Function to see if a menu item is visible / disabled?

I wanted to disable the album menu item and og menu item, and when I did the subitems that are dynamic came out into the main menu. So I hacked it and am using a function to see if the main menu item is visible in menu. Let me know if this is the way to go and i'll submit a patch for menu.inc as it is working for my purposes.

// Test code
if (!_menu_visible_in_tree('album')) {
  // make subitems MENU_CALLBACK instead of normal items...
}




// Function
function _menu_visible_in_tree($path) {
	return ($GLOBALS['_menu']['items'][$GLOBALS['_menu']['path index'][$path]]['type'] & MENU_VISIBLE_IN_TREE);
}