Dr. Maller’s Blog

This time of year it’s hard on us Southern Californians to bear the slings and arrows of our friends and family living almost anywhere else, watching not one but two Rose Bowl games played in glorious warm weather while they shiver and sulk, shovel and skid through an unusually harsh winter.

I’m feeling pretty smug about the weather, but not because of where I live. The Climategate scandal was our Christmas present du jour and wasn’t it a beaut?

Just before the Al-Gore crowd was to assemble in Copenhagen it came out that major weather “experts” on both sides of the pond had been systematically excluding data that questioned their so-called “settled science” that the earth was warming alarmingly and that human activity was to blame. Editors had been fired and careers destroyed. The intent of the Denmark conclave, which required 1200 limousines and innumerable private jets to populate, was to transfer billions of dollars in wealth from rich nations (us) to needy nations (the other 190) in the name of controlling CO2 emissions. (Of course India and China are too busy becoming prosperous to be bothered). Didn’t we learn in school that CO2 was what plants breathed in? I guess that went the way of school prayer and dress codes. Anyway, Al Gore won some awards for a movie ironically called “An Inconvenient Truth” that our schoolchildren have to suffer through, and CO2 got a bum rap, especially since everything we enjoy doing (driving, eating, farting, breathing for example) added more CO2 to our atmosphere. And if Mr. Gore’s mansion in Tennessee produced 20 times as much as your house, well HE is saving the planet and you’re not.

Age has its benefits, one of which is remembering when the script was different. Back in the 70s the earth was cooling dangerously. Time’s cover blared “The Coming Ice Age.” Some clown with a PhD predicted that we’d run out of food by the 80s. He’s still around, getting fat fees for lectures and books paid for by the hardy few who survived. The intellectuals instinctively blame all our ills on ourselves - there are just too many people, we’re running out of everything, blah blah blah. Unfortunately the western world seems bent on demographic self-destruction; most countries have barely half the necessary birth rate to maintain themselves.

My interest in so-called global warming started in earnest several years ago when I read “The Skeptical Environmentalist” by Danish statistician and Greenpeace member Bjørn Lomborg, who showed with meticulous research that money spent on reducing carbon emissions would have no measurable effect on climate change and would better be spent on meaningful reforms like sanitation. It is still his mission through the Copenhagen Project to influence the rich countries to spend wisely, and his impact is growing. Since then I have pursued the subject with growing concern because of the clear political poisoning of the debate. Should you choose to do so you can read or watch such works as “Unstoppable Global Warming - Every 15,000 Years”, which show that the earth is always warming or cooling, that industrial activity was nonexistent when the greatest warm periods occurred, that the Little Ice Age did far more damage than could conceivably occur with a degree or two of warming, and all sorts of other good news. An Arctic melting is happening but the polar bears will survive; meanwhile the opening of the Northwest Passage will save the environment enormous amounts of pollution by shortening shipping routes in the summertime. More food can grow; less fuel will be needed to heat homes. Did you know that Greenland was once green? Vikings farmed there for a few hundred years! There are fossils of palm trees in Siberia. Antarctica was almost surely once free of ice. The planet, like our own bodies, has an amazing capacity to regulate itself, When oceans warm, clouds increase and more sunlight is reflected away from earth. Water vapor, not CO2, is the primary greenhouse gas (excluding what emanates from the mouths of politicians).

In my first blog I cautioned not to confuse science, the pursuit of truth, with truth. Too many scientists have swallowed the Kool-aid and allowed their principles to be compromised. The nineteenth-century philsopher G. K. Chesterton famously warned, “When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything. This failure of faith often leads men to overestimate their own power. “Man-made global warming” is such a conceit.

The course I most enjoyed in college was Greek Drama. It was a rare treat to choose an elective, pre-med being the challenge it is. It was also the one class I shared with my wife-to-be.

The word I refer to is hubris, the hero’s fatal flaw, the arrogance, the lustful pride that would be his undoing. Nemesis was the instrument of his destruction. There are some forty surviving Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. A few were funny (e.g. Lysistrata) wherein the wives band together to withhold matrimonial pleasures from their husbands until they stop fighting wars, but [...] Continue Reading…

That’s “wring” with a “w”, not a typo. 2009 was a sloppy mess of a year and I say “good riddance.”

It’s been two years since I started blogging and I’ve been looking back at my off-and-on efforts with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. Forty posts plus some instructional entries aren’t as much as I’d hoped. But my readers tell me to keep at it. Tomorrow is two years since Gucci, then a one-pound fuzzball, appeared unexpectedly at my front door tucked into my wife’s cleavage, which is still her favorite hangout. Now she’s a seven-pound wonder dog whom [...] Continue Reading…

The influenza strain formerly known as swine flu has now been with us for about five months and the first vaccines are arriving, so it’s time for an update.

We are experiencing several unusual events. The last pandemic was in 1968. Influenza rarely occurs during the summer, but this pandemic has continued throughout the hot months. Will it replace the seasonal flu which generally appears about now, or will they occur side by side? We continue to vaccinate high-risk patients with the ordinary flu vaccine but it offers no protection against H1N1. Folks over 60 are immune. Deaths have [...] Continue Reading…

As many of you already know, important changes are occurring in my office these days. The good news is that I’m not retiring. The bad news is that I’m not retiring. Just kidding - really.

Kids & Teens Medical Group Inc. in the person of Dr. Janesri DeSilva is absorbing my practice, which will be one of three locations. I will continue at Suite 102 (that’s Practice 5.0) as I have been since 2004. Her office is at 10550 Sepulveda in Mission Hills, and the other is nearby at 14608 Victory Blvd. This will allow growth and modernization that would [...] Continue Reading…

At the suggestion of a new mom who has sent me a list of some 11 “old wives’ tales”, I shall try to shed some light in these dusty corners.

1. Doubling your toddler’s height at age 2 will give you their adult height.
That’s the rule for boys; for girls it’s eighteen months. I’ve had hundreds of patients grow up to adulthood, and it’s a pretty good estimate. But everything in biology falls on a bell curve. The eventual height can be influenced by early or late puberty; “late-bloomers” may keep growing through their teens. [...] Continue Reading…

You probably missed it but our president gave a pep talk last week to the recalcitrant public on why his health care takeover must happen ASAP. Viewership was notably poor despite the usual tailwind provided by his friends in the government-controlled media.

An example he chose to underscore what he sees as the problem with our current system was a slap in the face to every practicing physician. To paraphrase it, if your child is brought to his pediatrician with a succession or sore throats, the doctor might decide to take out the child’s tonsils because he’d make more [...] Continue Reading…

“What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is on the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the mind of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics.”

So said Edmund Burke in 1790. It is not a new debate. As the most influential philosopher of our American Revolution, his counsel should be heeded.

Our Declaration of Independence assures each of us the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It may seem indisputable that [...] Continue Reading…

When I started blogging a year and a half ago I promised myself I’d steer clear of politics. But politics is coming after me, and you, and everyone who dispenses or consumes that 15% of our economy known as health care. I have enough faith in the common sense of Americans to trust that we can fix what’s dislocated without breaking every bone in our structure as a society.
But the heat is on again from Washington, and the lies and distortions are drowning out more temperate and rational debate. In no particular order, here are ten of the most [...] Continue Reading…

I had a surprise visitor today at my office, one who took me back 35 years. Surprise, because her sister’s children were the patients, because she lives 1500 miles away, and because she lives at all.

It was the first of February 1974. I was at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles making my teaching rounds when I got an emergency call from the hospital next to my office, 15 miles away. A newborn was delivered who was blue and desperately ill. Nowadays a team of neonatal specialists would have been on the spot. In fact the diagnosis likely would have [...] Continue Reading…