PD: Day 70 - A little bit of a rant

So I was going to go a rant today about how one again my paper got rejected for publication and how the American medical community is clueless (lest you need proof), how it's ignorance of a basic understanding of population variation has led to heart disease being the number one killer in the US, where it has stood for the last 50 years, and how the medical journals insistence on ignoring basic research on health disparity populations has led to why these populations suffer heart disease earlier and are more often fatal than those of European descent. You would think that if we were actually making progress, heart disease would be waning but the medical communities adherence to it's one cause - one disease (i.e. logical positivism) mantra has led to such fun things as drug-resistant TB, and nosocomial diseases for example. If one had a basic understanding that populations have different histories, evolutionary or otherwise and their current genetic makeup may lead to more informed clinical decisions regarding the fastest growing portions of our populations (Hispanics, American Indians, and The Oldest Old). These journals adherence to common diseases - common genetic mutation are way off base and almost has bad as the idea that over prescription of anti-biotics will cure anything (although anti-biotics have now been subsumed by statins as the physicians drug of choice). The most likely cause of any complex genetic disorder of are accumulation of rare genetic mutations that occur in a combination to result in a similiar outcome (i.e. diabetes, athersclerois, etc.). Of course then I would seem bitter so I'll pass. Although anthropology has never seemed more relevant and it would behoove them to learn this before it is too late (a lesson the military has learned during the Iraq war).

So after that, I went to work on a couple of other things, sent my abstract off, found out that someone had published an article very similiar to the one I had done while I was trying to get published, so I was scooped. Headed home to rolled by a two year old girl, finally going to sleep a little after nine.