Seattle, one month on

Ok, I haven't been keeping up the blog, so here's a post to try to get back into the habit. Here's a little bit about what's been going on lately: I moved to Seattle (pics from the trip and my new place here). The lab is up and running, doing experiments and getting ready to go to ASV next week. Trying to get into the Seattle spirit by growing a vegetable garden, recycling, reusing (RE Store, free stuff, chemicals), riding bike to work, getting involved in community (Quest church and running club), taking part in water sports- sailing and building a kayak (more to come on this subject). The weather is beautiful. There's daylight from 4:30am to 9:30pm (not looking forward to the converse of this in wintertime). Roomates are cool people- they write code for Adobe, build buildings, respond to emergencies, take care of sick people, teach English abroad, and other generally productive things like that.

Since this blog is supposed to be occasionally about science and medicine, check out this article on a new model for primary care. It seems like a good idea if it works out. It makes sense to me from a sustainability standpoint to cut the for-profit insurance middleman out of the picture for primary care. People will still need insurance for emergency and specialty care, but we could save a ton of money on specialty care if people had good acess to primary care so we could catch and manage disease processes in the early stages, spend more time on patient education and primary prevention. If you have a chance, read the Healthy Dallas task force report. Here is one amazing conclusion from the report concerning the potential impact of primary prevention:

"Fifty percent of health outcomes are a result of poor health conditions caused by habits and behaviors, such as poor nutrition, lack of physical activity, tobacco use and alcohol abuse. Specifically, it is estimated that these four behaviors drive over 40% of deaths in the United States."