Saturday, April 29, 2006

4-29-06 Blinded By The Light

When George W. Bush focused the might of the American government upon the task of taking the Global War On Terror (GWOT) to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was not without the support of the American people. On that day when the TV news showed pictures of the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down, and the faces of Iraqi's cheering the American troops as they rode through Baghdad, it was difficult for even the most hard core peace advocate to deny the seeming rightness of the gambit.

Today we are seeing the results of our government's incredible lack of true character, allegedly based in the moral high ground that underlay the American people's willingness to support these actions. As the mug shots of administration officials, congressmen and high profile supporters of this administration continue to line up, one after another, we can see the dirty underbelly of this "one party system" that's taken over in Washington. As the billions and billions of dollars appropriated by congress to support the military actions in the middle east continue to magically disappear into corporate black holes; as even the billions appropriated to address the storm disaster in New Orleans somehow evaporated into these same corporate black holes, one has to wipe the glint of the moral high ground out of their eyes, sooner or later, and demand that this bullshit come to a stop.

The dirty underbelly of the Iraq invasion was the modus operandus of big business. The plan was that the American invasion would miraculously result in oil production going up in Iraq, and that this would pay for the reconstruction of that country.

In three simple words, it didn't work.

Now that the American government has clearly demonstrated that it's completely incapable of doing the larger job of building (as opposed to destroying) a country, the simplicity of fourth generation warfare is that the cat is out of the bag. Now too many people realize that it's so much easier to destroy than it is to build. Consequently, we now have individuals and small, relatively disconnected groups running around all over the world effectively shutting down huge and complex systems by destroying small and simple targets. A well placed bomb on a pipeline out in the middle of nowhere, for instance, effectively shuts down the whole pipeline. Since the pipeline's down, trucks might be used to transport the oil instead, but all it takes are a couple more well placed bombs on the highway and it's then difficult or impossible to find anyone to drive the trucks. The whole face of this so-called Global War On Terror has been morphed into something that this administration never bargained for.

They never bargained for the possibility that they would end up being the enemy against which the majority of the world would fight.

Without the dirty underbelly, without the criminality, without the chronic lying, without the piling up of scandal after scandal, perhaps this administration could've maintained the support of not only the American public, but that of some major portion of the rest of the world's governments as well. But the tide has not only turned, it has been washing up on the shore for some time now. It's a tide of recognition that this administration's actions over the past five years have been adding up to one of the worst disasters ever to beset this country. The disaster threatens to crash our economy, destroy our basic freedoms, and basically turn this whole world into a much worse place.

The shining light of freedom that this country has been for so many decades has been severely dimmed by the administration of George W. Bush. I might easily be convinced that he believes what he is doing is the right thing for the American people and for the world. But history has shown, over and over again, that the most evil acts ever perpetrated in this world were done by people who, just like George W. Bush, were convinced that they were doing good.

To quote Robert A. Heinlein...
"Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil."

And if we take a look at both sides in all of this, the neocons and christianists here and the terrorists and islamists around the world, this quote from Blaise Pascal says it all...
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

I think that the majority of the American public would still have remained behind our government's actions so far, if the plan (as originally conceived) had ended up working. If the oil fields in Iraq had been recovered and put into full production, hardly anyone can argue that the current price of oil would have ever reached the ridiculouos heights that we see today. But, as I said in three simple words earlier... it didn't work.

Just yesterday, this article appeared in the Washington Post...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042801082.html

Unfortunately, the judgement of what has been done by this administration has to be upon the actual result, instead of the apparently intended result. The actual result is that the entire basis of our economy, the affordable cost of the energy that everything runs on, has been sabotaged. The American Dream is not based upon philosophy or ideologue, it is based on the opportunity of the common man or woman to be able to get to work. Everything else depends on this foundation of affordable energy.

We can pontificate upon the rightness or wrongness of our government's actions from high moral ideas, with personal beliefs from liberal or conservative angles, and we can choose to be hawks or doves. But if it costs too much to get to work, to heat our homes, to pay for the transport of the goods we buy in grocery stores, then we find our very way of life threatened. It's not threatened from without, it's threatened by our leaders in Washington who have clearly been the sole authors of this current situation.

If this result had not been coincident with the administration's base in the oil industry, perhaps we could dissuade ourselves from blaming them. But the fact is that both Bush Sr and Bush Jr are "oil men", along with Dick Cheney, and many others, even Condoleeza Rice... Oil industry people, all. That the current situation gives the oil industry record profits is too much of a coincidence to ignore.

It reeks of corruption.

If this corruption were the only stink coming out of Washington in this past five years, perhaps even then we could dissuade ourselves from believing that George W. Bush's presidency has effected the worst disaster this country has ever had to suffer.

But this is hardly the case.

The one thing that could really push the price of oil into the upper reaches of insanity would be for our government to attack Iran. When we attacked Iraq, the country with the THIRD highest proven oil reserves, and those reserves were eventually sabotaged, rather than put into production, the benefit to the oil companies was demonstrated, and is still being demonstrated, with the over $70 a barrel price.

If they attack Iran, the country with the SECOND highest proven oil reserves in the world, second only to Saudi Arabia, there will be one definite, predictable result, ie- the price of oil will more than double AGAIN.

This will definitely, predictably give the oil industry even higher profits.

So, we can continue to believe that George W. Bush is "blinded by the light" of his consistently voiced convictions regarding the GWOT, or we can observe the obvious. This man is not working for the good of the American public, the safety of the American public, or the championing of freedom in the world. Behind the well-rehearsed "down home guy" we see on TV resides the character of an oil industry slime-ball, feeding his cronies the river of cash they have been enjoying this past five years.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Monday, April 24, 2006

4-24-06 Ronald McDoctor

The whole idea of being able to make big profits from treating sick people gives me a sense of something being rotten in Denmark. I was brought up in a time when hospitals could still be viewed as beneficent organizations, when the caduceus and the staff of asclepius...

http://drblayney.com/Asclepius.html

...represented a higher purpose behind the practice of medicine. Indeed, the Oath of Hippocrates...

http://www.thedoctorslounge.net/oath.htm

...clearly deals with this higher matter of a doctor's duty versus the lower endeavors of commerce.

Somewhere along the line, however, the practice of medicine has become what it is today, ie- a for profit industry. We use the term "industry" freely now, when referring to the "Healthcare Industry". Before, it was the practice of medicine. Now it's the healthcare industry.

Part of the blame for this change is the activity of the civil judiciary, wherein suing doctors for malpractice, ie- for fun and profit, grew to epidemic proportions. This necessitated the protections afforded by malpractice insurance, the costs of which grew along with the epidemic of shyster lawyers chomping at the bit to sue the doctors. It was a self-feeding mechanism that spiraled into the giddy heights of incredible profits that these bottom feeders (insurers and lawyers) managed to turn it into.

This increased cost of practicing medicine turned otherwise high minded and honest practitioners to ways that could help to foot the bills, and thus we had doctors working not only to help the sick, but also to defend themselves. Defense is better done collectively, and out of this we began seeing doctors' groups, clinics, and medical organizations springing up all over the place. There is more safety in numbers. Consequently, the larger an organization could grow, the safer the individual doctors could be.

Unfortunately, in this era of corporate raiding and "creating wealth" out of absolutely nothing, the existence of a burgeoning array of medical organizations represented a burgeoning array of corporations that were flowing an awful lot of money. This is where the for profit healthcare holding companies started coming into the picture. This also afforded the original investors in these corporations a means of "cashing in".

None of this has any aspect of "evil" to it, in my view. It's simply been a mundane matter of evolution in the world of money-making.

Of course, none of this would have taken place in quite the way it did if it weren't for the chemical companies.

This is the area of endeavor in the practice of medicine that reeks the most. Most of the blame for the change in the activity from "beneficent" to "for profit" falls at their door.

But let me back up just a tad, here. We can't necessarily blame the chemical companies for being what they are. A publicly held corporation is a psychotic "entity". It cannot be run in a manner consistent with any kind of beneficence toward individuals that are not stockholders. If individuals who are not stockholders are harmed in any way, this is dealt with in the cost of doing business. It's very psychotic behavior to exist in a society while doing harm to that society. But we see this behavior in corporations all the time.

See the film, "The Corporation" for a better understanding of what I'm talking about...

http://www.thecorporation.com/

...and, for instance, this article...

http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-4-23/40712.html

Most of the twentieth century has had chemical companies doing all sorts of horrific things. The most glaring example, of course, is the history of I.G. Farben, which formed the financial core of Nazi Germany. One of Farben's (at that time) subsidiaries, Bayer, known for the first aspirin product (Bayer Aspirin), supplied massive quantities of aspirin to Nazi doctors for experimentation on concentration camp detainees. Farben was the main supplier of Zyklon B, a chemical used in the gas chambers. It's interesting to learn what happened to this corporate giant after WWII. If you have a few hours to look into it, start here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben

The post WWII world was filled with hope and the wonders of science that would be creating all the incredible technology that we enjoy today. No-one can really make a cogent argument that any of the corporate activity of those days was aimed at anything "evil" unless you consider "profit" synonymous with "evil". We were all coming into an age of prosperity, hope for the future, and the American Dream after World War II.

The basic psychotic nature of publicly held corporations, however, skewed the goals of the American Dream, and not by any small amount. But in order to understand the horrific nature of their effects on our culture and on our society, one needs to understand what the term "side effect" has to do with "the cost of doing business". These terms are close cousins to "collateral damage".

A recent example of this kind of collateral damage is involved with the recent Vioxx lawsuit(s) situation...

http://www.arthritisdruglawyers.com/vioxx/

What you have in this kind of thing is an oft repeated product life cycle in the chemical industry, especially when you're talking about drugs. The motive for expensive research into new drugs to handle widely acknowledged human ills is, of course, to make a profit. No-one can hold this up to be "evil" in any way, shape, or form unless we're discussing it from a politically based angle. This post has nothing to do with that angle, however.

Corporate decision-making is predicated upon the highest yield for the stockholders, and any decision-making that holds to any efforts to the contrary will result in the loss of the decision-makers' jobs. So, you can't call the inherent basis of the organization "evil", except in the sense that it results in an overall tendency toward psychotic behavior. In other words, resolving the damaging bases of how corporations work is hardly a matter of changing any one particular corporation. The entire basis of legal corporate interaction with the society at large would have to be changed.

Consequently, the decision to pursue research into any particular new drug product is predicated on its prospects for future profits that will not only pay for the research, but flow some decent level of black ink afterwards. It's a no-brainer.

So, let's take a look at the cholesterol-lowering drug market.

Two of the big winners in this arena are Lipitor, and more recently Crestor. The underlying paradigm behind this highly successful market is a simplicity. This basically says that high levels of LDL cholesterol increase the risk for heart and arterial diseases. It all goes back to the Framingham study...

http://www.framingham.com/heart/

...which was modern medicine's big epiphany, and the birth of "healthcare".

What the study didn't do was to establish the paradigm from any further logical progression into the way the human body works, vis-a-vis cholesterol. All it did was to find the "bad thing" that supposedly "caused" the heart and arterial "diseases". The underlying framework for this is germ theory. You have a disease, it's caused by a germ, so you find a way to kill the germ without killing the patient.

On that basis, the new "germ" was LDL cholesterol and so the big research money was put onto chemicals that would get rid of it. It didn't take a long time for the big winner in this research race to finally come running in at the finish line. About a quarter century ago we started getting the drugs that would really lower LDL cholesterol. Of course, there are some "side effects"...

Twenty years down the line, there's a side effect of Lipitor that most doctors have no familiarity with at all...

http://www.spacedoc.net/lipitor_thief_of_memory.html

...but this is just another chapter in the history of chemical companies and their drug products' "product life" cycle. The product is released, approved by the FDA, people take it for years, then some small percentage who have experienced horrific "side effects" finally accumulate enough victims to entice a lawyer or two to take notice, and they suffer through years of litigation before finally getting the really horrific side effect even acknowledged. Sometimes it results in the drug being taken off the market, sometimes not.

The thing one has to understand about this oft repeated scenario, however, isn't that the horrific side effects were ever intended to be experienced in anyone by the manufacturer, or anyone else. It's all about the product life, the cost of doing business, and the maximizing of profit. On that basis, someday there's going to be in the news the final result of this one particular side effect to Lipitor, the end result of all the inevitable litigation, and this will either result in the side effect of cognitive impairment being added to the "official list" of side effects, so that doctors will know to take anyone OFF that drug if it shows up (at the very least, we would hope!), or maybe Lipitor will be taken off the market. Either way, however, the Pfizer corporation's only decision-making process throughout this unfolding scenario will be aimed at defending itself and its billions of dollars in profit that will continue to be made until that final outcome is reached.

Absolutely nothing, however, will be done at Pfizer by anyone to even acknowledge the possiblity that Lipitor does, indeed, cause any kind of cognitive impairment in anyone at all, until the courts tell them that they have no choice but to acknowledge it. Because of the legal basis of corporate existence, anyone within Pfizer who behaved in any other manner would not only lose their job, they would also be challenged by Pfizer in court for responsibility in the loss of any profits that resulted.

In other words, the corporate "entity" is legally required to behave in this psychotic manner. That's the way it works.

Now I know I've really gone on and on here to put all the pieces together in making this point about the chemical companies being to blame for the way the "healthcare industry" has turned out. And I know that a professional journalist would probably have been able to make this much clearer with a lot less rambling around. But I can only try to do my best here...

At any rate, what we've ended up with here in the present healthcare industry is a propensity for somewhat blurred and skewed causes and effects as regards how to be healthy, how to address various ills. To illustrate that point, I'll stay with the cholesterol lowering paradigm.

Here's where to begin...

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=33816

This story goes back about 25 years, less than half as far back as the Framingham study. It's all about more recent information, and a somewhat in-depth look into what this all means needs to be done to understand how it fits into the picture I'm attempting to paint here.

The upshot of the research being done at Cedars-Sinai can be understood in terms of where it will "fit in" to the profit picture for any chemical company that might pursue it. On the one hand, there's Lipitor and Crestor, et al, making billions in annual profits, with no end in sight. The patients, who are the chemical companies' end consumers, will be taking this drug for the rest of their lives. Compare that to the prospect of developing ONE INJECTION of genetic material into the patient. From that ONE INJECTION, the patient is then no longer a "drug customer". Consequently, how much will this ONE INJECTION have to cost in order for the manufacturer to not only recoup their research costs, but to make a profit?

So let's just take Pfizer alone. They have millions of customers spending around $50 a month for the rest of their lives. Will it make business sense for them to lose all those customers to a product that is going to be purchased by these same customers ONLY ONCE?

Of course not. This is why it's been twenty five years since this alternate possibility for the resolving of heart and arterial diseases has not gotten much in the way of research funding. It's not anywhere near as "viable" as the current product offering is. Of course, it only took less than a decade for chemical companies to begin offering products to lower cholesterol, following the general consensus of the medical community building up around the results of the Framingham study for the need of such products.

The entire healthcare industry is, consequently, a catch-22. If the money for research into completely eliminating any unwanted condition was spent, it would be an effort to eliminate its own market. It's the same reason that "Merlite Industries" doesn't exist anymore. This was a company that sold lightbulbs with a lifetime guarantee to never burn out. My Dad sold these light bulbs for a short time. The problem was that nobody believed it. But the product is entirely within our technology to make. It simply isn't viable, since it basically eliminates its own market.

So what you have in the present healthcare industry is a whack-o, ass-backwards, closed loop system of making sick people into "customers". You also have people going into this system for "check-ups" feeling perfectly fine, no complaints, no aches, no pains, and then coming out the other end with a "condition" that needs treatment (usually a prescription) to prevent this condition from getting worse.

I'll be the last one to say that there are any people out there, "customers" of this system, who aren't correctly diagnosed with any condition that doesn't merit the treatment strategy their physicians prescibed for them. I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is that the focus is skewed by the for-profit basis for the whole thing.

This system pumps billions and billions of tons of exotic chemical compounds into the human gene pool every year. The long term effects upon the human population are completely unknown. Anyone who claims that this situation is safe is speaking upon faith, alone.

This is really the only thing that has driven the healthcare industry to its current dizzying heights of profit making, after all. It's the faith in medicine that abounds in our culture. It's the incredibly easy "sales pitch" the doctor can make to the prospective customer, to get them to decide to agree and purchase the products of the chemical companies, and faithfully swallow all those pills every day for the rest of their lives.

What's the sales pitch?

It's the implicit threat of death.

No car salesman ever had it so good.

It won't be long before all the corporate giants will want to jump onto this bandwagon, and hook up to this golden goose. Someday soon we'll see drive-thru McHospitals, with Ronald McDoctor happily waving to the kids as those cash registers go ka-ching!

Saturday, April 22, 2006

4-22-06 Less Meat, More Vegetables - Part 2

After my last rant on this subject, I've had a chance to think about where the doctor's head might be at. Knowing that healthcare professionals tend to have a tremendous capacity for wry humor (my wife is an RN), I figured that what was needed in my "doctor - patient relationship" was some kind of connection with reality. It was abundantly clear to me after two visits (wherein my interaction with the guy added up to merely 5 minutes of actual back and forth communication) that I needed a good sound byte to cut through the social veneer.

I worked on this, on and off, for quite some time. Basically, I came up with nothing. I was, however, well into the headspace needed to come up with something clever to say to him by the time my April 20th appointment took place. As luck would have it, the sound byte materialized and came out of my mouth with no effort at all.

I said, "I've been telling my friends that I made this radical diet change only because my doctor was making death threats..."

Well!

That sure did cut through the social veneer!

This guy is no exception to the aforementioned proclivity for wry humor amongst healthcare professionals. He's a very quick fellow. I have to say that this one very brief moment in our interaction has totally cemented my "doctor - patient relationship" with him.

We can call this the "higher function" in human interaction, I suppose. Call it whatever you want. You know what I'm talking about here. It's no big mystery, and I've talked about it before in this blog. It's that spiritual thing, the psychic connection, the thing you KNOW but never talk about. It happened right there in the doctor's exam room. "BINK!" and suddenly there's a connection.

So, anyway, he paused for a micosecond or two (I told you, this guy is really quick!) and he gave me a "look" and there was that "BINK!" and his whole demeanor took on an instant change. I could call this a sense of recognition on his part. Apparently the shibboleth had been passed. From that point on, the sales pitch for Lipitor or Crestor took on a completely different tone.

Suddenly we're talking about the history of statin drugs, and the basis of his viewpoint on them. I slip in the sound byte regarding the "milano gene," sort of my own sales pitch on the completely different paradigm I'm operating off of in this whole matter of my high cholesterol, and he "gets it" this time (where he hadn't on my previous visit). And all of this rolls along a much different course than it did during my previous two office visits with him. I found myself much more satisfied with our intellectual interaction this time. I felt that he understood what my whole basis was for not wanting to initiate any drug therapy prior to establishing what my baseline body type handling of cholesterol will end up being after eating a healthy diet for at least a year.

He did, however, do his best to establish his basic views on the whole matter by relating his own very recent experience of what it's like to have to tell a patient that they've arrived at a point where they have a condition that's terminal, that there's nothing they're going to be able to to do for the guy. In this case, it was a patient of his with lung cancer. This was his very personal view, and as I said above, from a much different perspective than had been the case between us during the prior two visits. His message was that this was the thing he least wanted to experience with any patient, having to tell anyone that they're going to die.

I saw the sadness in his eyes, the stress this creates in his life, and the simple fact that he sees me as a candidate for this sort of eventuality. An eventuality that he believes he can forestall if I'd just take the damn pills!

It isn't that his viewpoint changed on that matter at all, but that now the interaction was minus the authoritarian element in his demeanor.

We'll find out what the blood test results are, and what my cholesterol levels now are, sometime next week.

Friday, April 14, 2006

3-14-06 Yin - Yang

The political landscape of America has lately been a subliminal matter of too much yang.

George W. Bush has managed to focus his public image and PR into a truly archetypal niche, one that's not all that easy to get a handle on when there are so many specific things that go down bearing the public's attention, scattering it across so many issues... At the bottom of all this, however, has been the capturing the yang flag.

This is hardly a matter of the battle of the sexes, men versus women, but rather the more fundamental masculine and feminine, active and passive elements.

Dubya is the manly man, and he won't back down. He holds that position with a hard stance. He won't budge. He's gonna bring the battle to the enemy. It's truly the most basic thing about him. Hard, dry, active, unyielding, and manly.

This stance makes it a cinch to polarize people into either the yin or yang camp. It's a very polarizing phenomenon. You're either accepting of a leader that's very yang, or not.

Meanwhile, capturing the yang flag leaves the political opposition with no other choice but to carry the yin flag. Soft, wet, yielding, and passive.

It makes the Hillary Clinton alternative purely an archetypal choice. You either want the yin camp, or you don't. And it will be very difficult to imagine "soft, wet, yielding, and passive" leading the country in the "global war on terror". Consequently, Hillary will have to capture the yang flag, in order to win. That will be something to watch...

The last election campaign was waged on those terms. Kerry was the "soft" candidate, the "waffling" candidate, the "complex" candidate. It was very difficult to figure out what he stood for. You didn't have any trouble with Bush, however, because you really had a solid idea of where he stood. He stood hard and firm. There wasn't anything else to it. He was the "hard" candidate, the "simple" candidate.

Now, according to Kinsey anyway, people aren't always all yin or all yang. There are a few gradations in between. See the Kinsey scale at...

http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/ak-hhscale.html

This manner of classifying the yin-ness of a woman or the yang-ness of a man on purely sexual terms is, of course, still considered controversial, but it tends to lend a hand in understanding the nature of what's been happening to the American culture and the political landscape in this country over the past five years. It's even a Bushist tendency to not be tolerant of these gradations. One is either a manly man or a womanly woman in the imaginary universe that Dubya lives in.

Bush's image and PR appeals on a gut level with his elementary swagger, his manly man certainty, his yang-ness. The only yin hint about him is that little head-bobbing thing he does when he's trying to make a point. Even that's the kind of thing you'd expect to see from a manly man who's trying to explain a more difficult concept, ie- it almost verges on being embarrassing to have to get so deeply involved with explaining anything. Simplicity is yang, it's a manly trait. Complexity is yin. So we get that little head-bobbing thing whenever he's compelled to spill over into that more yin quality of explaining a complex idea. He acts a little nervous about it. He puts that nervous little grin on his face. It is, of course, very manly behavior to appear this way when attempting to explain a complex thing. But the longer he has to bob his head and explain anything complex, the higher his voice registers...

He's got it down to a science...

Meanwhile, the country has been polarized quite severely by this. There has been, as a result, a tendency for people to individuate from either the yang-ness of the Bush administration, or the yin-ness of the democratic party's default assignation in this clever little trick. It doesn't matter where you might be on the Kinsey scale, or whether you're a man or a woman. It's the archetypal nature of this underlying scenario that unconsciously persuades people, one way or the other.

No real discourse takes place across this divide.

The way for this ridiculous situation to get unglued from the political landscape is to get the balance between yin and yang back into order. It probably doesn't really matter whether a yin predominance develops or the current yang predominance continues. Either way, it's sadly out of balance within our current government.