Pulling The Trigger
In conversations with my wife she would constantly hear me make this statement; "If I were in a leadership position I would pull the trigger". She asked me what did I mean by this. "Pulling the trigger" simply means doing the right thing in my lexicon.
Doing the right thing in life involves paying a price. In most cases it's harder and cost much more consequences to do the right thing. It's always easier to do the wrong thing and it gets you much more stuff.
My wife is at that time of life that she is suffering under the effects of Menopause. Menopause is a "bitch"; I can tell. And I whish that their was a way to help women and to give them relief from this physical problem. And menopause is just one medical problem of thousands that we have to deal with as human beings. We are not perfect; but what if we could move closer to being more perfect and more consistently and formidably healthy as human beings.
Stem cell research really sounds like a possibility. I believe that if we handled stem cell research in the right way it offers the possibility of actually making us more healthy and more resistance to the things that have usually made us sick and killed us. We have clearly realized the possibility of rebuilding body parts like injured spines. And we should be able to think of stem cell as going further in helping our general health situation as humans. Stem cell deals with the cells and it's in the cells that makes us who we are. We could even find ways of helping women deal with the condition of menopause. I look at stem cell as a way to go beyond helping and to cure. What if we did have the chance to cure ourselves in a more all encompassing positive physical fashion.
So I would ask the Doctors and the other folks in the various medical fields "would you pull the trigger" if you had the chance. You see where I'm going with this.
I've faced the fact for a long time that "pulling the trigger" and keeping people healthy in a consistently and ongoing fashion means HMO's and then the Doctors make way less money. One could almost argue the contention that sickness is something the medical pros rely on to make the money from us. One could also make the contention that these same medical pros would look at the chance of us being more consistently healthy , in a formidable way , as a threat to that same profit. I believe this is exactly the way they would look at this more healthy potential for us. I love my wife and I know what I would do. But to those numerous and very expensive medical professionals I would like to ask would you "pull the trigger".
We have a fine doctor on our site who has argued strenuously for health care reform. The AMA of all organizations proposes real health care reform.
So much money wasted on forms. There is more in your argument than I will get into for this short comment, but this is a good post.
We certainly need more R&D
January 30, 2009 1:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think the R is reform and I feel stupid in having to ask what's the D. Do you agree with the premise of what I feel the potential of stem cell research offers.
January 30, 2009 9:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
American medicine long ago (well over a century now) decided to emphasize the treatment of disease rather than prevention. The old proverb is right: "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
Obviously the treatment of disease cannot be ignored, but the emphasis of prevention goes well beyond just the medical field. The American diet is horrendous and unhealthy and leads to enormous health complications as we, in all our corpulent ignorance, grow older. Our personal lifestyle choices of heavy drinking, too much smoking, etc... also contribute heavily to the medical problems of the nation. Thanks to the clean air and water acts, our nation's drinking water and air is cleaner today than a generation ago, but it is still not what it ought to be. We need to update our water treatment infrastructure nationwide, we need to make vast strides in cleaning up the air so our people are healthier throughout their lives and both the youngest and oldest citizens are protected from the toxins we release into the environment.
Over and above have the medical world change it's emphasis to prevention, reforming all this will take an enormous effort the likes of which no one is even discussing at this point in time. We will have to educate the population generally and our children particularly. Parents will have to drastically change what they feed their kids and themselves. The difficulty of leaving the high fat diet of Americans is self-evident, not to mention very difficult when that's all you have ever eaten. The food products industry will have to be restrained and restricted from their vast advertising and marketing efforts of crap like junk food, high fat/processed sugar/high salt/fried foods and so on. Marketing of fresh fruits and vegetables will have to be dramatically increased. Lots will be required to turn our health situation around.
Having said all that, I'm 100% for pulling the trigger.
January 30, 2009 10:15 AM | Reply | Permalink