So, when Gate Keeping, Patient Education, Discharge Planning and Safe, Timely Hand-offs are NOT ENOUGH what do you do to limit re-admissions prior to 30 days after discharge?   What are you doing to improve your patient and employee satisfaction scores?   Are you doing this through lay-offs, cut backs, hiring only independent contractors, short staffing nursing, and fighting transparency, employee empowerment, and the creation of a nurturing environment?

Medicare will engage in real clinical transparency, insisting on the publication of real-time information about infections and other important aspects of quality and safety as one of its conditions for participation.  How will you deal with these issues?

It was NOT THAT LONG AGO when capitated managed care was lashing at the shores of the medical complex in these United States, and the push back, lack of sensitivity to the real issues and a lack of desire to change created a rush to merge and a fear of change.

What is it going to take to enlighten our internal healthcare leadership so as to allow them to see the forest and the TREES?

A few months ago, I presented a picture of what adding Integrative Medicine modalities could and would do for a health system that was slated to be short changed tens of millions of dollars due to mediocre HCHAPS scores.  When the CEO saw the numbers involved in treating about 40,000 patients a year in both inpatient and outpatient settings with gentle, nurturing attention, he sat back, smiled and said,”All of the salaries of all of those employees amount to the cost of about ONE readmission.”

Did you read that?

What differentiates your facilities from every other facility?  Better equipment?  Better doctors?  Better care?  Is the public educated enough to understand the nuances between a 48 slice and a 128 slice CT?  Does the public understand what the alphabet soup of letters represents after your employees names?  Nope, no, they do not not.  What they hope is that you have good equipment and good people, but what they know is HOW THEY ARE BEING TREATED AS HUMAN BEINGS.

Believe me, if your patients still have to “leave their diginty at the door,” to survive in your healthcare facility, there’s a good chance that you will be consumed by another organization in the not too distant future.

What is Integrative Medicine?

Integrative Medicine — the practice of medicine that reaffirms the importance of the relationship between the practitioner and the patient, focuses on the use of all appropriate therapeutic approaches, healthcare professionals and disciplines to achieve optimal health and healing.

Holistic Medicine — medical care that views physical and mental and spiritual aspects of life as closely interconnected and equally important approaches to treatment of the whole person.

Why not?  It is evidence based.  It produces amazing outcomes and helps significantly cut back on re-admissions.   It treats people with dignity.  It reaches areas that traditional medicine may never reach, and it is INEXPENSIVE.  Offer it to your patients and to your employees.  Many of the top facilities IN THE WORLD are offering Integrative Holistic medicine as part of their treatment plans and so should you.

As we approach Thanksgiving this week, I am moved by a series of events that have occurred over the past few days, and wonder when we, as human beings, will ever begin to GET IT.  My description for the inability to get it is often times caused by Hubris.  Don’t get me wrong, one does not run hospitals, research institutes, or work for Fortune 500 companies without experiencing this phenomena, but it typically rears its ugly head when you least expect it, and it can be lethal on so many levels.

Several months ago, I had written a blog regarding this topic, and the subject was similar.  Intelligence, experience, and large amounts of education can lead to failure due to hubris, but so too can ignorance.  One of my former CEO’s used to smile and say, “They don’t know what they don’t know.”   Inevitably, the person to whom he was referring had taken a stand on a topic about which they felt extremely confident, but, in fact, did not have the full story as to what the outcome would or could be.   In fact, his expression represented more or less the fact that they were setting themselves up to fail and fail miserably.

The old adage revolving around history  that reveals itself time and time again  is that, “Unless we pay attention to history, it will  repeat itself.”

This Thanksgiving season, take some time to contemplate those things that are most important to you, and then take a little more time to demonstrate your appreciation for those things . . . and when I say things, I don’t mean material things.  Friendships, loved ones, church, relationships, health . . . As I reflect upon the past decades, it becomes abundently clear that these are the ONLY THINGS that matter.  The rest of it is simply earning a living.

It was always my feeling that Europeans generally seem to work to live and Americans live to work . . .

Let’s take some time this week to live, to embrace those individuals that we love and to help anyone that we can to understand that intelligence, ego, self-confidence and ability are all good things, but that very few of us know everything that there is to know about every topic.   Let’s help those who are open to your experience to realize that we could all benefit from having a support network, a team, a group of friends and co-workers who can complete the Emotional Quotient categories that we do not personally understand or embrace.

So much of the pain that we see in our world comes from hubris . . . and that ego driven, intellectual effeitness can not only lead us into wars, it can pave the way to poverty, hunger, collapse, bankruptcy, and failure on so many levels.

Maybe, for some of us, a piece of humble pie would go a long way this year,but whatever the case, take some time to smell the roses, and realize that YOU did not create those roses and, by the way, will not be able to replicate them from scratch in your laboratory.

Question:   Is the percentage of readmissions to hospitals known and is it published publicly? I have seen some percentages in journals in regards to percentage of readmissions, but no statistical analysis of various states etc

Well, it is definitely known by each hospital. One of the interesting things about the Accountable Care Act is that transparency will become more and more the norm rather than the exception. I believe that, as we all know, COPD, Heart Failure, Cancer et al are the primary reasons for readmissions. Five to seven percent of the population uses most of the Medicare dollars currently being spent. I believe that Kaiser Permanente is one of the only health systems in the U.S. that originally took a very aggressive stand on this issue. They employed a home nursing service to monitor patients after discharge to keep patients out of the hospital. SOMEONE has to watch out for that. We are also working with firms that provide oversight for these patients.

Question: How are hospitals identifying these readmissions?

We call them, “the frequent fliers.” In the past there was no reason to limit those readmissions. All of my insightful clients are working with me to introduce health and wellness activities to their outreach centers and to their community. We KNOW who they are. The other problem is that, without health insurance coverage or a primary physician, and without them taking responsibility for their own health, there is NOTHING that will keep these frequent fliers from coming back as patients. SNF’s are not big risk takers . . . when in doubt, send them to the hospital? It’s a necessary tactic for the SNF’s, but it is also something that SNF’s could partner with hospitals to address much more efficiently.

Question: Are there trends being identified in the source of these readmissions? such as nursing facility, assisted living, diagnosis?

All of the above and NONE of the above. The reason that so many hospitals will merge or sell is that the leadership often times does not know what or how to the current culture or activities and change brings risk.  Some of these are the same hospitals that did not or could not invest in Electronic Medical Records, have not looked for prevention opportunities, and have not addressed problems dealing with infection control adequately. Just a note that nursing homes are also a major source of infections in hospitals, and the hospitals will be penalized for all hospital acquired infections as well.

Question: Are hospitals communicating this information to the skilled nursing facilities in order to minimize those readmissions that are not necessary? Are there measures being put in place to better address the clinical needs in the facility proactively to prevent readmission?

Yes and no . . . if they own them, they may be.  It appears that very small steps are being introduced.

Question: SNF’s are currently not identified in the ACO rule, but do hospitals see them as a part of the continuum of care? SNF’s are a nice transition for those residents who have higher clinical needs that are not yet ready to return home. SNF’s have lower costs than hospitals and clinical staff to manage frail patients.

SNF’s have the same problems as Hospitals, and New Jersey and Florida are already implementing managed care contracts to SNF’s that will further restrict their profitability.  PA is right behind them in this managed care decision.   I recently made a proposal to a SNF listing creative ways to lower their costs, increase their profitability and partner with their local hospital systems. They opted instead to look at further staff cuts and reductions. This is the same path many hospitals are taking.  It is the easiest but not always the best way to reduce costs.  It also can reduce quality, patient and employee satisfaction.  Communications between providers must happen in order for them to survive and thrive.

The truly enlightened organizations are stepping up because they have ACO’s and see that, for example, the $240K they will be spending on personnel for the wellness facility that their employees and patients use is the cost of ONE readmission. It doesn’t take much to figure out that if you can prevent a heart attack, even stents, it’s worth a small investment, but, unfortunately, we have lived off the Medicare entitlement concept so long and been rewarded for treating illness for so long, that addressing wellness will require change. In the book “Change or Die” the statistic is that 90% of us choose DEATH over change.

One of my special areas of qualitative focus is HCHAPS. One health system that I’m aware of will be penalized about $23M because of low HCHAP scores, and THEY HAVE RELATIVELY GOOD SCORES.  Image the hospitals with HCHAP scores lower than the average prison hospital. They need to retool, treat their EMPLOYEES and their PATIENTS with respect and allow them to be treated with dignity.

Question:   Can you identify some ACO’s and is there any data in regards to their success or failure in regards to reduced costs or reimbursement gain from the Shared Savings Program? In the most recent list published ACO’s there are 88 identified.

It is too early to determine the success rates of ACO’s. The goals are very clear for them, however, and they will be rewarded handsomely if they succeed. I’m working primarily in New Jersey and Florida, and there are prime examples of forward looking organization that already have ACO’s. We have helped generate millions to build workout and wellness facilities for  patients and employees. At least one has employed Integrative Medicine employees who are treating thousands of inpatients and countless outpatients a year with acupuncture, massage, reiki, etc., and are creating a womb like environment with hands on counseling for wellness and prevention activities. Plus they are making money in many ways from these investments. I once had a CEO who used to tell our management team that, “If we can’t figure out how to do this, I guarantee that SOMEONE can and WILL figure it out.”   That is the bottom line.

“My team is not dirty.  All the issues were on their side of the field.  This is a football game, not  a Hallmark Moment.”   Quote from Scott Lago – a Pop Warner football coach in Southbridge,  Massachusetts after a game in which five opposing players all 12 or younger, suffered  concussions.  New York Times

My only grandson, a nine year old, announced that he was going to play football last year.  It made me nervous, but the teams that he played seemed pretty reasonable, and everyone appeared to be fostering a spirit of careful football where little kids were being taught and nurtured.   This year, his second year in the league, he blossomed into a high-speed runner and scored four touchdowns in the first game of the season.    Believe me when I tell you that there was no one cheering more loudly on the sidelines than I was that night.

Several weeks ago, however, my experience totally turned around.  Upon reaching the field, people began to tell me that the team that he was playing only played to win.  None of that made a lot of sense to me until I saw our little guy running with the ball to cross the goal line and a human missile, twenty or more pounds heavier  hit him straight on, helmet to helmet with the force of a predator drone.  It was like watching the NFL but without the $75,000 fine attached.

My heart stopped. I saw my grandson’s head snap back, watched him hit the ground and lay motionless.  Because I was standing only about five yards away from this hit, it left me in a state of complete shock.  Was it possible that someone would train a player to tackle eight and nine year olds like this?  Was it possible that the referee who was not near the incident wouldn’t call a penalty?  Most importantly, however, was it possible that my grandson would not get up or would have a concussion that would negatively impact him for the rest of his life?

Yes, it was all possible, and with the adults from the other side of the field screaming as if each play, each player and each hit would get them a huge raise, or make their lives complete, I had seen clearly before me both the best and the worst of the game.  These little kids, with weight differentials ranging from 20 to 30 or more pounds, are just that, little, and this particular game seemed to have become a blood sport for the adults on the opposite team.

Well, thankfully, he did get up, and he doesn’t appear to have a concussion, but, with four touchdowns from the previous game, he probably had a target on his back, and when I went to his next game, it was with my heart in my throat, and a prayer that saner heads would prevail, and these events will become what they were always intended to be, A GAME, and they did.

As a healthcare professional, I’ve seen too many former NFL stars take their own lives and ran the hospital that actually cared for a local football hero not to be aware of the fact that head injuries are a real potential problem at any age.  This issue is obviously very controversial to people like Coach Lago and those rabid fans that live their lives through the wins of those little kids, kids who just wanted to have some fun.

Interestingly, I’ve been told that coaches are having problems fielding teams in places like Seattle, Washington because the parents who work for Microsoft and Amazon are concerned that concussions could end their children’s’ chances for intellectual advancement.

Maybe we should all spend more time protecting the brains of the teams’ leadership . . . because, if they teach little kids to hit like missiles, they can’t be thinking straight.

Over the last twenty five years, I’ve often felt like a stranger in the heatlhcare world.  Each day I coped with rooms filled with individuals who had finely tuned left brains that were bathed at every opportunity in quantitative information.  This was such a phenomena to me that I became a student and then somewhat of an expert on this topic.  What made them tick?  Why did we see the world in such diametrically opposed ways?

Working in that environment often took me to the precipice of despair as my ideas were dismissed as frivolous, my thought patterns seen as radical and too progressive and my career opportunities stomped on by leaders who, for the most part, saw the world in a very similarly left brained manner.

At each  meeting, a history lesson revolving around previously memorialized numbers was the primary topic of discussion.  Most of the time, these numbers simply raised more and more questions, but, regardless, were seen as the most important part of these sessions.  When ideas were presented regarding impacting these numbers that were not quantitative and linear ideas, the rejections could not come fast enough from the lips of the various levels of leadership.  And when qualitative solutions were added that worked, they were still seen as the first thing to be cut in any budget crises.  (What ever happened to mission?)

Well, as with Karma, sooner or later life throws changes at us, and to many of my former peers, these changes have been incomprehensible, overwhelming and completely stiffling.   Why?  Well, for the first time in my adult life, quantitative is equally as important as qualitative in the world of healthcare.  Think of it.  Your patient goes home from the hospital and in the safety of their own house gets a survey from CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) that asks them, (Are you ready for this?) qualitative questions.   If that isn’t bad enough, depending upon how these questions are answered, your budget could be disrupted horribly, and it won’t be a matter of just lowering the quality of toilet paper to make up the difference.

HCHAPS are making hundreds of my former peers ask questions like, “How much are we going to be cut this year due to poor patient responses?”  More importantly, many of them are finally asking, “How can we change our scores?”

Like I said, it’s Karma.

My formula was relatively easy, but it took a balance of right and left brain to implement it.  You see, no matter what you think, life is emotional, and when we base decisions on emotions, entirely new challenges appear?  “Did your nurses treat you nice?”  “Did you get any sleep?”  “Did your doctor explain things appropriately?”  These types of qualitative questions require a different approach to life and to care . . . it’s “Not just the facts!”

In order to be successful in this new healthcare environment, there is a tremendous need for you and your staff to stop and act like human beings on all levels, to reach out to people, to build relationships, to nurture relationships, to mingle, to care, to be transparent, to pay attention to the root causes of numbers that may evolve from something other than algorithms and more numbers.

It’s time to consider balancing right with left brain; to do exercises that challenge your  creative and humanistic deficiencies; to realize that it is not your full time job to simply react analytically.  We are now in an era of qualitative and quantitative like never before, and if you want to thrive and survive, it is not good enough to have HCHAP scores lower than the average prison hospital.

It is time to look at how you treat your employees . . . do they have HOPE?  Do you ever embrace their ideas and dreams?   It is time to embrace the families with transparency, honesty, openness, and, when appropriate, sympathy.   It is time to wake up and pass out the roses.

I’m currently working in the hospital where I was born, on both coasts of Florida and both coasts of New Jersey.  Okay, New Jersey doesn’t have a west coast, but I’m working both sides of that state as well.  Don’t get me wrong,, it’s not the New York City/Philadelphia sides of New Jersey, it’s the Jersey Shore/Mountain sides of Jersey.   Here’s what’s happening:   In Florida, we’re working on establishing a tissue repository that will provide tissue to the Department of Defense project that we helped birth back in 2001.  We’re also looking to establish a research capability on the East Coast that will focus on, among other things, Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms.

Back in PA we’re working on the Breast Cancer Program and behavioral health.  Its been four years since I was a hospital CEO, and, interestingly enough, it seems that many of the changes that we watched in the late 80’s are the topics of conversation again due to the legislation now being implemented in the U.S. Healthcare system.  The major difference between the decades is that the Baby Boomers are “hitting the proverbial wall” and with their furious entry into the health system, they are demanding changes that will help everyone.

You see, qualitative is finally meeting quantitative in a very big way.  HCAHPS are changing the way hospitals do business as Medicare patients fill out their evaluation forms in the safeness and confidientality of their own homes.  Did your doctor communicate appropriately with you?  Did you get any rest? Were you happy with nursing? These are the types of questions that are literally changing the face of health care.

How does this equate with the way hospitals treat you?  Well, their reimbursements are based upon the scores that they receive.  Consequently, as one of my friends often says, “If your HCAHP evaluations are lower than a typical prison hospital, your reimbursement will reflect that as well.”  In other words, if you don’t take exceptional care of your patients, you will get less money from Medicare which eventually means that you will get less money from ALL insurance companies because, as Medicare goes, the business world soon follows.

Let’s recap, no money for wrongful site surgeries, no reimbursements for hospital acquired infections, less money if your evaluations from the patients do not come in with high scores, oh, and finally, quality.  By forcing all hospitals to go to Electronic Medical Records, CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) will have almost instant access to numerous important data points that will become transparent to the public.  Follow this scenario:  You want to know which hospital has the best outcomes in Cancer treatment or Heart Disease, no problem, you’ll find it on the websites.  If you want to know infection rates, that will be available, too.  TRANSPARENCY!

So, everything changes, and it changes pretty dramatically.  If you wonder where the $715B or so that was cut from the Health Insurance Providers and Hospitals is going, this should give you a little insight.   Now, let’s take a look at what a new genetic test called Single Nucleotide Polymorphism will potentially do for medical care.  By testing about 300 genes, not 30,000, these tests will analyze the ability of your individual body to metabolize various medications.  The important news is that is ALL this test will do.  There will be no exposure of your future medical challenges or genetic weaknesses.   That improvement alone will change the way medicine is prescribed and utilized, and it will also cut out millions of dollars in drugs that would otherwise be given unnecessarily or, in some cases, inappropriately.

In New Jersey we are implementing Integrative Medicine in various health systems.  Why is this important?  It’s important because it is not only what individual patients are demanding, it is also a means of treating people that leads to prevention and wellness opportunities.  It’s proven to raise HCAHP scores, and it will lower the overall costs of medicine in the U.S.

Florida  equals discovery.  PA and New Jersey equal implementation.  The new world order is here and it’s starting now.

Barry Estabrook wrote a book called Tomatoland.  It is not necessarily the type of book that I would normally read, but I heard the author on a radio talk show, and he captured my imagination.  Not because of my great love for tomatoes, but because he explained some things about the working conditions of the tomato pickers.

He explained that he was visiting his father in Naples, Florida when hard green missiles began falling off the truck in front of him and bouncing across the road.  He had first assumed that they were green apples, but because his passion is food and his curiosity was aroused, he pulled over, picked up one of these foreign objects and discovered that it was, in fact, a tomato.

Although this fruit/vegetable had fallen out of a truck going the speed limit on a Florida four lane, and although it had bounced across the highway, when he began looking at the fallen tomatoes, he saw no nicks, no dents, no cracks and no significant scratches.  Obviously, they were bred to be transported.

I’m not going to continue writing about the tomato itself or the extremely detailed account of the Florida Tomato Growers except for one particular section that deals with those people who live every day in those tomato fields.  People who are exposed to “Pesticides, so toxic to humans and so bad for the environment that they are banned outright for most crops, are routinely sprayed on virtually every Florida tomato field, and in too many cases, sprayed directly on workers, despite federally mandated periods when fields are supposed to remain empty after chemical applications.   All of this is happening in plain view, but out of sight, only a half-hour’s drive from one of the wealthiest areas in the United States with its estate homes, beachfront condominiums, and gated golf communities.”

Estabrook goes on to describe the horrific birth defects of the children being born from those pregnant female workers who have worked in the fields during the insecticide spraying, and the sheer abuse that these workers suffer from at the hands of the tomato growers.  The most devastating examples of this abuse, however, come in the sections describing the fact that over the past decade and a half, numerous mid-management picker bosses have been arrested and prosecuted for actually holding immigrants as slaves, in chains, within high fenced areas and then buying and selling them to other mid-management picker bosses.

So, let’s recap, we are growing rock hard green tomatoes that can roll off of a truck at 65 mph, not bruise or break, are gassed to turn them red, are submitted to seven or eight times more chemicals than in California and that are picked, in the most extreme cases by SLAVES.  Oh, yeah, and they taste like cardboard . . . or worse.

It simply puts this whole IPad manufacturing issue into perspective when we cry out about working conditions in other countries.  Do we really want to know how old the little girls are who weave our Persian carpets, make our tennis shoes, or sew our suits?  Do we really want to know what it costs to hire someone to pick something by hand in a field?  Do we really care if the million and billionaires who run this country are paying taxes at the same level that we are?  It’s always been very interesting to me as to what we ignore.  In healthcare for example:

What is the infection rate at the hospital where you are going for surgery?

How about the patient or employee satisfaction rate is?

Or the re-admission rate for patients?

Do you know if your doc has a file with the National Physician Data Bank?

Or what his or her success ratio is for the type of surgery you’re having?

Probably not . . . but now, at least you know a little more about those rock hard tomatoes you’re eating in the winter!

Maybe, little by little, we’ll know where to look to protect ourselves and our fellow human beings.

Marvin Hamlisch died last week at the age of 68.  When I first heard the news, it was strangely surreal to me, not because he died, that is, afterall, the ultimate journey for all of us, but because he represented so much of the music that had been and will be part of us forever.  As I mentioned his passing to friends, the reaction was mixed, usually sympathetic, not very nostalgic and, for the most part, clueless.  “Who was Marvin Hamlisch?” “What did he do?”  “Hmmmm, okay, I knew that song,  that’s too bad he died.”  This struck me as a sad testament to at least the focus of my generation’s knowledge of greatness in the arts and it pointed out to me that, I’m still an honest to goodness music geek at heart.

What did Hamlisch do during his lifetime?  Well, for one thing, he won Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, Grammys, Golden Globes and even a Pulitzer Prize for his work.   In fact, he was recognized as the only composer who won all of these awards from every different arena of entertainment.  He created the music from everything from the “Sting,” to “Ice Castles,” “A Chorus Line,” “The Way We Were,” “Sunshine, Lollipops and Roses,” and the themes for “Late Night with David Letterman” and “Good Morning America.”  Oh, and don’t forget “Three Men and a Baby,” “The Informant,” “Sophie’s Choice,”  and literally dozens of others.

His musical, “A Chorus Line” was the first reality musical, a musical that “swept audiences off their feet and created a demand for tickets so huge that the show ran seemingly forever.”  As a musical, it ran longer than anything had ever run on Broadway.   Oh, yeah, and in his spare time, he had been the director of the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Pops Orchestra for the past 17 years.  That’s right, Pittsburgh.  Well, he did direct a few other pops orchestras: Milwaukee, San Diego, Seattle, Dallas, Buffalo, the National Symphony and the Pasadena Symphony and Pops.

“So, who cares,” some of you might ask, and there-in is the problem.  Who cares, indeed?  If you’re over 40, and none of these songs ever moved you in any way, then I’d suggest that you’re probably right to feel detached from the loss of this unbelievable talent, but if, like me, all of his music is tucked somewhere deep in your memories, your spirit, and your heart, then you have to realize that, unlike the untimely demise of a retired athlete, Marvin Hamlisch was a creative genius who never stopped creating, composing and delivering his own rare form of beauty to this planet, and he is gone.

In our efforts to understand and deal with Mother Nature, we have invented, engineered, and manipulated her in ways that often produce unexpected results. There is currently a drought in the Midwest that is devastating small farmers all across the Plains. In fact, the experts are saying that it is the worst drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. The difference this time, however, is that genetically engineered crops are still squeaking through. You see, by altering the gene make-up of our food, companies like Monsanto have been able to engineer corn that can resist insects and continue to thrive on much smaller amounts of water.

The skeptics might be asking, “What happens when you mess with Mother Nature,” and, not unlike my daily diet of unrelated pharmaceuticals, we know that there may be ramifications, but we don’t know exactly what those effects might be. For example, we know for sure that if you take five pills a day for different ailments, there is a 100% chance that they will interact with each other. What we don’t know, because they were made by different manufacturers to address different ailments is what that interaction may be.

Recently, a friend of mine posted a photo of the vascularization of the heart, and it was placed beside another photo of the Amazon River water basin. To the untrained eye, the complex network of the blood vessels of the heart looked exactly like the map of the river’s connecting creeks and streams. In fact, a few years ago I saw a presentation by a radiologist who had read over 1,000,000 mammograms. He was also an amateur botanist, and for every image that he showed depicting a malignancy, he had a corresponding image of flower and plant formations in nature that was almost indiscernible from the cancers, an ironic contrast of the beauty and cruelty of Nature.

A further exploration of this inner connectedness was the recent story on NPR about an Italian wine maker, a microbiologist, Duccio Cavalieri, who had clarified the connecting by which insects ( in this case a wasp) transfer yeast from their guts onto wine grapes. This wasp yeast then shares in the fermenting of the wine. This interconnectedness explains some of the centuries old complexities in taste in the wines from Chianti. In fact, since the Roman era, vineyard owners knew that their wines would be impacted by planting flowers around the vineyards.

The story elaborated on the concerns of Ann Pringle, an Evolutionary Biologist at Harvard, related to the unintended penalties of a smaller amount of species diversity once that diversity is lost. In other words, the yeast from the wasps digestive juices makes the wine taste amazing. If a wasp biting into a grape can change the taste of your wine, what happens when you change Mother Nature’s corn by genetic engineering?

Ironically, one of the things that happens is that the corn stalks on this altered corn become bigger, stronger and tougher than regular corn. In fact, the corn stalks are so strong that, once they are cut down at the end of the growing season, they literally rip into the tractor tires as they drive over them. Consequently, the tractors with eight tires that average about $1000 each are taking a real beating when they drive through these Super Corn fields. This has resulted in tire manufacturers and post- manufacturers hardeng the rubber and, in fact, adding Kevlar to them, the stuff from which they make bullet proof vests.

So, we feed our cows, pigs and chickens genetic corn, kill the wasps by spraying them, and place bullet proof vest materials inside our tires. It seemed so much simpler when all we had to do as kids was to hang out with farmers where we could eat, drink and enjoy Mother Nature’s best any day of the week. Little did we know.