If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
New AI-powered doctor’s office allows patients to draw blood, take vitals (Jennifer A. Kingson, 12/11/23, Axios)
Now coming to a mall, gym or office building near you: A self-contained doctor’s office, powered by artificial intelligence, where you — the patient — draw your own blood and take your own vitals.
Curing cancerphobia: How the psychology of fear distorts our view of cancer (David Ropeik, 11/29/23, Big Think)
Fighting the entrenched misbelief that “everything causes cancer” is hard. The highly respected Cancer Research UK tried, calling the study factually incorrect and misleading, as well as directly addressing the psychological factors of control and less fear of what is natural than what is human-made, saying, “It can be tempting to worry about our cancer risk from external things like pollution and chemicals more than from things we can control, like our lifestyles. But decades of research have shown that lifestyle factors — such as not smoking, keeping a healthy weight, limiting alcohol, getting enough exercise, and avoiding sunburn — have an important effect on cancer risk. In contrast, the evidence that pollution and industrialization has a widespread role in UK cancer rates is weak.”
The belief that cancer is mostly caused by human-made substances explains why any mention of the word “chemicals” or “radiation” sets off alarms. (Magnetic resonance imaging was originally called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. The “nuclear” was dropped to avoid the frightening allusion to weapons and radiation.) And it explains why scientists frustrated by “chemophobia” and “radiophobia,” corollaries of cancerphobia, try to reduce those fears by arguing, “All of nature is made out of chemicals,” and, “If we’re worried about nuclear power we should also worry about natural sources of radiation like the sun and bananas.”
Friendship as Soulcraft: How I made friends in my thirties. (Matt Dinan, Fall 2023, Hedgehog Review)
As Aristotle points out, even if one had every other good, one would still choose to have friends. This recognition is what led me to make friends in my thirties: I came to see that because you don’t need friends, and they don’t need you, you must seek them out. And an insufficient understanding of how this makes friendship different from other forms of love is one of the primary roadblocks to finding friendship in our time and place.
There is security in the messy neediness of love, the occult magnetic fields that attract and repel. Passion means to suffer, to be set upon. This is not to speak ill of love, but only to observe that since friendship is more freely chosen, it rests on unstable ground. Romantic love holds us together through mutual awareness of our neediness, but friendship does not arise from any need. Filial love is so powerful because it is, ideally without caveat, the sort of belonging one can neither earn nor lose. Some of the deepest hurts in human life consequently arise when we do lose that love, when the familiar becomes estranged. Family members, even those in a family you have some choice in forming, are the same type—“kin.” But the friend is some “other,” a stranger I have come to prefer.
“Terminalism” — discrimination against the dying — is the unseen prejudice of our times: In hospice care and hospitals, we prioritize those with more life to live over those who are terminally ill. What is that, if not prejudice? (Jonny Thomson, 11/11/23, Big Think)
Reed believes that a lot of people will find it somewhat ridiculous to call these instances a kind of discrimination. When presented with limited resources, surely it’s better to focus on those who have longer to live? In other words, isn’t it okay to value longevity over the moribund?
Reed calls this a structural “terminalist prejudice,” with little philosophical justification for it. He argues that “many of us tend to think, explicitly or implicitly, that a worthwhile life involves both the kind of life that has a future and also enables a person to ‘contribute meaningfully’ to society.”
We don’t want to see ourselves as cruel or prejudiced. We don’t want to accept that we are privately and socially devaluing human life based on our terminalist biases. Dying people are human beings as well. They have brothers and sisters; sons and daughters; or wives and husbands. They read books, watch TV, talk, laugh, and reminisce. If all humans have rights, the dying have rights, too. They are valuable in themselves, not for some abstract, unknown “contribution” they might make. As Reed puts it, “The reason that terminalism matters is that dying persons matter.”
“Life unworthy of life” as the Nazis called it.
Understanding Sigmund Freud’s Id, Ego and Superego (Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, Nov 9, 2023, Discover)
Exploring the Id
The first part, the id, was both innate and unconscious. Freud saw it as the driving force behind a person’s impulse to satiate their desires. The id wasn’t conceptualized as something that regulated or judged a person’s needs or wants. Rather, the id was the animalistic compulsion to seek pleasure and satisfy impulses.The Development of the Ego
The ego began to develop within the first few years of a child’s life, Freud argued. The ego was the person’s sense of self, and it had to negotiate between the id’s impulses and the superego’s cautious urgings to not act in ways that would be socially unacceptable.Understanding the Superego
Around the age of six, Freud theorized that a person’s superego began to form. Freud saw the superego as a guardian that pressured the ego to resist the id’s impulses in order to fit social norms.
Perhaps best thought of this way: The id is pure desire; the ego is the personal limitation on acting out those desires; and, the supego is the societal limitations. The rest is bunk.
The Medical-Robotics Revolution (Jonathan Shaw, Apr. 6th, 2022, Harvard Magazine)
What if a cardiac surgeon could operate on a beating heart without opening the patient’s chest? Or a flexible robot could navigate the delicate branching of blood vessels, or bronchi in the lungs, and then stiffen to perform surgery at its tip? Or a magnetic field could be engineered to drive a plaque-clearing robot inside a person’s arteries?These kinds of innovations are already in the vanguard of the field of medical robotics, says professor of surgery Pierre Dupont, a leading designer of robotic systems for use in healthcare. “I thought of going into medicine instead of engineering,” he admits, “so when I had the chance to combine the two, it was a fantastic opportunity.” The field encompasses precision instruments that can be deployed by doctors inside the human body for visualization, diagnosis, and treatment, but also patient-focused inventions, from handheld devices that let diabetics control their blood sugar to wearable robots that help stroke patients walk again.
Not all these achievements will make it from the lab. But gradual trends are emerging: toward increasing autonomy for the robots themselves, and greater personalization for users, whether as patients or providers of healthcare.
Above average is over.
Putting Floridians at Risk (PAUL OFFIT, NOV 27, 2023, Beyond the Noise)
Ladapo also claimed that Covid boosters are unsafe, stating that, “mRNA COVID-19 vaccines present a risk of subclinical and clinical myocarditis and other cardiovascular conditions among otherwise healthy individuals.” A vaccine is considered to be safe if it’s benefits clearly outweigh its risks. But no vaccine—indeed no medical product—is absolutely safe. Myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, occurs in about 1 in 100,000 mRNA vaccine recipients. Myocarditis following Covid infection occurs in roughly 1 in 5,000, a 20-fold increase compared with vaccination. Also, whereas myocarditis following vaccination is typically short-lived and self-resolving, myocarditis caused by Covid is more serious. Therefore, regarding myocarditis, the benefits of mRNA vaccination outweigh the risks.
Ladapo’s recommendation to boost everyone over 65 doesn’t make sense. First, if he believes that Covid boosters are ineffective and unsafe, then he shouldn’t recommend them for anyone. Second, if Ladapo believes that boosters should be targeted only to those at greatest risk, why limit the vaccine to those over 65. Other groups are also at risk, such as people with comorbidities such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease or lung disease or people who are immune compromised or people who are pregnant. Third, technically, everyone over 65 is not necessarily at high-risk of severe Covid. Recent data from the CDC showed that 99 percent of those over 65 hospitalized with Covid have at least one comorbidity and 90 percent have at least two. By recommending the vaccine for otherwise healthy people over 65, Ladapo is including many people who are less likely to benefit.
In the name of standing up to the “Washington edicts,” Governor DeSantis and his state’s Surgeon General have put many Floridians at unnecessary risk and inexplicably offered the vaccine to some who are not at high risk.