a mouse in the box and the mouse was holding a hammer to break into the flask of poison.  Although his point was scientific and dealt with quantum superposition, as a qualitative guy, all that I could think about was the fact that the mouse was gonna be dead either way! 

Our MD/PhD went on to say that Chemo Therapy is always tail chasing where the cancer is not cured, just slowed down only to grow again, sad.  But most importantly, he suggested that, “Personalized medicine won’t work as a business model.” Again, his supposition was that it will continue to cost a billion dollars to create a drug and with personalized medicine, enough people will NOT need that drug to make the venture financially positive.  (So much for doing the right thing for individual people.)

When I asked him about his music slide, hoping to hear about the vibration of proteins in the healing process, he simply said that he likes playing the guitar and often wondered what type of music a DNA strand would make.

Not to make light of extensive cerebral capabilities, it all just made me cheerless as I listened to these very bright people continue to pursue only their quantitative capabilities: IT, Biotech, and Pharma.  They’re still  missing the nuances of Integrative Medicine, unconditional love, and self-worth as potential benefits in our healthcare world.  

“The Failed Promise of Technology.” 

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