Here is a comprehensive list of every single paranormal phenomenon in the history of mankind that cannot be explained by science
If there's a question you want answered, I'm likely to know someone who can answer it for you. Try me.
There are messages behind Scooby Doo that are so profound, they bear repeating.
1 - empiricism rules
2 - question everything
3 - diversity makes you strong
Fred, Daphne, Thelma and Scooby are intuitive empiricists. Every episode of the original Scooby-Doo contains a penultimate scene in which the kids unmask the ghost-of-the-week to reveal a real person in a costume. The gang are robust and consistent with their ontology: they never accept that the creatures they investigate are “real”, because to accept their existence would be to accept that there is more to nature than our experience reveals. So, they use reason, experiment, analysis and bravery (albeit Zen bravery on the parts of Shaggy and Scooby) to reveal the underlying universal truth: there are no supernatural beings. They always work it out. The ghost is never a ghost. The ghost is always an adult with nefarious motives attempting to pervert the course of justice.
So not only is Scooby Doo about the constant triumph of empiricism over myth, lies and thievery, it is a constant reminder and encouragement to kids to question authority, challenge first appearances, trust their own investigative curiosity, be suspicious of the establishment, and to work together to problem solve and persist through to eventual triumph.
Each member of the gang also represents a different playgroud clique - the brave jock, the nerdy analyst geek, the popular good-looker, the drop-out stoner (that hallucinates a talking dog?). Kids learn that people of all types bring a unique and useful perspective to a team effort.
All of these are good things.
I knew this, intuitively, as a kid, but had it brought home to me by a discussion in the office this morning about the value of listening to your children and a verse in Tim Minchin’s beat poem, “Storm”, :
If you’re going to watch telly, you should watch Scooby Doo.
That show was so cool
because every time there’s a church with a ghoul
Or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The &*%$@#! janitor or the dude who runs the waterslide.
Throughout history
Every mystery
EVER solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.
I finished reading “The Patient Paradox” by Margaret McCartney a while ago, and I have since been chewing over a niggling tension that lies at the heart of the relationships between patient, primary care physician and healthcare system.
Margaret prompted the niggle with her focus on the disruptive effect of top-down driven policy-led targets on the patient-doctor relationship. She is superbly eloquent on the problem. It lurked in my subconscious all the way through the book. But the niggle didn’t clarify into a concrete insight until I listened to Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel and his audience debate how to encourage healthy behaviour.
I think it goes like this:
There is an (unresolvable?) tension between primary care being the first port of call for (most non-emergency) patients with a health issue, and the leaders of a (state-financed?) healthcare system wanting to use that point of contact to drive improvements in the system’s performance, quality, its health economics, patient outcomes and reductions in cost.
Health leaders know that GPs that are at the pointy end of the system and that they are the ones who have possibly the most influence over the patient; they are the longest lever. A GPs loyalty, however, is rightly to the patient, ensconced in the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath, and herein lies the rub:
GPs look out for patients; healthcare system leaders (should) look out for the healthcare economics and long-term sustainability of the system - these two important interests are not always (and quite rightly so) aligned. One is intensely focused on the very specific unique personal and complex circumstances between two individuals who, in the best case scenario, are working together towards a ‘positive health outcome’; the other necessarily deals in in generalities, best-bets, public campaigns, organisational, structural, political and financial problems on a colossal scale.
I don’t know the answer, or that there should be one. Sometimes tensions are good. But I have a new niggle, and it’s to do with prevention, public health promotion and personal freedoms. When it crystallizes into a post, I’ll be back here…
If you listen to anything today, make it this: I have listened to this 3 times already - it's brilliant. Eminent Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel and his audience get into some of the deep nuances in how we should try to encourage healthy behaviour.
Cash to lose weight? Is that a bribe?
Subsidized broccoli? Is that an incentive?
Are bribes an incentive?
Cash incentives to drug addicts for sterilization?
How do you encourage people into healthy behaviour? No one has really cracked this, although junk-food advertisers appear to have mastered the opposite
"Profound moral questions lie behind paying people to lose weight, quit smoking or abandon alcohol. Michael Sandel weaves through these issues with the help of philosophers past and present."
McCartney is a GP and she puts this so simply and eloquently, I had to share:
Don't smoke.
Don't drink excessively, and not every day.
Eat a wide variety of foods, mainly fruits and vegetables. Excercise daily, and if you can, make it sociable.
Have a job you like.
See people and do things you enjoy.
Stay reasonably trim.
And don't be poor.
That's it folks. I guess, largely, we all know that. But in the search for ever more complicated external reasons for what we are led to believe is the apparent fragility of our own state of health, the charge is that we are over-doing it, searching for illness, when we should be maintaining health.
I like the fact that she covers physical, nutritional and mental health, and is clear about the social determinants of health.
There's a lot more on modern medicine's tendency to turn healthy people into patients at the cost of their health and the finances of the health system. But for now, that's my favourite.
I don't like advertising.
So I was fairly annoyed to discover that TED had succumbed to the dark side of communication and is doing "ad awards".
"There goes another trusted brand," I thought, "bought by the corporate stench of filthy lucre."
It made me think of words I'd read attributed to Banksy, and on Googling them to check, not only do I get them in full, but I get a nice thoughtful comment on them by, you got it, an Ad Man.
Dave Trott's thinking gives me a glimmer of hope that adland is not a total cesspit. Ads that make us think, if just for a minute about how we might want to change the world for the better - they're OK, I guess?
The rest, the majority, is a waste of everything, time, money, resources, talent, bandwidth, breath....blog posts...
And yes, one of my best friends is in advertising. We both agree that he makes no tangibly useful contribution to society other than to extract money from companies and pay a portion of that to the state in taxes.
BANKSY on Advertising, with Dave Trott's thoughts below
--------------------------------------------
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday.
They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.
They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else.
They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate.
They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.
They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them.Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that.Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours.
It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.
You can do whatever you like with it.
Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing.Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy.
They owe you.
They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.
They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
~ Banksy
Personally I’m with Banksy on this.
We do come uninvited into people’s lives.
If we can’t do that in an amusing, informative, fun way, we shouldn’t do it at all.
If we’re interrupting their newspaper, barging our way into their living rooms, annoying them on their laptops, defacing their landscape.
If that’s all we’re doing, no wonder they don’t like it.
I wouldn’t.
You wouldn’t.
Banksy says we’re intruding.
Fair enough, we are.
And when we do that, the only way to get away with it is to do something they like.
Make it a fun, enjoyable experience.
That’s just polite.
Anything else is rude, boorish and crass.
Just like the sales calls we get at home, when we’re in the middle of something else.
They don’t care what we’re doing, they just want us to shut up and be sold to.
No wonder we get angry.
And advertising like that is just the same.
It deserves to be defaced, switched off, or ignored.
No wonder 90% of it doesn’t work.
Most advertising is just visual pollution.
In the last couple of weeks there's been a flurry of media attention around the positive effect prevention, early diagnosis and rapid intervention are having in reducing deaths from heart disease. This is great news.
Some key articles below, a nice video report from the Beeb above, and right at the bottom - a good reason to wonder whether it's ALL IN VAIN!!!???
Poland:
Over half of the recent fall in mortality from coronary heart disease attributed to reductions in major risk factors and about one third to evidence based medical treatments. http://bit.ly/x1yGXE
Denmark:
First time heart attack hospitalizations and subsequent short term mortality both declined by nearly half between 1984 and 2008. http://bit.ly/AicjFP
England:
The death rate from heart attacks in England has halved in the last decade. Both prevention and improved emergency treatment have contributed to the decline in deaths http://bit.ly/yPqMr8
A warning to developing nations from a nice editorial in the BMJ:
As the world population ages and becomes more industrialised and urbanised, the decline in coronary mortality is predominantly in rich nations, while rates increase in dozens of others http://bit.ly/wJaHVC
And then they go and ruin it all by doing this - a full fried breakfast the weight of a small child - "The Kidz Breakfast". The spelling alone is enough to give me a coronary...
The west needs to learn lessons from modern Indian healthcare:
Despite the "hard" probing by the BBC's Stephen Sackur, Devi Shetty puts forward a strong case for the "industrialisation" of healthcare in an effort to reduce costs, increase access and improve quality.
So much of what he says cuts against the emotional grain of how people feel about how healthcare should be provided - especially for those of us in the warm embrace of our publicly-funded systems.
The numbers are staggering: India needs to do 2.5 million heart surgery procedures a year - currently capacity is at 90,000.
Shetty is building a huge hospital in the Cayman Islands to offer healthcare to Americans at half the price they can currently access. Extraordinary, but even more extraordinary is what he is doing in India and planning for Africa - training is the key thing - he is calling for a global health university. Really, he's a visionary...
My favourite Shetty quote: "You invest in healthcare, and you are going to make a country healthy and wealthy".
It’s worrying that we still see pharmaceutical products as the mainstay of improving health in the future when the evidence tells us, should we listen to it, that the biggest gains to be made to health are social, political and environmental.
This is from a post prompted by announcement that the UK government is proposing allowing commercial organisations access to anonymised patient record data.
There are privacy concerns, yes, but Margaret has hit on another thing that has been missed by most commentators: We need to stop thinking that the answer to our healthcare woes lies in the consumption of more better medicines and drugs. Yes, it's good to develop better, more targetted therapies that are more likely to help the right patient at the right time, but we know that the best interventions in healthcare are preventative lifestyle changes, and then, where possible, an early diagnosis...
I am really struggling with this - it's a very big thinky scratchy-beard conundrum.
I talk to pharma all the time, and I think access to anonymised data could really help companies and health systems make smart decisions that improve patient care - but I think this needs to be reciprocated - if governments are going to allow commercial organisations free access to the data collected on publicly-funded EMR systems, commercial organisations should commit to releasing ALL the data from ALL the clinical trials regarding their medicines.
It's about transparency, openness and fairness. Last time I checked, I thought these were good things. Biased under-reporting of clinical trials harms patients, wastes money and is against the tenets of good science.
