If you don’t know the story, its about Horton the elephant who has great hearing and is able to detect a world of people living on a dust speck. He protects them at great personal expense from an authoritative mother Kangaroo with the refrain — “A person’s a person, no matter how small”.

In a sequel, he is tricked by a lazy momma to be bird to sit on hear egg for a whole year until it hatches. The bird shows up at the end to claim the egg just as it is about to hatch, but instead of a bird in the egg, its a baby elephant!

The stories are wonderful, like all of Dr. Seuss’s books. But after reading the books over and over again I wondered, are they anti-choice? Well according to Wikipedia, they are not. Theodore Geisel threatened to sue an anti-choice group to make them stop using his phrase on their stationary, and his widow stated that she “doesn’t like people to hijack Dr. Seuss characters or material to front their own points of view”.

Though evidence points to Dr. Seuss being a left-leaning person, and his wife reportedly supports Planned Parenthood, anti-choicers have co-opted this story for their cause. Anti-abortion groups actually PROTESTED the LA opening of the Horton Hears a Who movie, where children were present.

My opinion is that the story is meant to honor children not fetuses. It makes Matilda feel great to hear the phrase “a person is a person no matter how small” because she is small and often feels powerless. And while Mazie the bird was lazy and didn’t want to care for her egg, it shows how HARD it is to care for an egg. It makes me feel appreciated as a mom to know that Dr. Seuss doesn’t take gestating lightly.

So back off anti-choicers. Horton is too great to be brought into the abortion debate! Leave him alone!

Now that she is older, I am really starting to be concerned. He favorite princess is Sleeping Beauty and she has started to complain daily that she does not have light skin and that she wants long yellow hair. She constantly plays at “being married” and asks me who is her prince.

Perhaps I should just chill out.   But as I put Matilda to bed at night and read her one of the below stories, I cant help but to worry about what the effects hearing these stories over and over again. There are repeating themes of competition between females, not having a mother or friends, stress on the importance of beauty not to mention the violence.

Here are my evaluations of the popular, Disney princess books. The film versions differ greatly from the books. Matilda is scared to watch movies, so we have not gotten to that point yet.

Sleeping Beauty

Every character in this story has a name except her mother!

This is a really scary story for kids. The drawing of the witch is scary and its scary how Aurora get lured up to the highest tower by the witch so she can meet her fate.

This is the most violent of the stories. Just try to explain this to your child –  “when the baby reaches her sixteenth birthday she will prick her finger on a spindle and die”. The book features a page where the prince stabs the dragon/evil fairy in the heart. There is blood.

Beauty and the Beast

There are so many stories in our culture of  beautiful, long suffering women who love men who are violent and have terrible tempers. In the grown up versions of these stories, the woman usually ends up dead so that the male character can feel badly about it.

Stories like Beauty and the Beast teach girls to believe that we can change the beast into a prince through the power of our love! Beauty and the Beast is probably the first story of this theme that girls are exposed to.

Belle like most girls in most stories, has no mother. She also appears to have no friends.

There are good things about Beauty and the Beast however. Belle is a brunette and the smartest girl in her town.  They sell dumbed down versions of the book that show Belle and Beast as just friends. They are like Goofus and Gallant. Belle is polite and clean and Beast is rude and dirty. I try to stick to these books rather than the actual story.

Snow White

The female competition between step-mother and daughter is intense in this one. Snow White’s step mother decided to kill her because she is more beautiful than the aging queen.

Thankfully, Disney books has edited the story. In the original, the evil stepmother instructs the hunter to take Snow White to the forest, cut out her heart and bring it back in a box. In the new books, he merely abandons her in the forest. A strange man comes and kisses her at the end and carries her off.

Matilda used to like this story a lot but I had to stop reading it to her because it gave me nightmares.

Cinderella

More female competition.  Cinderella has mean, ugly stepsisters and a step mother who hates her.

Her big achievement in the story is to have small feet and marry the prince.  Matilda asks me all the time when is she going to get married. And tells me the details of her wedding.

This is probably the one that I read to Matilda the most as there are no witches or violence. I also like the way that Disney worked the mice into the story.

The Little Mermaid

I actually have few problems with this one. Ariel does not wear a crown and in the stories she actually has a fully developed personality. She actually spends some time with Prince Eric before they marry and he seems to be a nice prince. Her underwater friends are great too.

Though Ariel has no mother, she has a complex relationship with her father and defies him.

Ariel’s story is best told in the movie. It doesn’t work well as a 15 page book.

I have tried a couple of things to deal with the princess problem. I attempted at one point to retell the stories my way. But she caught on pretty quickly that I was not telling the story “correctly”.

Disney has of course introduced some diversity to their line of princesses. There is Mulan, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Tiana. However, Matilda has no interest in these princesses.

So tell me. Is your daughter obsessed with princesses and does it concern you?

May 3, 2010
Teaching Physicians the Price of Care
By SUSAN OKIE

When Dr. Ryan Thompson, an internist, was a medical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston a few years ago, he worried that he and his fellow trainees weren’t learning about the cost of medical treatments, the financing of health care and the impact of high medical bills on their patients.

So, with the help of faculty members at Harvard Medical School and another resident, Dr. Thompson organized an elective course for residents on the topic. In one session, “I made up a kind of ‘Price Is Right’ game,” he recalled. “I got the bill of a patient and actually went through it,” asking colleagues to guess the cost of commonly ordered tests, like CT scans. Their answers “were all over the map,” he said. “They had no idea.”

Doctors in training have traditionally been insulated from information about the cost of the tests and treatments they order for patients — in fact, for decades, the subject was virtually taboo when professors and trainees discussed treatment decisions during hospital rounds. During four years of medical school, students learn to order tests and treatments based on their knowledge of diseases and of scientific evidence.

Until recently, most schools included little information on financial factors, like how the insurance system works and how treatment costs affect patients’ behavior. As a result, most physicians enter practice with little sense of how to make the most cost-effective choices for patients, or how their own decisions affect the patient’s — and the nation’s — medical bills.

“Medical schools have done a really terrible job over the years in educating students about the system that they’re going to encounter,” said Dr. Michael Whitcomb, former senior vice president for medical education at the American Association of Medical Colleges, or A.A.M.C., and former editor of the journal Academic Medicine.

But escalating costs and the national debate over the health care overhaul are forcing medical schools and residency programs to grapple with teaching about the financial side of their profession. Accrediting organizations now require such teaching, and students and residents recognize that they need to understand finances as well as blood tests.

“It’s a very odd system where we make purchasing decisions on behalf of patients but we don’t know what anything costs,” said Dr. Neel Shah, a first-year resident in obstetrics-gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “There’s no disincentive to ordering tests — all we have to do is click a button and we’ve ordered it.”

To be accredited, medical schools and hospital residency programs, in which doctors spend three to five years learning a specialty, are supposed to be teaching future doctors about health care costs and cost-effective practices. The A.A.M.C., which does the accreditation of medical schools, made this clear in a 1998 report. And since 2007, residency programs in the United States have been required to teach doctors to “incorporate considerations of cost awareness and risk-benefit analysis” in caring for patients, according to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

A commentary in the April 8 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Molly Cooke, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of the school’s Academy of Medical Educators, said it was “a critical responsibility of medical schools and residency programs” to educate physicians about cost issues.

“Medical schools and residencies, in general, are taking this very seriously,” said Dr. John Prescott, a physician and the medical college association’s chief academic officer.

Nonetheless, the effort has not been universal. According to a recent A.A.M.C. survey, about 60 percent of 102 American and Canadian medical schools include some material on health care costs, although the time they devote to it varies widely.

Dr. Prescott said a separate survey of 155 large teaching hospitals that together sponsor more than two-thirds of accredited residency programs in the United States found that only 41 percent had made sure that all their residencies included material on health care costs.

Dr. Whitcomb, the former A.A.M.C. vice president, said one reason medical schools and residencies have been slow to tackle the subject is that most of their faculty members are academic doctors or researchers who know little about health care economics and don’t feel comfortable teaching it. “Trying to figure out how to do it and who’s going to do it is a real challenge,” he said.

Some medical schools have met the challenge by creating courses for first- or second-year students on health policy or professional responsibility that include information about treatment costs and insurance.

A second-year student at the Yale School of Medicine, Alexandra Ristow, said, “We discussed the fact that we have all this technology now that we can’t necessarily afford to provide to every single patient — and it’s not necessary, either.” She added that, in other classes, cost considerations are part of the discussion of how to treat hypothetical patients.

Professors ask: “What is this test going to tell you? Is it going to change the diagnosis, or change how you manage the patient’s care?” Ms. Ristow said. Concerns about treatment costs, she said, are “just very pervasive.”

But once students begin working on medical teams in hospitals, during their third year of medical school, they must focus on developing clinical skills and learning to care for patients — and, according to students at several schools, the financial aspects of care are seldom discussed.

“We all know that the cost of health care is high, but it’s sort of fuzzy how doctors play into this,” said Chitra Akileswaran, who has completed three years at Harvard Medical School and is enrolled in a joint degree program in medicine and business administration.

At the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, students can get hands-on lessons about the impact of treatment costs on patients by volunteering Saturdays at the East Harlem Health Outreach Program, a student-run free clinic for uninsured residents of a low-income neighborhood nearby.

Medical students evaluate patients, choose which drugs are prescribed, arrange care for patients who need to see a surgeon or other specialist and collaborate with a social worker to help those who need social services or assistance paying for medicine. They also sit on the steering committee and are in charge of researching and updating the clinic’s formulary, a stock of inexpensive, cost-effective drugs that are purchased from the hospital pharmacy.

Dr. Yasmin S. Meah, an assistant professor of medicine at Mount Sinai who directs the program, noted that medical students initially campaigned to establish the clinic, similar to others at several New York medical schools and an estimated 110 nationwide, as a service to the community. Since opening in 2004, it has become an invaluable setting for teaching future doctors to practice cost-effectively. Students come to “understand what is necessary and what is not,” Dr. Meah said. “They’re using the cheapest drugs to get the biggest bang for the buck.”

During residency, trainees’ heavy workloads and the need to care efficiently for very sick people make it hard for them to consider the cost of tests and treatments. “You definitely try to think about it,” said Dr. Ian Warrington, a first-year resident in emergency medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “All of us are aware that a CT scan is significantly more expensive than a chest X-ray, and an M.R.I. is significantly more than a CT scan.”

Emergency-medicine residents memorize guidelines that help them determine when imaging studies are needed after certain kinds of injuries, and professors routinely ask trainees to defend their rationale for ordering certain tests. But sometimes, Dr. Warrington said, residents and the doctors supervising them will end up ordering an expensive test even when the probability of finding a fracture or a hemorrhage is low because they are worried about missing something serious, and about being sued if they do.

“You’re sort of working on not enough time and not always enough information, and you do the best you can,” he said. Cost “should be factored in, but realistically, with the environment that we practice in, you have to be very cautious how you do that.”

This article was produced in collaboration with Kaiser Health News — an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy research organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Circumcision as we understand it today originated when God commanded that Hebrews were the chosen people and that circumcision was to be performed on male babies as part of agreeing to such a covenant. Today, circumcision involves removing the vast majority of the prepuce (foreskin) of the penis, but back then, they removed only the tip of the foreskin, just “taking a little off the top,” so to speak. This procedure was called the “Mosaic” circumcision, and it didn’t require retracting the foreskin from the glans (head) of the penis. (It’s called “Mosaic” because Moses’ wife circumcised her husband in just such a way, ’cause he lived with the Egyptians and they didn’t do circumcision.)

But the Greeks, you see, who revered the male figure and wouldn’t have dreamed of “mutilating” the penis, did a lot of socializing and making public policy in bath houses, naked. Any Jewish man who wanted to assimilate into this scene needed to fit in somehow, and many circumcised men would attach weights to their now-shortened foreskins, to stretch them out to a passable length. The Rabbis got wind of this and it didn’t fly. They decreed that now Jewish baby boys needed to have all the foreskin removed, and the “Rabbinic” circumcision is how we circumcise boys to this day, no matter what their heritage.

We didn’t circumcise Mateo because its not a part of Pablo’s culture, and I am dead against it unless you are Jewish. Read Jocelyn’s full post here. It has the details on how they actually perform circumcision. You might want to avoid reading it if you are squeamish, or prefer to be in denial because your son has had one. However, if you are considering having it done to your son, PLEASE READ IT!

When I crawl the web, I can instantly tell which sites are designed with the end-user in mind.. and which are not. And then there are sites just just don’t seem to have any quality assurance. They seem to be deployed without testing — and clearly, the staff are not using the site and finding/fixing bugs. The worst offenders seem to be some of the most popular sites on the internet? My most hated example? Facebook. I despise Facebook. First, I don’t even understand what it is for. If I am connected to a friend via e-mail, instant messenger, phone, SMS.. then why do I need to send them messages via Facebook? Secondly, If I haven’t communicated with you since we were 12 years old, then are we really “friends”? Sometimes is cool to reconnect with someone from your past, but it creeps me out how people who HATED me in high school now want to friend me on Facebook. Seriously, go away. And last, but not least, who programmed this piece of crap? Half them time I click on something, I get an error message. And the user-designed/programmed apps only make the problem worse. I literally feel like pulling my hair out everytime I try to do something on Facebook. WHY do people like this? Honestly, let me know!

Next on my hitlist — Linked in. I feel transported back to 1999 when I use this site. It seems like I am on a 56k modem again. I understand if they are behind in updating their networks to provide a faster site, but the programing and design doesn’t help. Have these people heard of AJAX? Or checkboxes? It shouldn’t take so many clicks to find and add a contact. In my opinion, Linked in shouldn’t be a time suck like Facebook, MySpace etc. The site could really be streamlined to help busy professionals keep up to date with contacts. Anyway, I am on LinkedIn and am hoping to utilize it more in 2009. So if you are on LinkedIn, please add me. Thank you!