I think I am going to go through withdrawals now that the only show I watched regularly on tv, "The 4400", has ended for the season. Thank god it's been renewed for a fourth season. The writing is brilliant plot wise because it's all twisty and turny and how they end things really make sense. I might not like them but the payoff makes sense to me. To have to be thinking that far ahead all the time seems unimaginable.

I wonder if JK Rowling did the same thing with the Harry Potter series, where she had to think that far ahead to have things pay off. In the first screenplay I wrote, reviewers said I paid things off well and answered questions that they had in the screenplay. I didn't do it deliberately though, it just kind of happened that way. But a 110 page screen play is easy compared to a seven-book series for three seasons of a 13-episode show.

Conferences are so disorienting. My health care conference was at the Omni Hotel on Montgomery and Calfornia and was only for 1.5 days, and I didn't think it would be a big deal to attend. But it really was. You're in an enclosed environment for that time period, so you're participating in your normal world which means coming back is like so weird. I didn't travel to the conference, I took the train to work like I normally do, but it does feel like I've been away for a couple of days. It's a very, very strange feeling.

I do like conferences though because they do feed you very well. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner at The Waterfront Restaurant on the first day, and then breakfast and lunch at the half day. The food at the Omni Hotel was very good and I was surprised how good the food was at the Waterfront. There was also a constant stream of snacks and drinks, and the hotel even had a basket of Power bars, Luna Bars, and Cliff Bars for snacks and Numi teas. Talk about a swanky hotel. They were were real cloth towels to dry your hands in the bathroom along with nice smelling soap and lotion. And they must have drained a whole quarry of marble because it was everywhere in the hotel.

I was just at a 1.5 day conference with a bunch of healthcare folks from around the country, and it was such a strange experience for me. I work in health care, and it's really a job and not a career for me, so it's really a bit uncomfortable for me to be in a healthcare conference when I don't necessarily believe in the efficacy of western medicine.

I am a big believer in alternative health care treatment because I don't think western medicine has all the answers to keep me healthy. Western medicine is great when you break a leg or when you have a chronic condition like diabetes, but western medicine seems to be completely clueless about how to keep a person healthy.

The cash incentive in the U.S. health system is to treat really sick people, with more than one disease. That's where the cash is. The pharmaceutical industry has their share in U.S. health care as well, because if it was up to pharma, every single person in the U.S. would be on one or more pills. Doctors don't make money on people who are healthy and not on drugs.

CMS is trying to change the medical cash incentive somewhat by paying more for preventive care, but we're talking a huge behavioural change in the way doctors do business. No doctor likes to see their patients get sick, but they don't have a lot of monetary incentive to keep their patients healthy either. And frankly, I don't think a western medical doctor would know what to tell their patients anyway about how not to get sick other than the usual crap of exercise more and eat healthy. I mean, lots of people do that, exercise and eat fairly healthy and they still end up getting diseases.

So if western medicine doesn't quite know why the body breaks down and gets sick, how can a person place faith in their dcotor for keeping them healthy? I mean, you can't. That's why I am open to alternative health treatments. It's not that everything western medicine tells you is wrong, they just don't have all the answers. After all, if western medicine had all the answers we'd all be disease free wouldn't we?

The work person I went to the health care conference with told me "well, you didn't drink the Kool-aid of western medicine and besides you're from California and it's hip to be into alternative medicine". I don't even consider myself being hip about my health, but instead just prudent and practical about my health.

But it is weird to be with people who have "drunk the Kool-aid of western medicine". And the assumptions of most companies is that the majority of the American population will at some point as they age be on a ton of medications and have any number of chronic diseases that need to be constantly managed. It's a bleak picture of the health of our country, but I have to admit myself, they might be right and that it's a future that most Americans will be realizing very soon.

U.S. News and World Report just released their college rankings for 2007 and my old alumni, Grinnell College, came in 10th for Best Value in a Liberals Arts College and 14th in Top Liberals Art College.