Of the thousands upon thousands of pages of policy I’ve been reading for school lately about health care reform, one recurring theme is how primary care is going to save healthcare. With our almighty power of coordinating the care of patients, paying attention to their quality metrics, making them do preventive care, switching them to the cheapest generic meds on their health plans, and viewing the latest fancy high tech interventions with our skeptical scientific eyes, we, the simple heirs to the old GPs, favor the time tested and cost effective evidence based care over the shiny and glamorous expensive new stuff that pays for our colleagues' Italian sports cars but makes little difference in the quantity or quality of our patients' lives. In his account of the Affordable Care Act’s design and passage, one of the key advisors in the Obama administration, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm's brother) writes of the role envisioned for primary care doctors in the Accountable Care Or...
So I am sitting here with a beer, 800 mg of ibuprofen, and a Vicodin -- the preferred cooldown regimen for us marathon athletes. I have successfully completed my peak training week with a 20 mile run today. It's all downhill from here as I taper my runs until the Vancouver Marathon on May 4. Honestly, I believe I should get some kind of extra credit for doing this in Seattle. 6 months ago, I came up with a training schedule (largely lifted here ) and entered it into my calendar and since then I haven't missed a single workout. I have run in rain. I have run in snow. I have run in hail. I have run in the dark. I have run hungover. I have run at 10 pm on a Friday night. I have run and run and run. I spent weeks planning for today's run, testing out clothing, trying different routes, sucking down different kinds of energy gel on different schedules (Clif Shot with 25 mg caffeine taken at 1 hour, 2 hours, 2.5 hours, and 3 hours if you must know). I ate pasta all day yesterday...
I keep telling people it was the most fun I'd had in months. 9500 riders on a 2 day tour to Portland supported by the Cascade Bicycle Club . I'd never done any long rides like this before, but I've always wanted to. There is no better way to see a place than on a bike. And there are no friendlier people than a bicyclists on a tour. Matt , Greg, Fil and I did the ride over 2 days, stopping to camp in Centralia. Fil had done it last year and I when I was driving him back up and was impressed by how much fun everyone seemed to have. This year, I remember thinking about 2 hours into the ride how incredible it was and that there was no question I'd be back next year. It's too bad the photos turned out like crap. My camera died just before the ride and no one else brought one so I just got a couple disposables. $40 for about 40 crappy pictures. Awesome. Parents, please talk to your kids about Chamois Butter before it's too late. Crossing the Columbia River... (Did I m...
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