Daily Rounds: Reflections On AIDS; Health Jobs Bloom; Exercised Brains; The Doctor Who 'Escaped' Just Punishment

A Decade of Progress on AIDS - NYTimes.com "It was the look in their eyes when the nurses gave them the diagnosis — H.I.V.-positive — then said there was no treatment. I saw no anger in their expression. No protest. If anything, just a sort of acquiescence. The anger came from the nurses, who knew there really was a treatment — just not for poor people in poor countries. They saw the absurdity in the fact that an accident of geography would deny their patients the two little pills a day that could save their lives. This was less than a decade ago. And all of us who witnessed these dedicated African workers issuing death sentence after death sentence still feel fury and shame. AIDS set off an almost existential crisis in the West. It forced us to ask ourselves the big, uncomfortable questions, like whether capitalism, which invented the global village and kept it well stocked with stuff, could also create global solutions. Whether we were interested in charity... or justice." (nytimes.com)

Health care jobs grow . . . in administration – USATODAY.com "It's a paradox, too. Even as cutbacks in Medicaid and other programs gouge hospital budgets, and overall health care demand slackens as penny-pitching patients put off procedures in a bad economy, hospitals are creating jobs: a net gain of 95,000 this year, 13,000 of them in September and 6,600 in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, the health care sector is not only the nation's top job generator, but it's also one of the few major industries producing new jobs at all." (USA Today)

How Exercise Benefits the Brain - NYTimes.com "Notably, the exercised volunteers performed significantly better on the memory test than they had on their first try, while the volunteers who had rested did not improve." (well.blogs.nytimes.com)

Michael Jackson's Doctor Conrad Murray Escaped Just Punishment | Reporting on Health "Had Murray hooked Jackson up to an IV filled with the anesthetic propofol in a public place where people could see what was happening, it would have looked much more like an assassination. Instead, it will go down in history as just another unfortunate collision between medicine and celebrity. From Elvis to Brian Wilson to Michael Jackson, we have come to expect that rich entertainers will pay physicians to do their bidding. And we have decided that much of the blame rests with the entertainers." (reportingonhealth.org)