Tag Archives: medical

Beating Badwater, the hardest ultramarathon in the world

Today, you get a call from a friend. They need a favor. Would you mind spending your vacation time this summer in Death Valley, a desert where temperatures hover around 130 degrees Would you be OK with sleeping in a van, if you get to sleep at all, for three days, because you’ll be working your tail off spraying runners down with water, dunking them in ice and keeping track of everything that goes in (and — yes — out) of their body every 15 minutes so they don’t die running 135 miles in the hardest footrace on the planet “Yeah, man, it’s Badwater.

Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s ‘Deadly Doctor,’ Strikes Back

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the medical ethicist and oncologist who advises President Obama, does not own a television, and if you catch him in a typically energized moment, when his mind speeds even faster than his mouth, he is likely to blurt out something like, “I hate the Internet.” So it took him several days in late July to discover he had been singled out by opponents of health-care reform as a “deadly doctor,” who, according to an opinion column in the New York Post, wanted to limit medical care for “a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.” “I couldn’t believe this was happening to me,” says Emanuel, who in addition to spending his career opposing euthanasia and working to increase the quality of care for dying patients, is the brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Death in the Recession: More Bodies Left Unburied

Have economic times gotten so bad that some of the dead are going unburied? Several large counties across the country are experiencing unprecedented increases in the number of unclaimed deceased — not only because the dead people could not be identified, were indigent or were estranged from their family, but also apparently because more people simply cannot afford to bury or cremate their loved ones. The phenomenon has increased costs for local governments, which have to dispose of the bodies

Football: Real Madrid say spending over

Xabi Alonso completed his medical at Real Madrid on Wednesday as club director general Jorge Valdano said their close season transfer spending spree was over. Liverpool and Real have agreed a fee believed to be in the region of $50 million for the Spanish international, who has also agreed personal terms with the Madrid giants

Family makes trek to find a job

John Spieker stood on the back porch of his newly rented Bailey, Colorado, home, thankful for his Good Samaritan landlord and worried that his previous home, parked in the driveway, wouldn’t get him to work the next day. His 1977 Toyota Dolphin camper, which Spieker rescued from a salvage yard, had carried him, his wife, Katie, and 4-month-old son, Jacob, from Florida to Colorado earlier this summer, a cross-country sojourn in search of work.