The 200th Grand Rounds is up at Grunt Doc (hosting his sixth Grand Rounds - congrats!). Lots of good reading in the round up. I enjoyed the post from Highlight Health about how people tend to exaggerate their consumption of fruits and veggies in order to gain approval of others. Not surprising, I suppose, but it means that the already sad quantity of fruits and veggies we supposedly consume is actually an even sadder quantity.

Amanzimtoti has a great post about a pompous American NGO group visiting her clinic in South Africa and acting as if they were royalty and owned the place. Sad, but true. I spent two years in Tanzania as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the late 90s. I saw plenty of wealthy American and European donors who would arrive in Africa, give out money as if they were waving a magic wand, expect to live like kings, and then return home with lots of pretty pictures. Luckily there were also plenty of foreigners in the country who were there to help as much as possible and didn’t expect anything in return.

The Colorado Health Insurance Insider post about ACOG and the AMA and their positions on homebirth was included, along with another post about the same topic from Dr. Tienchin Ho, who also believes that homebirth should remain a legal and supported option for American women.

As usual, InsureBlog has a good addition to the mix - with an article about how health insurance companies are sometimes portrayed as evil-doers, without all the facts being represented.

Rural Doctoring has a great post about transparency. She sums it up perfectly: “The goal of transparency is a greater common understanding of how processes work, so that special interests and self-promotion cannot corrupt the system. Don’t let this ideal deteriorate into a mere buzzword which can be used to perpetuate the decline of the healthcare system.” I couldn’t agree more.