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Parasite [par-uh-sahyt]: noun
1. an organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment.
2. a person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others.
3. (in ancient Greece) a person who received free meals in return for amusing or impudent conversation, flattering remarks, etc.
From Dictionary.com

I was sitting patiently in my doctor's office the other day reading the latest edition of Scientific American. I wasn't paying particular attention to the people around me, but there was a subset that really stuck out. A lady with perfectly coiffed hair, makeup expertly done, and a stylish briefcase was sitting behind me typing away furiously on a tiny laptop. She had one of those little pieces of rolling luggage that you see people carry in airports. She actually looked like she belonged in La Guardia airport, flying to some important meeting somewhere. She definitely stuck out in a room full of elderly and everyday people. I didn't think too much of it until another stylishly dressed man carrying a dark briefcase walked up and sat down across from her. Their brief conversation was illuminating.

Woman: Who do you work for?
Man: Oh, I'm not a rep. I'm a lawyer. I'm here to take Dr. X's deposition.
Woman: Oh, I'm sorry. I see another darkly dressed person and I assume they are a drug rep. This place is crawling with them (laughs).
Man: (laughing) yeah.

Another stylishly dressed, well-coiffed, suitcase-toting drug rep took this opportunity to come around the corner and talked to the receptionist. I counted no less than three drug reps and one lawyer come through the room in my 20 minute stay in the waiting room. The place was truly crawling with them. The word "crawling" reverberated in my head as I sat there thinking about all the other things that were crawling through people's bodies in that building. Was some bacteria invading someones sinus cavity? Was cancer slowly metastasizing through someones lungs? Was some virus floating through her bloodstream to latch onto and plunder more cells. The term seemed strangely appropriate.

I am a student of public policy, but I won't even claim to have a good grasp of where all our health spending is going. I can only give anecdotal accounts of what I think is causing the rapid increase in medical spending. I know, anecdotally from my many interactions with doctors, that they are not getting paid more now than 10 or 15 years ago. Doctors make about the same amount of money as they have for the last thirty years or maybe even a little less if you are a pediatrician or family practice doctor. Nurses, Tech, Paramedics, and other professionals are also not getting paid substantially more than thirty years ago. So where is all this increased spending going? Obviously, part of the answer is the explosion of new medical technology. We have radical new lab tests for diseases and imaging technology is so futuristic as to be almost unbelievable. All this costs money, and that creates the potential to make lots of money, and that has attracted the parasites.

The parasites are the people who are looking to turn a profit from someone's illness without ever being directly involved in the care of that person. They are the people who suck money from the system without contributing something to that system. The people who take advantage of the vagaries and loopholes in the system to make money. A few of these people include the middlemen involved in insurance billing, malpractice lawyers, and drug reps. There are many more types of these characters out there but mostly they are the businessmen that surround medicine.

I have resigned myself to the fact that medicine is a business. Americans are going to spend an estimated 4.1 trillion dollars on healthcare by 2016, and I fear that most of that money is not going to wind up in the hands of the care providers. Most of that money is going to end up in the pockets of insurance companies, Wall Street investors, and CEO's of drug companies and medical device companies. Think about that the next time you see a drug rep come through your office or when you complain about the increased cost of your insurance premiums. Cause and Effect.

How Stars Are Born - video powered by Metacafe

This is an extremely complicated computer simulation of billions of years of star formation. You can see the cloud coalesce as gas particles collide into others, their gravity intensifies, and they attract more gas particles. A star is formed when the gravity of the objects reaches a sufficient mass and the stars are swung out into space in a whirl of light and gas.

I first saw this simulation while I was an undergrad in a class called "Extraterrestrial Life." The professor was trying to impress on us how our solar system came into being. The image has always haunted me. It's how God would view the formation of our solar system. It might also be how God views and shapes the birth of everything.

Human life is a lot like this starfield simulation. We start out as a formless, shapeless, idea that coalesces into a small point of light when we are born. We spend a small amount of time orbiting around our loved ones and then we are flung out into space, always near them and still influenced by their gravity, but moving in our own direction at our own speed. As we fly through space, we are influenced and influence everything around us. Everybody has gravity. Some people (just like some stars) have more gravity and end up with many other stars orbiting around them. Some people are captured by the gravity of only one other person and they end up orbiting each other. Some people fly through space until they encounter someone else and the other person's gravity changes their course forever.

This theory partly explains why I want to be a doctor. Doctors have a lot of gravity, and they change the courses of people's lives dramatically when they meet them. A person can be flying along, and when they meet a doctor can have a subtle course shift or go into orbit and do a complete turnaround. Doctors are given the unique gift of being witness to the birth of something amazing every time someone is born, and are also present when that amazing point of light dies. In the cosmic web of life, they are the watchers, the witnesses and the guardians.

Center stage. Naïve B cells (blue) and B cells specific to an antigen (green) can be seen flowing into and out of the germinal center of a living mouse. Their ability to enter and leave the structure suggests to researchers that germinal centers are open, dynamic systems.

More visualizations of B-cells doing their thing. I love biology. From Newswire

So last night I came home and was all ready to start being productive (which I don't do at work). But then I discovered Pandora. My roomate has told me about it as a way to have music to work to. So I surfed to the page and entered my favorite salsa band and low-and-behold, I loved almost every song they played. In fact, I liked them so much that I clicked on the I-tunes link to see if I could buy them. But I didn't have I-tunes, so I downloaded that.

Now I'm in trouble

I'm kind of a news radio junkie. I love NPR and so it was with mounting glee that I found out about all the free podcasts available on I-tunes. I spent the rest of my night downloading podcasts and songs and other assorted things that I enjoy...all with Pandora playing sadistically in the background. Now I'm hopelessly addicted. Curse you Pandora, curse you I-tunes, curse you internet.