Wednesday 05-02-12

A beating at Church and Brambleton

Wave after wave of young men surged forward to take turns punching and kicking their victim. The victim's friend, a young woman, tried to pull him back into his car. Attackers came after her, pulling her hair, punching her head and causing a bloody scratch to the surface of her eye. She called 911. A recording told her all lines were busy. She called again. Busy. On her third try, she got through and, hysterical, could scream only their location. Church and Brambleton. Church and Brambleton. Church and Brambleton. It happened four blocks from where they work, here at The Virginian-Pilot. Two weeks have passed since reporters Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami - friends to me and many others at the newspaper - were attacked on a Saturday night as they drove home from a show at the Attucks Theatre. They had stopped at a red light, in a crowd of at least 100 young people walking on the sidewalk. Rostami locked her car door. Someone threw a rock at her window. Forster got out to confront the rock-thrower, and that's when the beating began. Neither suffered grave injuries, but both were out of work for a week. Forster's torso ached from blows to his ribs, and he retained a thumb-sized bump on his head. Rostami fears to be alone in her home. Forster wishes he'd stayed in the car. Many stories that begin this way end much worse. Another colleague recently wrote about the final defendant to be sentenced in the beating death of 19-year-old James Robertson in East Ocean View five years ago. In that case, a swarm of gang members attacked Robertson and two friends. Robertson's friends got away and called for help; police arrived to find Robertson's stripped, swollen corpse. Forster and Rostami's story has not, until today, appeared in this paper. The responding officer coded the incident as a simple assault, despite their assertions that at least 30 people had participated in the attack. A reporter making routine checks of police reports would see "simple assault" and, if the names were unfamiliar, would be unlikely to write about it. In this case, editors hesitated to assign a story about their own employees. Would it seem like the paper treated its employees differently from other crime victims? More questions loomed. Forster and Rostami wondered if the officer who answered their call treated all crime victims the same way. When Rostami, who admits she was hysterical, tried to describe what had happened, she says the officer told her to shut up and get in the car. Both said the officer did not record any names of witnesses who stopped to help. Rostami said the officer told them the attackers were "probably juveniles anyway. What are we going to do? Find their parents and tell them?" The officer pointed to public housing in the area and said large groups of teenagers look for trouble on the weekends. "It's what they do," he told Forster. Could that be true? Could violent mobs of teens be so commonplace in Norfolk that police and victims have no recourse? Police spokesman Chris Amos said officers often respond to reports of crowds fighting; sirens are usually enough to disperse the group. On that night, he said, a report of gunfire in a nearby neighborhood prompted the officer to decide getting Forster and Rostami off the street quickly made more sense than remaining at the intersection. The officer gave them his card and told them to call later to file a report. The next day, Forster searched Twitter for mention of the attack. One post chilled him. "I feel for the white man who got beat up at the light," wrote one person. "I don't," wrote another, indicating laughter. "(do it for trayvon martin)" Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen, died after being shot by a community watch captain with white and Hispanic parents, George Zimmerman, in Florida. Forster and Rostami, both white, suffered a beating at the hands of a crowd of black teenagers. Was either case racially motivated? Were Forster and Rostami beaten in some kind of warped, vigilante retribution for a killing 750 miles away, a person none of them knew? Was it just bombast? Is a beating funny, ever? Here's why their story is in the paper today. We cannot allow such callousness to continue unremarked, from the irrational, senseless teenagers who attacked two people just trying to go home, from the police officer whose conduct may have been typical but certainly seems cold, from the tweeting nitwits who think beating a man in Norfolk will change the death of Trayvon Martin. How can we change it if we don't know about it? How can we make it better if we look away? Are we really no better than this?

http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2012/05/beating-church-and-brambleton

FDA may let patients buy drugs without prescriptions

In a move that could help the government trim its burgeoning health care costs, the Food and Drug Administration may soon permit Americans to obtain some drugs used to treat conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes without obtaining a prescription. The FDA says over-the-counter distribution would let patients get drugs for many common conditions without the time and expense of visiting a doctor, but medical providers call the change medically unsound and note that it also may mean that insurance no longer will pay for the drugs. “The problem is medicine is just not that simple,” said Dr. Matthew Mintz, an internist at George Washington University Hospital. “You can’t just follow rules and weigh all the pros and cons. It needs to be individualized.” Under the changes that the agency is considering, patients could diagnose their ailments by answering questions online or at a pharmacy kiosk in order to buy current prescription-only drugs for conditions such as high cholesterol, certain infections, migraine headaches, asthma or allergies. By removing the prescription requirement from popular drugs, the Obama administration could ease financial pressures on the overburdened Medicare system by paying for fewer doctor visits and possibly opening the door to make seniors pay a larger share of the cost of their medications. The change could have mixed results for non-Medicare patients. Although they may not have to visit a doctor as often, they could have to dish out more money for medications because most insurance companies don’t cover over-the-counter drugs. “We would expect that out-of-pocket costs for insured individuals, including those covered by Medicare, would be increased for drugs that are switched from prescription to OTC status,” said Dr. Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, who testified last month on behalf of the American Medical Association in an FDA-held public hearing. Pharmacists and doctors have lined up on opposite sides of the issue. Often trying to combat a public perception that downplays their medical training, pharmacists embrace the notion that they should be able to dole out medication for patients’ chronic conditions without making them go through a doctor. “We think it’s a great development for everybody — for pharmacists, for patients and the whole health care system,” said Brian Gallagher, a lobbyist for the American Pharmacists Association. “The way we look at it is there are a lot of people out there with chronic conditions that are undertreated and this would enable the pharmacists to redirect these undertreated people back into the health care system.” Medical providers urged caution, saying the government should not try to cut health care costs by cutting out doctors. “What the government via the FDA has decided to do is just bypass the expensive doctor and to satisfy some safety concerns of letting people just pick out their medications is make sure they have to get counsel by the pharmacists,” Dr. Mintz said. “I believe there is value to using pharmacists, but not at the expense of primary care.” Although the FDA says more patients will be likely to obtain the drugs they need under the proposed model, Dr. Fryhofer questioned whether the agency has sufficiently proved that. “The FDA has not offered any evidence establishing that it is safe, or patient outcomes are improved, when patients with hypertension, [high cholesterol], asthma or migraine headaches self-diagnose and manage these (or other) serious chronic medical conditions on their own,” she said. Comments on the proposal are due by May 7. FDA spokeswoman Erica Jefferson said the agency will issue a decision sometime after that but didn’t offer a more specific time frame. “The agency is still reviewing the public comments and will make a determination on the best path forward once this has been completed,” she said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/29/fda-may-let-patients-buy-drugs-without-prescriptio/?page=all#pagebreak