Archive for the ‘ Medical ’ Category
TED - Noel Bairey Merz: The single biggest health threat women face
More women than men now die of heart disease – about four times as many. More research over a longer period has gone into men’s heart disease, and the results have made a difference. Funding is now going into women’s heart disease – but some people say we can’t afford it!
This video is excellent, and shows what is being done about it.
I continue to struggle to understand what is going on – an obsession most people find strange. For them, what is going on is what is going on, simple as that – and trying to make anything more of it is crazy.
I don’t believe them for a minute. Anyone can see they are coming to conclusions about how the world is all the time – and acting on that knowledge. This is what humans do.
Only their actions get crazier all the time. But they are not aware of this, and think they were not crazy at all – but perfectly normal.
And they are right – they are normal for their time, which is crazy. But crazy in a new way, that we have not appreciated or thought about.
Considering this requires us to accept a new idea – negative existence, or negative being.
It is an idea, like all ideas, that lives successfully in our bodies – but it has not yet penetrated into our minds. Because we have developed a strong aversion to anything like philosophizing.
We do not want to know what is going on. All that has been swept under the rug, and will not be exhumed.
This is amazing, because, as I said, humans are thinking creatures. But we seem to be thinking creatures who had decided not to think.
What is going on here? We have been exploring new territory (unconsciously, which is how we do this kind of thing) and come up with a new capability that has obsessed us (we are prone to be obsessed with such things).
But this new capability has not become conscious – and we need to consider why this is so. But first, we need to define what this is – because the act of definition will help us understand it.
I will help by naming it, and calling it Negative Existence. How can this be? Things can either be, or not be; how can they be anything else?
This is true, in the natural world of ordinary things. Either a rock is – or it isn’t. But in the human world, things are different – radically so. People can believe in a great many things that do not really exist. But in their minds, they are real, even more than real.
And many of these things are mysterious indeed. They exist in our minds (and our bodies) without our being aware of them. Unless we really work hard – using a variety of techniques – at being aware of them.
This vital effort we now no longer want to do. Indeed, we will do almost anything else to stay away from it.
To summarize: we work very hard at not being. We work at this as though our lives depended on it – which is precisely the case.
Let me summarize again: our lives depend on our not being. How strange! What can this mean?
It means that we are moving into a new way of being – the direct opposite of our old way of being: negative being.
Things are getting tricky here, and hard for our unsophisticated minds to follow. For exactly this reason, we need to concentrate.
In the human world, negative realities are possible – and not only possible, but attractive. And very dangerous because they are so irresistible.
But before we can use this new understanding, we have to convince ourselves – and really convince ourselves, that it exists. That negative reality exists, and we can see it (and experience it) all around us.
Part of our problem is that we are aware of this in many unconscious ways – and this produces a wide variety of physical and mental symptoms in us. But since we are not aware of this consciously, we cannot deal with them – but instead do all kinds of other things that only makes them worse. Which only makes us more frustrated and irrational.
We have to get at the root of the problem. Which is not too hard to understand once we realize the problem exists. Once we get over that initial barrier.
Negative reality is just as powerful as the positive kind – and once it develops beyond a certain point, it is more powerful. This is why civilizations have risen and fallen forever. Once they have risen and developed all that good stuff, other people cannot resist stealing it.
You may reply that I am only talking about the good and the bad – nothing new. But knowing about the good and the bad has not been enough. We need something new, a new idea – and this is what I am proposing.
We have become used to thinking in terms of the market – where every thing can be traded.
I remember going to a job fair in Silicon Valley – and marveling why no one else was marveling. There were thousands of highly-paid professionals streaming in from their expensive cars in the huge parking lots – each with resumes in their hand to present to the hundreds companies manning the booths on the inside.
They were for sale on the jobs market – just as slaves once were. Their value was determined by the value of their skills – and they could see nothing wrong with that.
I could. I had made the mistake (beginning in High School) of selling myself on the market, and I had ended up with nothing. Exactly what the Old Testament prophets had warned us of.
In my old age, like many, I suffered from a variety of weird ailments. But I made the right decision: to just get out and live in a low-pressure environment. Actually, I didn’t make this decision, I was not in shape to decide much of anything. But more or less by accident I ended up in a good place, and was able to adapt to it.
This adaption is not something most can do. It means making a life for yourself, something you had not been able to do in all of your previous life.
But if you cannot have your own life, you might as well be dead. You will be even worse than dead, in fact. You will be in great pain – but not consciously aware of it. And your body (and your mind) will suffer because of it.
This will be the subject of another posting – unconscious pain. Look for it soon.
Wired - Open Source Tackles Healthcare In Places Microsoft Can’t
On the surface of it, this sounds like a great idea – but when you dig deeper, you quickly find it is not as advertised. What I wanted to know was how data entry into it was performed. According to the article, no computer would be used. And I went to its demo software to discover how that was done.
What did it find? Computer software, pure and simple. I am sure it is as simple and easily modifiable as it claims. But it is still software that requires a computer to run on. This is another case of smoke and mirrors – where those most deceived are those operating the smoke and mirrors. A very old story.
Africa remains a disaster, for all that.
I am reading Crazy Like Us, and finding it highly edifying. I married into a bi-lingual family and noticed how this mix of cultures had effected them. Whenever they were discussing an emotional subject they switched to Spanish automatically, because it is so much better at expressing emotions. When they were discussing business matters (impersonal things), English was better.
From page 160:
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The different ways that cultures communicate expectations for behavior are often quite subtle. Seemingly small differences, such as the disease’s name, can make a difference. Jenkins noticed, for instance, that Mexican-American families in Southern California… tended to use the terms nervios to describe the illness of a relative with Schizophrenia.
This at first seemed an inappropriate word; nervios is a folk term often used as a generic way to describe any one of whole range of symptoms, including headaches, dizziness, sleeping disorders, aggressive or grumpy behavior as well as feelings of anxiety, insecurity, or fear…Nervios is a catchall diagnosis for feelings of disquiet or distress. The use of the term appeared to be a kind of culturally inspired, willful blindness for these family members. Calling schizophrenia nervios was the equivalent of telling someone with cancer that he is just just feeling under the weather.
On closer examination, however, though Jenkins saw that the use of the word was part of the strategy by which the family jointly downplayed the gravity of the illness. Nervios carried little of the dire connotations an Anglo-American would associate with schizophrenia…
The hopeful naming also fostered feelings of empathy. Many of the Mexican-American families in one of Jenkin’s studies told her that they too suffered from nervios, in a milder form, and so could emphasize with the relative’s distress…The label and its connotations allowed family members to keep the relative within the fold.
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From my experience with Beth’s schizophrenia. She told me the first part of her psychotic episode was was not so bad (she wandered into an affluent dinner-party and refused to leave, so they called the police). But when she was locked up on the country mental ward, things got much worse. Later, after that fateful weekend, I visited her there, and was shocked by the woman in charge of the place. She scared me, and I was relatively sane. Everyone else overlooked this, to my amazement. The patients were considered insane, although I could see many of them had already partially recovered from their initial medication, which had calmed them down.
I can only imagine what went on some of the older mental asylums, where doctors who could not get a divorce from their wives had them declared insane and locked up for life.
In the States, we have gone to the opposite extreme, and removed the mental health safety net that once existed for those that needed help. They have now joined the homeless wandering the streets all over California.
I am listening to Mockingbird, and I am finding it tough going – after all, understanding a person as different as this is not easy work, and few even bother to try – and just shove off the job to special schools or special teachers. Even here in Orosi I know a severely handicapped child, and a teacher who specializes in them – and Orosi is only a tiny place.
What is eerie about this book is how often Caitlin’s behavior is similar to mine. I keep being reminded how different we all are – as well as how similar we all are. Too often we only concentrate on the similarities.
The Market is one of the basic institutions of human society. I lived in a Mayan village for awhile and got to appreciate that. Even today, I do some shopping at the Mercado (the local market) and eat there once a week when I go to the nearest large town – but also do much of my American shopping at the Walmart there.
Today I went to the public health service pharmacy to get my medicines for next month. They buy them in bulk and use a lot of generics, so their prices are low. My health insurance down here is $45 a month. Costa Rica subsidizes the training of its doctors, and they in turn are obligated to spend half of the their time working for the public health service.
I can see with my own eyes that people are often content to provide medical services for no other reason then they like to help others. As with any social institution, everything depends on attitudes and expectations.
I can illustrate this from my experiences yesterday. I was riding my bicycle back on my usual scenic ride, when the chain broke. I wasn’t far from a friend of mine, so I pushed it into his place and he called a taxi for me. The taxi showed up, none too quickly, and proceeded to charge me $12 to take me back to Orosi. I realize this doesn’t sound like much to you up there, but down here it is practically robbery. I have to pinch every penny, as nearly everyone does here, but that got my day off to a bad start.
When something similar happened when I was riding with my friend Isabella, she just flagged down a local farm truck and got it to take both of us back to down. There are times when I wish I had a sensible relationship with a sensible local woman – like I had with Marielos in San Jose. But I see I my mind is wandering.
The rest of the day was entirely different. I took my bicycle to the shop where they fixed the chain for free. It was no big deal, he said and I was a good customer. I had some buttons that needed sewing on one of the fancy shirts I bought on my last trip to the States. My local sewing lady did them for free, and would have been offended if I had insisted on paying her. Having a Gringo customer like me gives her shop more class.
Like I said, everything everything depends on attitudes and expectations. If people expect to make money off you they will behave one way – if they are only being human, they behave another way.
In practical terms, this means medical costs in American can never be controlled – because the system is not designed to make this possible. There are non-profit medical institutions there – hospices, for example, and they do not have pricing problems, because they are not set up that way.
America needs a completely new medical system. But America needs more than that – it needs a brain transplant.
This comparison has struck many people – it is too obvious to be overlooked. Both consist of growth gone out of control. This is easy to see.
But both also consist of the sudden appearance of something not caused by previous events. This is harder to grasp – but cancer provides the perfect example. I have listened to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which is excellent, I wish everyone could hear it or read it. At first, it was assumed that cancer could be cured by detecting it soon enough – and eliminating it then. It soon became apparent that every cancer is an unique event that starts by itself, for its own reasons. These reasons are so many and so patient-dependent that a catalog of them would be so big as to be useless.
To put this another way: every cancer is different – a situation that medicine could not accept at first – because it was based in 17th Century Science. It wanted specific diagnoses and specific cures – but more and more these became impossible. Many diseases now have no known origin or cure – they just seem to come (and sometimes go) of their own accord.
What is the parallel between this and contemporary life? Like every analogy, it has it limits – but also its usefulness. Life in America since about 1820 has developed its own strange character – and is self-destructive. This much can be seen easily by an impartial observer. But it can be easily overlooked or denied by its victims – who are nearly everybody.
This is a powerful analogy – or to use a more appropriate term: a metaphor.
Mankind has experienced many epidemics, such as the Black Death. They had the advantage of being obvious: we could not possibly overlook millions of dead bodies.
The Dying I have in mind was something everyone overlooked because it was so gradual, subtle, and internal: it happened in the unconscious, which was discovered as this was happening – from about the late 19th Century to the late 20 Century. It effected nearly everyone; and was a mass dying far greater than anything that had ever happened before.
As a result: people, or what was left of them, took great care not to be seen – and not to see anything either. They were scared to be seen alive – which meant having some awareness of what was going on. If they were caught alive, they were destroyed.
There are all kinds of theories about how this happened and what happened. But for me, it all boils down to a matter of will-power: the determination of an individual to be its own unique self.
This is the kind of subject you cannot think about (although many philosophers have tried), but something you can feel easily. Or as McGilchrist has pointed out, this is the purview of the Right Hemisphere – the Master part of the brain, that was usurped by the Left Hemisphere (the Emissary). The end result has been our technological, totalitarian culture – where everyone is the same.
Or, to put it another way, it is like a illness that has destroyed our ability to be - leaving people only interested in money, or equally strange obsessions (such as religion).
I am reading Oliver Sacks Awakenings, about how he used the drug L-DOPA on people suffering from Sleeping-Sickness and Parkinson’s disease. These people had a similar problem: they no longer existed as normal people, but only as disembodied ghosts.
In their case, the symptoms were obvious. The disease affecting all of us has been diagnosed by nearly everyone – to no avail. The most common strategy is to simply ignore it, and declare it does not exist – exactly what it wants.
How do you know I am not just another crazy seeing things? Look for yourself, and see if you cannot detect fear everywhere.
As I recall, back in the Fifties Psychology was divided into Normal Psychology and Abnormal Psychology – indicating that there was a clear demarcation between the two. We are no longer so naive – much of what passes for normal behavior is abnormal behavior, cleverly disguised.
I am now listening to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks. This guy combines medical skills with literary skills – much to the annoyance of his medical colleagues, who resent his popularity.
Listening to this book has been an education, it has made me appreciate how important these mental defectives are. We can learn a lot from them – how to make the best of whatever mental gifts we have, for example.
The title refers to our ability to remember things that did not happen – and to not be able to remember things that did happen. Both are all too common, as any reflective person knows.
I used to be a technical writer in Silicon Valley in California. Now I live on my Social Security in a beautiful valley in Costa Rica.
