I don't think that the epidemiology she learned is different than the one I learned. She just can't separate her professional opinion from her emotions and political beliefs.
I don't think that the epidemiology she learned is different than the one I learned. She just can't separate her professional opinion from her emotions and political beliefs.
So true, I think that is true of far too many people nowadays. It astonished me how so many of the policies coming from the top went against basic immunology, and that so many doctors just ignored what should have been "common medical sense" and dismissed natural immunity. I think our Universities are to blame, they truly don't teach people to think critically and learn how to agree to disagree, they turn everything to a moral, black and white battle to the point where University-educated people won't engage in honest discourse about hot topics because their sense of moral outrage clouds their judgement.
"University-educated people won't engage in honest discourse about hot topics because their sense of moral outrage clouds their judgement."
A strange morality indeed, Aimee, is that which abdicates a responsibility to evaluate balance of harm beyond monomaniacal pursuit of self-interest.
Heightened sense of personal risk does indeed cloud judgement, but is the resulting insolvency intellectual or moral?
I don't disagree with your very perceptive observation, but after decades of working in risk management, I've come to realize that the majority of expressed outrage is offered in an effort to obscure what is, at its root, seldom more than avid pursuit of self interest.
The entire idea of public health presupposes a large degree of selflessness, which looks good on paper, but is very difficult in practice. What benefits the greater good is not always what benefits the individual patient - mammography is a great example.
Poignantly observed and highly astute comment, RNK1409.
There are two primary categories; public and private.
Public health is, and must be, coldly utilitarian, entirely unconcerned with the fate of any one individual. It is essential that it remain solely concerned with the collective.
Private health is and must remain entirely focused on the care of individuals, regardless of the collective. It cannot attend to individual outcomes with a "paint by numbers" approach.
The two categories are often in conflict with each other's aims, and this, too, is essential. Without that friction, the needs of unique individuals become subject to the utilitarian calculus. The result is avoidable illness and death. Likewise, concern for one life may lead to the death of many. It's a question of balance through conflict, an unavoidable aspect of human behavioral dynamics.
When mass business closure was announced, the refusal of public health authorities to include the well-documented effect of poverty on health in the utilitarian calculus, was something I observed with a great deal of misgiving.
At first, I was astonished and thought a correction would be immediately forthcoming. When the inevitably harmful effects of non-medical intervention were reported, they were dismissed or shouted down, whichever tactic the reputation of the reporting entity required.
Preemptive unnecessary intubation was the first clue, followed shortly thereafter by observing many local private practices forced into bankruptcy and closure by outwardly imposed denial of care.
Those small practices were avatars for the widening gyre of what was simultaneously happening to countless other non-medical businesses. At the at the tail of the Pareto distribution curve, operates a numerical majority of income-generating operations that disproportionately fail with small diminution of monetary velocity. This is the "domino effect" leading to misery and want.
The conclusion became inescapable that it was individualized self-interested expression of fear on the part of those wielding power, that led to abdication of responsibility for inclusion of all medical harm within the utilitarian calculus.
More concisely, they cared more about their personal safety than that of even the collective, let alone any individual other than themselves and their inner circle of dependents.
Sacrifice of food, shelter and health for thee, but not for me.
To your everyday example of mammography, we can add intrusive treatment of what amounts to a glacial progression beyond a presentation of what functionally amounts to benign prostatic hyperplasia.
Time and trespass upon Doc Prassad's bandwith prevent a deeper discussion of the myriad harms, but in closing, I offer the desperation of lonely older adults and the side affects attendant to SSRI uptake. Accelerated memory loss adds to generalized anxiety about impending loss of autonomy. One of the results of this is DNR advance directives by those losing their will to live.
Politicizing the pandemic response was a criminal act, the way that it transpired. Fear-induced monomania was understandable and forgivable only before any data signals emerged from the noise of the initial panic.
I don't think that the epidemiology she learned is different than the one I learned. She just can't separate her professional opinion from her emotions and political beliefs.
So true, I think that is true of far too many people nowadays. It astonished me how so many of the policies coming from the top went against basic immunology, and that so many doctors just ignored what should have been "common medical sense" and dismissed natural immunity. I think our Universities are to blame, they truly don't teach people to think critically and learn how to agree to disagree, they turn everything to a moral, black and white battle to the point where University-educated people won't engage in honest discourse about hot topics because their sense of moral outrage clouds their judgement.
"University-educated people won't engage in honest discourse about hot topics because their sense of moral outrage clouds their judgement."
A strange morality indeed, Aimee, is that which abdicates a responsibility to evaluate balance of harm beyond monomaniacal pursuit of self-interest.
Heightened sense of personal risk does indeed cloud judgement, but is the resulting insolvency intellectual or moral?
I don't disagree with your very perceptive observation, but after decades of working in risk management, I've come to realize that the majority of expressed outrage is offered in an effort to obscure what is, at its root, seldom more than avid pursuit of self interest.
The entire idea of public health presupposes a large degree of selflessness, which looks good on paper, but is very difficult in practice. What benefits the greater good is not always what benefits the individual patient - mammography is a great example.
Poignantly observed and highly astute comment, RNK1409.
There are two primary categories; public and private.
Public health is, and must be, coldly utilitarian, entirely unconcerned with the fate of any one individual. It is essential that it remain solely concerned with the collective.
Private health is and must remain entirely focused on the care of individuals, regardless of the collective. It cannot attend to individual outcomes with a "paint by numbers" approach.
The two categories are often in conflict with each other's aims, and this, too, is essential. Without that friction, the needs of unique individuals become subject to the utilitarian calculus. The result is avoidable illness and death. Likewise, concern for one life may lead to the death of many. It's a question of balance through conflict, an unavoidable aspect of human behavioral dynamics.
When mass business closure was announced, the refusal of public health authorities to include the well-documented effect of poverty on health in the utilitarian calculus, was something I observed with a great deal of misgiving.
At first, I was astonished and thought a correction would be immediately forthcoming. When the inevitably harmful effects of non-medical intervention were reported, they were dismissed or shouted down, whichever tactic the reputation of the reporting entity required.
Preemptive unnecessary intubation was the first clue, followed shortly thereafter by observing many local private practices forced into bankruptcy and closure by outwardly imposed denial of care.
Those small practices were avatars for the widening gyre of what was simultaneously happening to countless other non-medical businesses. At the at the tail of the Pareto distribution curve, operates a numerical majority of income-generating operations that disproportionately fail with small diminution of monetary velocity. This is the "domino effect" leading to misery and want.
The conclusion became inescapable that it was individualized self-interested expression of fear on the part of those wielding power, that led to abdication of responsibility for inclusion of all medical harm within the utilitarian calculus.
More concisely, they cared more about their personal safety than that of even the collective, let alone any individual other than themselves and their inner circle of dependents.
Sacrifice of food, shelter and health for thee, but not for me.
To your everyday example of mammography, we can add intrusive treatment of what amounts to a glacial progression beyond a presentation of what functionally amounts to benign prostatic hyperplasia.
Time and trespass upon Doc Prassad's bandwith prevent a deeper discussion of the myriad harms, but in closing, I offer the desperation of lonely older adults and the side affects attendant to SSRI uptake. Accelerated memory loss adds to generalized anxiety about impending loss of autonomy. One of the results of this is DNR advance directives by those losing their will to live.
Politicizing the pandemic response was a criminal act, the way that it transpired. Fear-induced monomania was understandable and forgivable only before any data signals emerged from the noise of the initial panic.