sleep eludes

Baby Julius now has our collective cold...he can barely breathe what with all the snot. Thank God he is 24 pounds and allowed to take Advil cold and Tylenol Cold. (You know, the stuff they said didn't work? hahahahahahhaha, maybe they should speak to the entire pediatric ENT team at Sick Kids, all of whom heartily endorse it.)

Seriously, I love how the keep banning drugs off the market these days with little or no evidence of harm. It's like the new favourite thing to do is ban everything. In reality, they should just make sure it works for certain things and stick to them and study the drug properly if they have no studies.

Like pediatric decongestant? It works just fine, thanks. There are no studies on it in children. Only adults. But the FDA and Health Canada decided to go thermonuclear and BAN it. Funny thing is, that it likely does work well in children. They just haven't studied it yet. The companies are going to study it now because they are getting a lot of pissed of parents and a lot of high level guys like the ones at Sick Kids who are angry that children are being put in danger of chronic ear infections, ear drum damage, ear tube insertion surgery and possible deafness as a result of dipshit bureaucrats trying to cover their ass.

Oh and did I mention the monetary incentives? You see the ENTs at Sick Kids are paid flat rate salaries they negotiate and they only see the most serious cases, and are incredibly busy, so they don't want to see any unnecessary surgeries. They have enough to do. But the ear tube surgeries are still done regularly for any child who has had more than three ear infections. By local ENT surgeons. Who get paid per procedure, and depend on them to cover the bills. (ENTs also got screwed when it was discovered that tonsillectomies are rarely medically necessary. Business dropped and so did office profits.)

You see, about 7-8 years ago, a Cochrane study came out about the effectiveness of ear tubes for children with chronic ear infections. It turns out that ear tubes do absolutely no good at all for any normal children. They are effective for children with cranio-facial deformities, (like Downs, or flat heads from lying on their backs) but pretty much no other children. In the case of normal children with constant ear infections, they should get the pneumovax vaccine, and stay on children's decongestant to dry up the fluid in their ears. They should also be fed sitting bolt upright at all times, and never ever go to bed with a bottle of anything, water, milk, or juice. Breastfeeding is different because you can't culture germs in it and it can't come out of a breast unless the baby is actively sucking and swallowing, so therefore it can't pool in the ear tube and drum and brew up an infection.

The Ontario Ministry of Health could do something about this, and stop paying for a multitude of medically unnecessary procedures, (arthroscopic knee surgery, ear tubes, frozen shoulder rotations, preventative appendectomies, cystoscopies with irrigation, etc, etc...) and someday pay for medically necessary ones, like IVF with SET and PGD or miscarriage treatment, or helmets for plagiocephaly.

Health Canada could operate on the basis of medical evidence for drug safety and say---do things to prevent the death of babies and improve maternal infant fetal health.

But if that were to happen, all hell would break loose, the universe would end, and sunshine and rainbows would come bursting out of my ass.

You know, because it would mean the Doctors actually give a flying fuck about saving lives instead of cold hard cash.