Dr. Lane’s Thoughts LXXIII

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1) We can discuss the issues in this country all that we want but it is pointless if the people who do need to hear about the issues have no interest in learning enough to make informed decisions. Many potential voters are not just ill-informed (from places like OAN or FOXNEWS) but actually uninformed because they are not interested in anything that doesn’t affect them personally.  

These same people are the ones that put Trump into office not because they knew his stances on issues but solely because they had ‘heard of him’ – from his TV show (The Apprentice – a completely fake form of reality TV) and from his name being on several real estate projects.  None of those people had any idea what he had said or done to other people or they subsequently brushed away dissent in the form of information because they, still, did not have an interest in learning more or being informed.  These people need loud crashes and yelling to get their attention, something Trump knew and could produce from calling upon his weird ideas about patriotism and sacrifice (not anything about American ideals or damaged or soldiers as POWs, both of which Trump despises and doesn’t want to be associated with).

Let’s call these people the “wrestlers” since these are the same people who do not understand that professional wrestlers are just actors with steroid-addled bodies and minds putting on an act for an audience.  Many of these audience members do not believe that professional wrestlers are just faking injuries and that they follow a script; much like Donald Trump, these people follow a script when they get on camera.

These same people believe that the President can affect gas prices (not true – much of the price you pay at the pump has to do with supply and demand, issues in other countries, and the ability of the gasoline producers to deliver a profit to their shareholders), that the President can force peace in other countries (our POTUS has no control on how other countries behave, either with their enemies or their own population), and so on.  The POTUS has an impact only in this country and only with a cooperative relationship with Congress.

When Trump gets on camera and talks about how he will bring retribution on his enemies and will be a ‘dictator’ on his first day – you should believe him.

Yes, Biden is a doddering old man but he is neither a dangerous man nor is he looking to perform dumb and dangerous things in this country or in others – Trump will do this (he already told us).

2) Evangelicals have a Trump problem. For reasons that are beyond anything that I can surmise they believe that he is ordained to be POTUS. Where this came from is, probably, from Trump himself. This pompous fascist, thief, narcissist, liar and serial cheater with a string of bankruptcies, business failures, ex-wives, and a persistent ignorance of all things educational and political has been able to entice people who ground themselves in Christian faith to think of him as a Christian Savior despite his very actions being the opposite of all things this group believes in.

If ever there was a magic trick this is is proof that many people can be fooled simultaneously by one person.

For the purpose of this essay lets be clear that an evangelical to be someone who interprets the Bible as the inspired word of God and who takes seriously the charge to proclaim it to the world.  If you don’t think that I have this right you should at the least admit that this is pretty close to being correct without being offensive.

Trump doesn’t follow a single one of these precepts. Can we all admit that personal integrity was a prerequisite for political leadership? Trump has zero personal integrity – spending most of his campaigning complaining about his ‘treatment’ as a twice-impeached POTUS and being on trial in at least 4 jurisdictions in eleven cases (presently 91 separate charges). He doesn’t read the Bible or live a moment of his life by its words. Nothing he does or says insinuates that he gives the Bible a single thought as he bellows about Fascists, Communists, and how he intends to seek vengeance against all the people he feels have wronged him or sought punishment against him for his endless criminal acts as a businessman and as POTUS.

Like many people with other concerns, Evangelicals believed that once they decided on Trump that they needed to stand by him as if he was a persecuted potential martyr [in the world of economics, this is called ‘sunk costs’ which cause the individual to sink greater amounts into a bad project solely because they have already spent so much and need to salvage their prior expenses]. As it became clear that Trump was a buffoon of limited morality Evangelicals had to begin to forgive him believing that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ,in their view, an attack on the character of Evangelicals themselves, which created a permission structure to ignore the former POTUS’s depravity.



4) NJ Medicaid / NJ Family Health pays $11.00 for chiropractic services done by a licensed chiropractor in NJ.  

A chiropractor has to have an undergraduate degree, a chiropractic medical degree, and take 4 national board exams as well as pay for malpractice insurance.

A chiropractor has complete legal responsibility for the patient for everything done on them in the office from the minute they cross the threshold.

Minimum wage in NJ is $15.75/hour.  No degree necessary.  No responsibility is incurred or implied by the employee for working that hour.

Figure that out for me.  I’ll be patient.

5) I really despise those blood-pressure machines all my patients seem to have in their homes.  They are used incorrectly and no matter who I speak to their use UNDERMINES their doctor’s orders about the use of medications for blood pressure control.

For example, a patient will check their pressure and decide that the numbers shown are ‘low’ for their blood pressure so that means, to them, that there is no need to take their medicine that day.  Some patients who do this lie to me and tell me that this is ‘ok with their doctor’.  No it isn’t – no doctor on earth ever said ‘take your blood pressure medicine whenever you think you need it” – there is no blood pressure problem that just comes and goes randomly and should be treated that way.

Just a few minutes ago I got  off a call from a chiropractic patient who told me that he wasn’t feeling well after I treated him 3 days ago.  This is unusual because my treatment tends to work well and I pride myself in treating for over 30 minutes and doing this treatment only once to relieve the patient of their musculoskeletal issues (the typical chiropractor will try to get you to come in at least 10 times).

When I asked him if he had high blood pressure or diabetes he told me that he was being treated for high blood pressure (which he lied about on his intake forms) and that he ‘takes his medicine only every 2 days because he sees his pressure is low even the day after he takes his medicine so he skips a day”.  He admitted that he doctor never told him to do this but his information comes from using a blood-pressure machine.

He is 67 years old and corpulent.  It was obvious that he had high blood pressure to an observant doctor but I chose not to argue with him about this issue and only learned the truth today.  His low back pain probably is coming from his blood pressure and his sedentary lifestyle (many of my drivers are truckers so this goes with the profession unless the driver makes an effort to combat these issues).

We all believe in patient independence and free choice but these machines do not help patients to achieve this goal.  It only serves the purpose of undermining the doctor’s education and their information to the patient by creating the illusion that the patient is an equal to his doctor because the machine is objective and useful.  It is objective but hardly useful for one reason: patients will take their blood pressure many times over the space of an hour until they find a number that they like.  They also take the pressure immediately after waking up after hours of prone positioning and sleep – factors that tend to decrease blood pressure.  Most doctors test pressure from a seated position and we are careful about other factors.

The truth is that NO ONE can take their own cuff and stethoscope pressure because we are all flawed in our skills when it comes to our own health; this includes doctors!  Machines in the hands of patients just makes this worse.

6) I know someone who is the bane of all hard-working people who hold jobs and have responsibilities – the guy with lots of free time and is always available because they are never doing anything.  We all know people like this – I have known several myself.  They are easy to talk to because they will never be doing anything that makes your achievements look small, they are always able to go out any night of the week or go somewhere on your day off because they are never doing anything at that (or any other) time.

This is an ok situation when you are all trying to get an education and get started in your careers or find a decent job – finding a job, losing that job, looking for another job, leaving that job; we all expect that to go on for a few years but, eventually, something works and sticks and we are, basically, employed until further notice.

But not this guy – nope, he becomes a late riser, finds a supportive wife (in more than one way), or has indulgent parents who support him until, it becomes apparent that this is his lifestyle and they do not have a problem with this for the rest of his life.
These people will speak highly of themselves as not being drug addicts or alcoholics, being kind to their wife (or women in general) as if these are things that set them apart or put them into a category of ‘superior’ men without the intruding thought that this just makes them NORMAL and not an abuser (to paraphrase Chris Rock “What do they want, a cookie?”).  You can be sure that you will be paying for any time you have together – they either outright admit that they have no money or ‘forgot their wallet’ (because this is what all men do [in their minds] when, in reality, no man ever forgets their wallet unless (a) they just changed clothes before they left and didn’t bring a jacket  – which is where most men keep their wallet, or (b) they are a woman).

Their ability to be married and have friends is solely based on their absolute availability (probably their employment as well – when there is a place that has to have a warm body, or a man/woman who is willing to settle for just a warm body, or a friend who suddenly doesn’t feel like being alone AT THAT MOMENT this guy is there!) This leads to a ‘friendship’ of 35 years or a marriage of the same length.  Sometimes it can lead to a job (of sorts) where they get hired in some tiny position (and forgotten) where they go daily and do almost nothing for 20 years, never seeking a promotion or asking for anything, they never get to work late or leave early) [This is basically the design of most government jobs].  Sometimes these people are part of an eventual inheritance or payout / payoff for some event in the past.

Always, these people feel strongly that they earned whatever money they have, usually for ‘putting up with that horrible person’ who is either their parents, grandparents, or spouse.  Sometimes they are complaining about their boss / supervisor but that would be a stretch of interpretation since these people rarely have ever held a job.

Sometimes these guys will ‘check in on you’ or tell you that they will ‘be in your area’ on some date or basically just show up at your door.  There is no reason to turn them away so you take them out for some quick cheap food while they vaguely mention some kind of employment and their vague family members who are doing nothing unique or special (you realize that the kids model themselves after your friend and not their more enterprising parent).  You may notice that when they are visiting you (or telling you that they are in your area) that they are too far away from their home (or are just traveling around seemingly aimlessly) for too long to actually have a job.  

You piece together that their job is either seasonal or short-term and requires vague credentials that are either industry-specific or ‘busy hands’ work handed off to people who aren’t important (and never will be) but are needed to free up the important people to do things that bring in the money to the company.

From what I have seen, these people through a combination of narcissism and boredom create psychological conditions which they use as a crutch to defend themselves from any kind of criticism or pressure to ‘do more with their lives’ – they have to be home ‘for the kids’ or their kid is ‘special needs’ [which could be real such in the case of autism or developmental / birth defects but has expanded to include ‘my kids only like to eat the lunches I bring them to school’ and ‘their school starts too late for me to get to a job by 9’ to ‘we want one of us to be home when they get back from school’ which doesn’t work as well when the ‘kid’ is older than 12].  I have several of these ‘friends’ who send out newsletter about their ‘coping’ and things they do to ‘get through the day’ which sound more like retirement and less like they involve a therapist.

This behavior goes on for about 35-40 years until they decide to ‘retire’ and collect social security and apply for Medicare.  What they are retiring from is not clear and will never be clear.  For those intervening years they are somehow able to float between scattered employment, their mother, their wife, and their kids and, usually, have a bed somewhere and food.

Many of these people become beloved by their kids or the spouses of their friends because they are innocuous – they do so little and they are always soft and have no money but they are always home – they are the constant parent or presence  and, without them, others have to be alone so they are as just an excuse to avoid loneliness.  

The other parent or spouse is the one who comes home from earning the money, maybe in a bad mood from dealing with issues of an office or a client, stressed from money issues and paying bills and, certainly, not as nice to be around for their kids as your ‘friend’.  Your friends becomes the ‘nicer’ parent by default.

You soon realize that this ‘friend’ has no income and if they do divorce their spouse will have to pay them because divorce only goes one way in the USA – the earning spouse has to pay to be rid of the non-contributing one.  Usually, that is more trouble than it is worth for many reason but, importantly, the earning spouse probably have to pay for 2 lawyers to guarantee equal ‘representation’.  Worse, this guy won’t cheat on you or do anything a religion forbids so you feel unable to take a moral ground in seeking a divorce – just your lingering feeling that you really did deserve more from a spouse than just a warm body.

While I haven’t had any of these people die yet in my life I can only hope they seek to be cremated so that they leave as little behind in this world as they contributed.

7) Just to be clear without a doubt you have lost decent friends that you met at the same time as the people in #6 – these are the people who you met while getting your career off the ground but to do this you had get very busy and / or move to another place; or your friend had to do this.  All of a sudden they can’t be available to talk or just hang out without a lot of planning or arrangements and, soon, years have gone by and the pursuit of a further friendship seems unconceivable or unworkable.  Sometimes that budding friendship involved going out together and it never had a chance to become more.  Maybe they were a ‘friend of a friend’ and that middle person is also no longer around.

Worse, maybe you lost a potential girlfriend / boyfriend / spouse. That role was filled by the guy I described in #6 because you didn’t want to be alone or you truly believed that #6 was going to be launched at some point so that place for ‘the good one’ was filled by #6.  Now #6 is in your life, or the father of your kids and getting them out would involve more trouble than it is worth.

The good and decent people are often very busy getting to their goals and we lose those people to their pursuits.  I think that I speak for all of us when I say that I hope they meet other good and decent people wherever they land just as much as I hope all of you can meet new people to fill the places of those that have moved on.

It is sad that the decent working friends you have met can’t stay in your life as you both pursue the things you want in life.

8) From what I have read in the media and on social media there is an increasing number of people living alone.  When you filter out the people who are widowed or starting out in the first place that they can call their own, we are left with people who are no longer willing to try and live with another person; in short, they can no longer exchange their odd ideas of the world and how they feel that they should be treated with another person who feels the same about themselves.  

For many years I am sure that adequate money and freedom insulates people from how unencouraging having another person in their lives can be but, over time and eventually the money supply (job or cash infusions from family) dry up and this brings these people closer to each other in proximity and they have to ‘confront’ each other.  These people have to confront the person they are involved with and thought were good and supportive of them.  The realization is that they lied to themselves.  Unless something happened over the years they were together, this is the actual person they are involved with – aches pains, mental illnesses (and other pathologies), sloppy habits, and a follower of any number of conspiracy theories or close relationship with friend or family who are of a criminal sort [The list of ‘reality’ would be too long to list here but those are a few of the possible things that can be ‘discovered’].

Two sets of pathologies cannot mix well for the simple reason that, from my experience, nutty people like to be the only one in the room and they expect that all the other people there must be stable so that they can ‘act out’ with impunity.  There is no way for two sets of pathology to be acting out because acting out (from the root idea of ‘acting’) must have an audience and it must have the full attention of the audience.  

You would think that nutty people could take turns but they can’t – it is in their nature to require full attention from everyone in the room and all the time.  The world is all about their problems, their health issues, and their mental condition and any obstacle (like some else asking for attention) is a course correction that must be fixed and the attention returned to them.  After all, what is a problem if it is kept a secret; problems are for public display and must be the only topic being discussed.  The unspoken motto is “I have a problem and everyone else simple has ‘inconveniences'”.

Do you need proof of concept here?  Everyone can easily solve other peoples’ issues with a few words and a few minutes but their problem unique problem needs a great deal of time and attention – the attention of everyone and it must be discussed at all times.

After a while the strain cannot last and these walking, talking lists of problems need to be left alone or they seek to find a way to live alone, certain in their belief that they have been abandoned by ‘everyone’ because ‘no one cares’.

In fact, it is only that no one cares about them; not any more.  For these people they have emptied the well.  People have problems of their own.

8) Jacob Stern’s article today (01/10/2024) looking at what on earth the deal with the site QUORA is. He writes, “Fourteen years into its run, Quora now provides an answer to one fundamental question: How has the internet evolved? From idealism to opportunism, from knowledge-seeking to attention-grabbing, from asking questions to shouting answers.”

Yep, the internet is a cesspool.  Social media is just a symptom.

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