Dr. Lane’ Thoughts LXVII
1) David French for The Atlantic wrote about Trump’s NFT scam: Indeed, this is hardly Trump’s first con. Yesterday, HuffPost reported that Trump spent only a small fraction of the money he’d raised, ostensibly, to aid GOP Senate candidates. The rest, he hoarded for his own presidential campaign.
The most spectacular and dangerous of Trump’s cons was his “Stop the Steal” effort after the 2020 election. In addition to conning tens of millions of Republicans into believing a free and fair election was broken and corrupt, he raised $250 million to support an “Election Defense Fund” that the January 6 select committee says did not exist.
2) To quote a good person (songwriter and performer Sandy McKnight): “(t)he freedom not to judge how others live their lives is something we fought for in WW2. 80 years later, some people want to give that freedom away (ironically, in the name of ‘freedom’).” He was writing about the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show but he might as well be talking about our lives today. He likens the appearance of the Beatles to the changes that the younger generation of the 60s were saying about the older generation (their parents).
To show you what Sandy was getting at as to why the Beatles appearing on this variety show was so important, he notes earlier: “This unbridled joy was simply inappropriate in their view. Some changed their minds over time. Some tried to fight it.
Soon, maybe coincidentally, other new freedom movements gathered steam. The Women’s movement was being discussed on talk shows. The Civil Rights Act was passed that year. Gay men started to reject their lives in the closet. This revolution, usually associated with the late 60s, was kicked off that winter’s night.”
Sandy is right. This band on this show changed the world as we know it to bring us to the world of today.
3) I interact with people daily and I get a lot of response about vaccines and other topics of medicine and science. The people who agree with me do not say much to me but I hear about how much people think that the COVID-19 vaccine and the disease itself are ‘hoaxes’ and ‘money grabs’ and other disparaging comments.
The whole ‘money grab’ is just weird because in the USA no one paid for the vaccines and it was offered everywhere. Who was grabbing what money?
Rather than go into the issues one by one I had to wonder as to where this disbelief comes from about medicine and science. I am not talking about the SOURCE of this misinformation [probably Facebook, Twitter, Right-wing media sources, and FOXNEWS] but why was it believed by so many.
About the mid-20th century people began to turn against their main source of knowledge – the place that offered all the answers – which was religion. Science was becoming the real answer to health issues and psychology was replacing faith.
Those who held knowledge were the ones that could lead and the more education you had, the stronger your ability to interact with this new world of ideas and language.
4) Despite being from a world of educated people, most of this country (and most countries) do not have any education past high school. Understandable – most people do not want to seek higher education or maybe they can’t seek higher education and this is for many reasons.
This doesn’t mean that they are not educated since if knowledge is important to you you can learn from many good sources; if you want to learn about subjects there are many good sources everywhere. Moreso since the evolution of the internet.
Most people do not seek out these sources because they are not interested.
There was a time (long before I was born) when a high school education was enough to get a decent job with a good pay and start your life, get married, have kids, buy a house. Those days are long gone, of course. It needs to be noted that those days will never return. The best use of your time on earth is gaining more knowledge and skills to be able to provide for yourself and for the people you care for.
Back then, college was for those who strived to go further in knowledge because they had a desire to learn. it was also for rich people who could afford the time and tuition even though education was relatively inexpensive for in-state schools (basically free) and ‘elite’ school were affordable (if still out of reach for the average person).
By the time I went to college it was obvious that I was with many smart kids but also a great number of actually dumb kids and lazy kids (what we would have called ‘not college material’) but they were there and if they stayed long enough they would have received a degree. I was not surrounded only by people capable of college but people who could and would be there despite no great interest in it.
To sum up this idea: not everyone who goes to college belongs there and not everyone who DOESN’T go to college is uneducated.
But without education on the complex knowledge that is medicine there is no reason to understand vaccines or how they are created, tested, and distributed. It is easy to assume that it is another example of the government just bothering you or a conspiracy of some kind against the people.
Of course you then comment on the things you can see – a person doesn’t get the COVID vaccines but also doesn’t get COVID so you draw the conclusion that it isn’t necessary; another person get the vaccine and gets sick so you conclude the vaccine caused the condition, and so on. The real explanations are more complex but because you can’t see that you figure things out for yourself from a very small bit of knowledge or (worse) you hear from people you ‘trust’ who tell you what you want to hear. Always, there is an MD who has his own wacky ideas that agree with your (uneducated) one so you feel vindicated.
I had a patient who told me that his friend needed a stent in his heart (a tube placed to keep the arteries open that have been weakened by plaque buildup, which takes years to occur) but had to have the stent put in a few months after he got the vaccine so this guy made the conclusion that the vaccine caused the need for the stent (“he was fine before he got the vaccine. A few months before he got the vaccine his doctor told him he was ‘very healthy’).
Just to be clear, if you don’t had a arteriogram of your heart of get a chest x-ray it is possible not to know about a plaque buildup. Needless to say, there is not relationship between the two events.
I will just make my conclusion here: education shows you that knowledge changes over time, continuously. Science is not so simple that if you drop something it falls (and even that kind of math and physics is complex). Education is not elitist and there is no need to separate people by classes based on educational achievement.
Nevertheless, if people want to cling to their thoughts, opinions, and hearsay as knowledge. They will always be ready to repel information and the people who have it as being a conspiracy the further it takes them away from faith and religion, the safeguards of the community they are comfortable with. Even ‘gut’ intuition has to come from somewhere and the less you know the more likely your ‘gut instinct’ isn’t insight but is probably intestinal gas.
5) Inspiration and good insights can often be written by people in jobs that are, typically, uninspiring. That doesn’t stop people from writing some very insightful words as can be seen in this Nike ad:
“Life isn’t about keeping score.
It’s not about how many people call you and it’s not about who you’ve dated, are dating, or haven’t dated at all.
It isn’t about who you’ve kissed, what sport you play, or which girl or guy likes you.
It’s not about your shoes or your hair or the color of your skin or where you live or go to school.
In fact, it’s not about grades, money, clothes, or colleges that accept you.
Life isn’t about if you have lots of friends, or if you are alone, and it’s not about how accepted or unaccepted you are. Life just isn’t about that.
But life is about who you love and who you hurt.
It’s about how you feel about yourself.
It’s about trust, happiness, and compassion.
It’s about sticking up for your friends and replacing inner hate with love.
Life is about avoiding jealousy, overcoming ignorance, and building confidence.
It’s about what you say and what you mean.
It’s about seeing people for who they are and not what they have.
Most of all, it’s about choosing to use your life to touch someone else’s in a way that could never have been achieved otherwise.
These choices are what life’s about.”
6) My office sent out 10 gift baskets to colleagues and to businesses that send many employees to my office.
We did not receive a single one back.
We did receive a ‘cease and desist” letter from the lawyer for one organization informing us that the gift basket was in violation of bribery laws and the basket would be donated to a homeless shelter. They included a donation receipt for tax purposes.
7) I am well-aware that I have many family members who are lawyers. I just do not get it about all these people who want to be lawyers. It seems to be a way to make money but give up your soul.
When there is a rape case who do you think the defense will use other than a woman attorney – assigned exclusively for her gender. A case that involves a racist? It will be front-and-center with a Black defense lawyer (or whatever the race involved will be). You are no better than what you look like to try to mount a defense.
Or you can work in a large firm where you spend years writing briefs about a single sentence in a contract.
Your whole focus is pleasing your boss and getting chosen to be a partner. Then you don’t make partner and have to make a decision about leaving or staying because your life will always be a salary and never profit.
‘Justice’ costs money so the more money you have the more ‘justice’ you can get. Never forget that it is the client who pays the attorney so it is ‘good business’ for an attorney to gouge the client for as much money as they can get out of him. of course there is the unspoken statement that if you do not pay your lawyer he will sue you for his ‘work’, however bad it may have been and no matter how much he created redundant filings to charge to you.
In medicine you treat the person who is in front of you and you always have to do your best because that is the only way you know to do your job. In medicine you do not get more money depending on how much ‘health’ the patient can afford.
8) How much tolerance do people have to indicate when the person they are speaking to announces that they have an ‘anxiety disorder’ or “OCD’ or other disorders that they make clear are their ready-made excuse for (1) how they need to be excused for poor choices in their behavior and/or (2) how much you have to alter your interaction with them so that they do not get ‘triggered’?
It has become very popular in the world that I live and work in to be informed quickly when I am interacting with people that they ‘inform’ me that they have behavioral disorders or one kind or another so they have to be treated ‘special’.
9) We have a system in our office (and all doctors also do this) that we are clear that we will not send reminders to our patients or make any further effort to continue a relationship with a patient who acts odd or aggressively while they are in our office. It is as close as we can go to block a patient’s return.
10) “My Unorthodox Life” is nothing more than “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” with the thin veneer of Judaism. Both shows sicken me. Useless people with little to no real talent or education being paid to be influencers for goods. Their lives are made up of talking about themselves.
11) If you’re a parent with a child who has obesity — or is even overweight — it’s vital that you adopt diabetes-fighting, healthy weight habits for your child (as well as for yourself). You know what they are: a plant-based diet free of heavily processed foods and red and processed meats, along with getting 300 minutes of physical activity weekly. And please have your child checked for prediabetes and diabetes. Early and aggressive intervention can help kids dodge a lifetime of medical complications and premature death.
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