Regardless if you have had Covid or not, the issue of “Long Covid” is one that will be a secondary one for decades to come. Will it become a reason for many to be declared disabled and in turn require them to enroll into Social Security Disability? Be added to the list of Disabilities currently on the EOC protected list? And will it become a diagnosed condition as listed by the American Medical Association? Well if money is involved yes. What will be the problem is will insurance cover the treatments and how is this diagnosed in a way that can enable providers to be sure this is what defines “Long Covid” as there is no string nor consistent symptoms that follow the protocol of most illnesses. And let’s be honest, the Medical System fails on many counts to diagnose properly outright, so I don’t expect this to be different.
America’s Doctor, Fauci (who again I personally loathe but hey go at it you be you and love the guy) has claimed Long Covid will be an insidious health emergency in the future. So there you go folks more is coming.
I have written many posts on the Cognitive Bias by Physicians and with that the most recent on how they treat and mistreat the Disabled. Since the nascent days of Covid where the largest portion of individuals diagnosed with Covid were elderly (check), of color (check), had Comorbidity (check check), largely poor and/or uninsured it may explain the rising deaths, the failures to diagnose properly and in turn offer the care that would have enabled many to recover quickly without long term care needs. And that it appears that access and availability raises its ugly head when it comes to Covid deaths.
Anyone who has had an experience in an American Emergency Room knows it is a crapshoot where the house wins and you lose on average. I read this in the Guardian from a reporter who was so afraid of taking her partner to the ER she nearly contributed to her death. That is some reticence right there, but I get it I really do. Health equity and parity exists when it comes to medical care and quality long (pun intended) before Covid.
It appears that Women seem to suffer more from “Long Covid” over men, and that said at the present the numbers are switching to more White people being hospitalized currently from Covid than those of Color. And with that I suspect that is also defined by the politics of the vaccine and the lack of even simple safe protocols that would at least reduce transmission not followed for the same reasons. Which does lend to this issue that States which are the definitively “red” in their color with regards to their Legislative component, the life expectancy of the overall population is reduced. A study found:
“Especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labour domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD [cardiovascular] mortality.”
According to the National Council of State Legislatures, as of June this year Republicans controlled 61% of state legislatures and Democrats 35%. In terms of whole state governments, Republicans controlled 46% and Democrats 12%, with 12 states divided.
The study authors also noted that American life expectancy as a whole is lower than in most high-income countries, “fall[ing] between … Cuba and Albania”.
Yes, Cuba has better medical care. And irony it is right near Florida, where the old go and well die. Yes folks the majority of deaths from Ian were the elderly and with that the official death toll is like all of them, rigged, as they don’t count deaths that were connected but not caused by the hurricane. In other words your ventilator stopped due to no electricity but you did not drown or get blown out of your house and crushed. Okay then. But those who did survive are left with little to nothing often making one wonder if the Golden Years is less gold.
But mortality is being challenged in both Red and Blue States, due to both drugs and guns. Again this week another BOY, yes he was all of 19, took a cadre of arsenal to the school he had just graduated from the prior year and managed to ONLY kill two before he was taken down by Police. And of course he cited, loneliness, no friends, no girlfriend and being isolated that led him to become violent. Well folks that describes a big portion of the population and yet we don’t feel compelled to take arms and kill. But then again that the age of these shooters are now in their teens is not surprising. The age is declining while access to guns is rising and that enables them to get them legally and without issue to act upon their most base of emotions – anger. To say that sex and access to having healthy normal functioning relationships also contributes to this and the rise of the Incel is being tracked by the FBI. And with the issues surrounding sexual identity, education, book banning, and the like expect more to follow.
And with this it means going to the local ER that may or may not be prepared to handle these kinds of injuries and if they are children we know that many communities are closing children’s wings and services which means they do not have the medical equipment and staff trained to handle smaller bodies and their specific needs, so they will likely die or have serious traumatic injuries that will result from delayed response. Good times here folks!
We are fucked here without dinner. If Climate Change doesn’t end the world a 19 year old boy armed with an AK 15 will do it for you. The loss of working age men and women to drugs and the endless script of pharmacopia being dealt will destroy another generation. And lastly disease and lack of medical care and treatment. We know the vaccine works in offsetting the worst aspects of Covid but that also means that Paxaloid does as well, either/or but soon neither/nor as the Government has purchased what we believe is the last of Boosters, Vaccines and treatments and soon those will be on the backs of the Insured or not. So what costs us nothing now may soon be very very expensive. And with that we are on our own. Well we always were. Hmm does that mean I can get a gun or some drugs to ease the pain? Well one I need a Doctor, the other just head to retail store or Craigslist. Kind of amusing I think I can get drugs that way too.
A myth and of course a premise devised by Men to suppress Women and maintain the Patriarchy. Shocking, I know! Not really.
I am sure my Mother “loved” me but was it that kind of unconditional love and one that would go to the mat to protect me if I was in danger? No. She was the least Maternal person I knew and yet the only Maternal figure I actually knew. I saw some friends Mothers and yet the funny thing about it, I can remember NONE of them. NOT one single woman as a role model or presence in their lives let alone mine. I clearly did not have those kind of friendships that bonded me to their family, did those activities that in turn bonded kids and it explains why perhaps I am a loner and a Misanthrope. The figures in my life in my home were all Adults, very diverse, largely Gay or one or two Women who worked with or for my Family whose children were involved in our family. I have no idea where they are today nor actually care. I have hard time remembering the College kids I knew back in the day and with that I threw out those photos in the pandemic as they were not anyone who mattered as a part of my history.
And with this it is perhaps why I am not prone to trusting or liking women much and despite my best efforts really truly want little to nothing to do with them. Sex and the City is a show I watch for I see parallels with the Gay men I knew and that ends that. I do love the fashion and the armchair analysis of men but the reality is that I never knew women like that and likely would not given where I grew up and the time frame. The 70s was a era of independence, finding tribes, making love not war and for me it was the discovery of music and a love of concerts that to this day carries me. I went alone then and I do today as I don’t need someone to share with me that joy that live music brings. It is why I am heartbroken over the heat and the idea that for me that part of life has to end but with that I move indoors and will mask up and hope for the best and not the worst. Theater is the other pleasure that came later but the Arts for me are a avocation not vocation and perhaps now I see that it could of been in ways that were not front of stage but behind it. Again no mentors, no real support mechanisms nor parents who were interested in me finding my path led me to wander the windy one I am still on.
And as I am still in public education and surreptitiously act as a Teacher and I used to love to go to classrooms and shoot the shit with kids and have an exchange of ideas that sometimes worked, sometimes did not but overall I loved that energy. That is over and I go in already despising them, the school, many of the staff and count the hours to the end of the day. I never thought in a million years I would put in headphones and listen to podcasts during work but I needed to in which to survive. One suicide hotline call was one too many but three shows I have really not faced my depression with regards to that work. So I direct you to this article that yesterday did not surprise me in the least with regards to the drugging of American kids. We give them a pill for whatever ails them but in reality what ails you. The pill popping of the 70s has not changed just the age of the taker has. Go ask Alice. Oh wait she was made up.
Bill Maher said on his show discussing Big Pharma how we hate them, with regards to their role in the opioid crisis and with that we love them when we need them, as regarding Covid vaccines (which are only mildly successful and yet more are coming). And this is another crisis in the making, medicating Teens. I am not sure it is about their needs as the story explains that the best strategy is intense but expensive therapy or about their parents who simply have no clue. And with that the rise of Adults as well as children now being diagnosed as Autistic and ADHD is not surprising as we are always looking for a cure. And it is not surprising as they too requires medications and costly treatments that are often needed and of course not covered on Health Insurance. My feeling is that you made it to Adulthood without said diagnosis(and btw once again it seems to fall largely to women over 35. Hmm…) perhaps you need less of an excuse or explanation and just accept who you are. But that is the problem we have no way of doing so without feedback or a mirror and that largely comes from one’s Mother. Oh God she would be the last person I would ask if she was still alive. The woman was tragically unhappy and medicated with Valium for a time and then in turn used liquor confined to one day a week to get falling down drunk. Just that alone was another message she sent to me that even having a cocktail could not be sane, rational and dignified. So what did she do? Sent me to therapy where I lied about it all. The last thing I wanted to do was let others know about her pain and in turn mine. And her story is like many when it comes to Mothers and Motherhood.
With that the New York Times had the below article on what is believed to be Maternal Instinct, another made up concept. Not a day goes by I do not regret choosing to not have a child. I would love a dinner companion, friend who wants to shoot the shit over a meal or a drink or coffee as the girls did in the Sex and the City and would prefer a Gay man or Gay Woman as there is no confusion about the type and nature of this relationship and in turn one that is less likely to discuss their children, a subject again I loathe. I work with them all day and I want to be away from them the minute I walk out the door. I realize that was my issue when I taught full time, the sheer amount of time I had to vest into a job that should have been 7-3 and that was it. It wasn’t.
I have highlighted some of the concepts with regards to the notion of Motherhood and how it became this issue that today is highly charged with regards to the issue of Abortion. I have said repeatedly it is not about the infant it is about controlling Women. There are a few people who truly have that belief but the majority of anti abortion protesters is their own confusion and misdirected rage to women who do choose to not have children and that pretty much sums up America – this is about me. Not one person I have ever had an exchange with online regarding this subject ever thinks from another individuals perspective. The man who was furious over my comments about being a Teacher set him off and immediately went into the offense rather than simply ignoring my comment or simply disagreeing that it was not his experience and he felt differently. Nope it is never enough we must humiliate and denigrate anyone who does not believe/do/say/think/act as we act as it somehow threatens us. Really it does?
Misery loves company but it has to be shared and coordinated and agreed upon if it veers from the accepted script it is wrong, not right, negative, or just plain dangerous. Wow are afraid are we when we cannot even disagree without the threat of civil war. I think that current dialogue is enough to make me wonder how nuts are we as a society. Well pretty nuts from what I can tell. But again that is MY opinion I could be wrong but if I am then that is a good thing. But regardless of my own personal history with women I support WOMEN, THEIR RIGHTS AND AND THEIR BELIEFS (EVEN WHEN I DISAGREE WITH THEM) . I AM A TRUE FEMINIST.
Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created
By Chelsea Conaboy August 226, 2022 The New York Times Opinion Essay
Ms. Conaboy is a journalist specializing in health and the author of the forthcoming book “Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood,” from which this essay has been adapted.
Around the time that Mimi Niles became a mother, an upstairs neighbor in her New York City apartment building had twins. When the two women ran into each other in the hallway or on the sidewalk, Ms. Niles would ask the neighbor how she was faring.
“Fabulous,” Ms. Niles remembered her saying. “I’m so happy.”
Ms. Niles was dumbfounded. She was not feeling fabulous in new motherhood. She was exhausted and anxious. She slept little and cried a lot. Even as she worked to bond with her daughter through co-sleeping and baby-wearing, she struggled to understand what the baby needed.
But Ms. Niles soon discovered that there was little room for that struggle within the prevailing narrative of motherhood, or even in her conversations with other parents.
All around her swirled near-rapturous descriptions of the joys of new motherhood. They all celebrated the same thing — the woman who is able to instantly intuit and satisfy her baby’s every need, and to do it all on her own.
Ms. Niles, who is now a midwife and researcher, wondered what was going on. Of course, she was aware of the “baby blues” and knew women who suffered from postpartum depression, but what she took issue with was something more fundamental, about how our culture approaches motherhood. Where did the idea that motherhood is hard-wired for women come from? Is there a man behind the curtain?
In a sense, there is a man behind the curtain. Many of them, actually.
The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.
It keeps us from talking about what it really means to become a parent, and it has emboldened policymakers in the United States, generation after generation, to refuse new parents, and especially mothers, the support they need.
New research on the parental brain makes clear that the idea of maternal instinct as something innate, automatic and distinctly female is a myth, one that has stuck despite the best efforts of feminists to debunk it from the moment it entered public discourse.
To understand just how urgently we need to rewrite the story of motherhood, how very fundamental and necessary this research is, it’s important to know how we got stuck with the old telling of it.
Modern Christian archetypes of motherhood were shaped by two women. There was Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit and in doing so caused the suffering of every human to come. And there was the Virgin Mary, the vessel for a great miracle, who became the most virtue-laden symbol of motherhood there is, her identity entirely eclipsed by the glory of her maternal love. Mary’s story, combined with Eve’s — unattainable goodness, perpetual servitude — created a moral model for motherhood that has proved, for many, stifling and unforgiving.
Still, for centuries, across time and cultures, the status of a mother within religious society was not entirely limited to child-rearing. The home was the seat of economic production as well as a place of politics, education and religious activity.
But the Industrial Revolution pushed the walls closer together, moving people from farm to factory and separating work and home. Of course, many American women — disproportionately women of color and immigrants — did continue to work. Nevertheless, the rise of industrialization ushered in a major shift in the domain of women from one of economic participation and production to one of domesticity and consumption.
The “sacredness” of home grew as capitalism focused work and politics on individual competition and created a ladder for men’s earning potential. The family was seen as the backstop against such self-interest, “the arena in which people learned to temper public ambition or competition with private regard for others,” the historian Stephanie Coontz wrote in her book “The Way We Never Were,” which examines the history of American family life.A mother’s moral imperative and responsibility within the home were inflated — the “angel in the house” — as her role in society shrank.
In the 1800s, Charles Darwin and other evolutionary theorists upended how we thought about human nature, shifting the focus from faith to biology.
And while one might have expected such a shift to dispel longstanding chauvinistic ideas about women and motherhood, the very opposite happened. Within his revolutionary work, Darwin codified biblical notions of the inferiority of women and reaffirmed the idea that their primary function is to bear and care for children.
“What a strong feeling of inward satisfaction must impel a bird, so full of activity, to brood day after day over her eggs,” Darwin wrote in “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” in 1871. Observant as he was, Darwin apparently ignored the hunger of the mother bird and the angst of having mouths to feed and predators to fend off. He didn’t notice her wasting where wing meets body, from her own unending stillness.
Women are specialized to care for other humans and men to compete with them, he explained. By that basic fact, he argued, men achieve “higher eminence” in virtually all things, from the use of their senses to reason and imagination.
As more women demanded their own identities under the law, social Darwinists seized on this idea as justification for continued male dominance. Among them was the English philosopher Herbert Spencer,who wrote that childbearing extracts “vital power” from women, stunting them emotionally and intellectually.
The psychologist William McDougall took things one step further in 1908, writing that the instinct to protect and cherish her children — along with the “tender emotion” required of the task — becomes “the constant and all-absorbing occupation of the mother, to which she devotes all her energies.” It is an instinct stronger than any other, he wrote, “even fear itself.”
Interestingly, he did not believe it to be strong enough to withstand education. McDougall wrote that as a person’s intelligence grows, parental instinct declines, unless countered by “social sanctions” that discourage, for example, birth control, divorce or the erosion of gender roles. The education of women was therefore a major concern for McDougall, a eugenicist for whom maintaining maternal instinct was linked with maintaining white supremacy.
Early feminists were quick to push back against such ideas. In 1875, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a suffragist and the first woman to be ordained a minister,published a critique saying that Darwin had simply found “a fresh pathway to the old conclusion” about women’s inferiority.
But Blackwell and her peers, sometimes referred to as “Darwinian feminists,” saw opportunity in evolutionary theory precisely because it moved the gender debate away from biblical ancestors and the status of a person’s soul and toward science. The solution, they thought, would be for female scientists to identify the questions most urgent in their own lives and advance their own skills so they could answer them.
This was easier said than done. At the time, science was largely walled off to women, dictated by rigorous protocols and supported by institutions to which women were routinely denied entry. To Blackwell and women who thought like her, evolution had meant “freedom from stories about virgin mothers and evil temptresses,” writes the historian Kimberly Hamlin in “From Eve to Evolution.” To the men of the scientific establishment around the turn of the century, however, science was too often a means of affirming the status quo.
In following decades, as women began to gain entry into scientific establishments, many worked to push back on retrograde ideas about motherhood. In 1916, the psychologist Leta Hollingworth wrote in The American Journal of Sociologythat women were compelled, for the purpose of “national aggrandizement,” to believe that their highest use was as a mother by the same means that soldiers were compelled to go to war. Hollingworth encouraged political leaders to give up on such “cheap devices” and instead provide women with fair compensation, “assuming always that the increased happiness and usefulness of women would, in general, be regarded as a social gain.”
Still, the notion of maternal instinct hung on and resurged following World War II, when mothers in the United States saw wartime job opportunities — and its accompanying federally funded child care — disappear.
And throughout the 20th century, a chorus of psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and child development experts declared mother love to be as important to the emotional development of children as vitamins are to their physical development. As the historian Marga Vicedo writes in “The Nature and Nurture of Love,” where before a mother’s role was seen as encouraging her child’s capabilities through education and good rearing, now experts insisted it was a specific kind of love that only a mother could give that would determine a child’s future — an idea that would grow roots and fuel maternal guilt for generations.
Today, many proclaim that motherhood is neither duty nor destiny, that a woman is not left unfulfilled or incomplete without children. But even as I write those words, I doubt them. Do we, collectively, believe that? Maternal instinct is still frequently invoked in science writing, parenting advice and common conversation. And whether we call maternal instinct by its name or not, its influence is everywhere.
Belief in maternal instinct and the deterministic value of mother love has fueled “pro-family” conservative politicians for decades. The United States, to its shame, still lacks even a modest paid leave policy, and universal child-care remains far out of reach. The Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971 was the last serious attempt to establish a national day care system. Richard Nixon vetoed it, saying it was a “family-weakening” bill and the government must “cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization.” Implicit in that statement was a belief about a woman’s natural place.
That attitude was also evident in March 2021 when an Idaho state representative, Charlie Shepherd, announced (in remarks he later apologized for) that he could not vote for a bill that would use some $6 million in federal grants to support early childhood education because it made it “more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child.” It’s a belief that isn’t always stated so blatantly but seems to dictate local and national policies. President Biden’s Build Back Better package would eventually be stripped of its paid leave plan along with a nearly $400 billion investment in affordable child care and universal preschool.
Belief in maternal instinct may also play a role in driving opposition to birth control and abortion, for why should women limit the number of children they have if it is in their very nature to find joy in motherhood? A 2019 article published by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, a Christian anti-abortion policy group, claimed that “the ultrasound machine has been the pro-life movement’s strongest asset in recent years” because once a woman is informed of her pregnancy, “her maternal instinct will often overpower any other instinct to terminate her pregnancy.” Why, then, should the law consider the impact of pregnancy on the life of a person who has the full force of an instinct stronger than “even fear itself” to gird her in the task?
The myth of maternal instinct places a primacy on biological mothers, suggesting the routes to parenthood fall into two categories: “natural” and “other.” It sustains outdated ideas about masculinity that teaches fathers that they are secondary — assistants, babysitters — and encourages mothers to see them that way, too. It undermines the rights and recognition of same-sex couples and transgender and nonbinary parents, whose ability to care for their children is often questioned.
But the myth of maternal instinct is not as strong as it once was. More and more, narratives of perfect pregnancies and perfect mothers are being challenged as more people share their less-than-glorious experiences of new parenthood and just how completely blindsided they were by it.
The comedian Ali Wong’s Netflix special “Hard Knock Wife,” performed after her first child was born and she was pregnant with a second, was fueled hilariously by the outrage of the unprepared over the physical trauma of birth and over the stupid things people say to working mothers. Of breastfeeding, she said, “I thought it was supposed to be this beautiful bonding ceremony where I would feel like I was sitting on a lily pad in a meadow and bunnies would gather at my feet while the fat-Hawaiian-man version of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ would play.” She went on: “No! It’s not like that at all. Breastfeeding is this savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now.”
Social media is full of posts from mothers sharing stories about the realities of motherhood, pregnancy, their postpartum bodies, their sense of themselves, or the anxiety and monotony of parenting — as well as accounts of pregnancy loss and infertility. Often, there is a disconnect between the frankness of the words and the flattering photograph above it, as if it’s OK to get real if you still look good, in natural light, while doing it.
Increasingly, though, there’s rawness in the images, too: stretch marks and C-section scars, tears and spit-up, an awkward feeding, a hand cupping the feet of a baby who arrived as a stillbirth.
In February 2020 Frida, a company that makes products for new parents and babies, released an ad depicting a postpartum mother trying to use the bathroom. In the video — which garnered nearly four million views in its first two weeks on YouTube — a woman switches on a lamp, reaches over to comfort her newborn, then hobbles to the bathroom in pain. She struggles to use the toilet and replace the postpartum pad held up by her hospital-issued mesh underwear.
Friends and I passed around the link and marveled at how it made us weep. There is no narrative arc. It is just a snapshot, one that hits us because it is us. We know the smell of the witch hazel pads and the squish of the peri bottle full of warm water, the agony and the relief, the sharpness of the physical pain against the haze of sleeplessness and emotional upheaval.
The ad was deemed too graphic to be run in the Oscars broadcast that year. Frida’s chief executive told The New York Timesthat the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had suggested that Frida consider a “kinder, more gentle portrayal of postpartum.”
Such a portrayal would have been false, one more obfuscation. The ad worked because all of us thought we were alone, that no one else felt adrift, miles from shore. And yet there we all were on the screen. Lost together.
I imagine all of this — the Frida ad, the rise of the confessional social media post, Wong onstage screaming about the need for maternity leave so that mothers can “hide and heal their demolished-ass bodies” — like bits of garish graffiti scrawled around the edges of a giant billboard depicting some Virgin Mary-like mother, rested and at peace, her baby plump and contented. That picture still looms large.
We’ve become good at protesting the parts of this story that feel wrong to us. But we haven’t replaced it. Not yet.
The science of the parental brain — much of it now the work of female scientists who are mothers themselves — has the potential to pull back the curtain, exposing old biases and outdated norms, revealing how they are woven throughout our individual and societal definitions of mother or parent or family, and offering something new.
Using brain imaging technology and other tools, and building on extensive animal literature, researchers around the globe have found that the adaptation of the human parental brain takes time, driven as much by experience — by exposure to the powerful stimuli babies provide — as by the hormonal shifts of pregnancy and childbirth.
Research tells us that to become a parent is to be deluged. We are overwhelmed with stimuli, from our changed bodies, our changed routines, and from our babies, of course, with their newborn smell, their tiny fingers, their coos and their never-ending needs. It is brutal, in a sense, how completely engulfed we are by it and from multiple fronts, like a rock at the ocean’s edge, battered by waves and tides and sun and wind.
Studies show that about 10 percent of those who give birth develop postpartum anxiety. In those tumultuous early weeks and months, new parents are thrown into a state of hyper-responsiveness, with increased activity in brain regions related to motivation, meaning-making and vigilance. Eventually, it’s thought, this activity shifts, and they develop a stronger capacity to read and respond to the needs of their ever-changing babies and then to predict them, to make mistakes and to use those mistakes to make better predictions next time.
The parental brain is changed, and it’s also changeable — made more plastic than at most other points in adulthood. And while the biological mechanisms for change are quite different for gestational and non-gestational parents, scientists now believe that the outcomes may be similar for anyone — including fathers, adoptive parents and nonbinary parents — who truly invests time and attention in caregiving.
What happens if we look at this new science with full knowledge of how the old science was interpreted? What if we examine it with urgency and with an awareness of the cultural baggage we bring to the task? Then what story will we tell?
It might acknowledge parents in all their forms and celebrate the fact that human babies have always relied on more than just their mothers for survival. It could recognize new parenthood to be a major overhaul for the brain, a new stage of development that takes time and that brings with it incredible adaptation and incredible risk.
It certainly will be a call to action, to overhaul clinical care to address the radical transformation new parents experience, including screening during pregnancy for depression risk factors, more home- and community-based support, and meaningful efforts to reduce the prevalence of postpartum post-traumatic stress disorder, which as many as 9 percent of mothers develop.
Maybe — one can hope — it will help lawmakers in Washington to finally pass paid parental leave, something so critical to family well-being that the United States is one of just six nations that fail to offer it.
Perhaps this new story will help us talk, parent to parent, a bit more honestly about just how it feels to become one.
Buried in the insane rulings of the Supremes, which included terminating tribal sovreignity, reproductive rights, guns and more guns and allowing a toxic environment was the one about permitting Doctors to write script for pain killers and legitimizing what is often called pill mills. There are numerous stories about how many Doctors and Nurses exchange sex or cash or barter with Patients seeking opioids and contributing to the addiction crisis. Well huzzah the Supremes said “no problem, carry on!”
I knew of at least two in Tennessee when I lived there and recently I went to the comic John Mulaney’s show at the Garden where he spoke of this past year of his coming clean and becoming a father. I was not a big fan but I do find him amusing and thought it might be “interesting” so I went. Well it will be my last time doing anything at the Garden as the delay in the show kept us sitting there for 30 minutes, I had to check my phone and where I was sitting what I would be recording is nothing that anyone could see or hear well, and with that I sat drinking Dunkin coffee with two empty seats that allowed me to at least be comfortable. Finally when my seat mates arrived with crutches no less, the only good thing was that the rows in front and back were both empty so I moved up a row. I enjoyed about 45 minutes of the show when I decided to leave, navigate the Garden to get my phone out of hock and get to the PATH. It was enough for me to realize that when you are famous and have an intervention held by famous people and a car waiting to take you to a facility out of state for months all paid for and come out to a new girlfriend, dumping one’s wife, and having a baby all within that same year of recovery, things could be worse. But I did learn how he got drugs and they were almost all legal. He researched Doctors on YELP with the lowest reviews and then made appointments where they amply passed out script, one in exchange for not only cash but the request he remove his shirt in which to do so. Okay then. Again what one does to get drugs is often demeaning and tragic, but comic is a new way clearly.
Drug addiction is not a laugh nor worthy of a $125 dollar ticket for where I was sitting, it may explain the two rows empty as the claim the event was sold out, so those must of been comp ticket seats for friends. I guess they had better things to do (I did enjoy the celebrity studded intervention story but they were there and already heard it). But in reality most stories of those challenged by addiction is not funny in the least and this decision will make it even less so.
Update: In Opioid Liability Ruling for Doctors, SCOTUS Deals Blow to DOJ
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
On June 27, 2022, the United States Supreme Court ruled that doctors who act in subjective good faith in prescribing controlled substances to their patients cannot be convicted under the Controlled Substance Act (“CSA”). The Court’s decision will have broad implications for physicians and patients alike. Practitioners who sincerely and honestly believe – even if mistakenly – that their prescriptions are within the usual course of professional practice will be shielded from criminal liability.
The ruling stemmed from the convictions of Dr. Xiulu Ruan and Dr. Shakeel Kahn for unlawfully prescribing opioid painkillers. At their trials, the district courts rejected any consideration of good faith and instructed the members of the jury that the doctors could be convicted if they prescribed opioids outside the recognized standards of medical practice. The Tenth and Eleventh Circuits affirmed the instructions. Drs. Ruan and Kahn were sentenced to 21 and 25 years in prison, respectively.
The Court vacated the decisions of the courts of appeals and sent the cases back for further review.
The question before the court concerned the state of mind that the Government must prove to convict a doctor of violating the CSA. Justice Breyer framed the issue: “To prove that a doctor’s dispensation of drugs via prescription falls within the statute’s prohibition and outside the authorization exception, is it sufficient for the Government to prove that a prescription was infact not authorized, or must the Government prove that the doctor knew or intended that the prescription was unauthorized?”
The doctors urged the Court to adopt a subjective good-faith standard that would protect practitioners from criminal prosecution if they sincerely and honestly believed their prescriptions were within the usual course of professional practice. The Government argued for an objective, good-faith standard based on the hypothetical “reasonable” doctor. The Court took it one step further.
Justice Breyer delivered the opinion of the Court. He said that for purposes of a criminal conviction under the CSA, “the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knowingly or intentionally acted in an unauthorized manner.” To hold otherwise “would turn a defendant’s criminal liability on the mental state of a hypothetical ‘reasonable’ doctor” and “reduce culpability on the all-important element of the crime to negligence,” he explained. The Court has “long been reluctant to infer that a negligence standard was intended in criminal statutes,” wrote Justice Breyer.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion, which Justice Clarence Thomas joined and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined in part. Although Justice Alito would vacate the judgments below and remand for further proceedings, he would hold that the “except as authorized” clause of the CSA creates an affirmative defense that defendant doctors must prove by a preponderance of the evidence.
The Court’s decision will protect patient access to prescriptions written in good faith. However, for the government, the Court’s decision means prosecutors face an uphill battle in charging, much less convicting, physicians under the CSA. Indeed, the Court’s decision may have a chilling effect on the recent surge in DOJ prosecutions of medical practitioners and pain clinics.
Once again a quick perusal of social media was drawn to the newspaper many liberal elites loathe, The New York Times. Yes that is right the liberal elite loathe it. They haven’t paid for it for years, listen to maybe The Daily as that was for a time the podcast du jour and then it wasn’t thanks to another scandal regarding reporting. Something that used to be a rarity, today is way more common thanks to the ability to fact check and due dillegence on numerous sources that once were near to impossible to track. Shame we could not track Covid in the same way but the powers of the internet providers had others issues of import that drew their attention and made more money than coming up with ways to track and trace a virus that killed over a half-million Americans. But hey they are dead so let’s focus on the living they have the clikc and bait capability we need to build profits.
When I read the rant of the Twitter poster, since deleted, he was quite intent on calling out the lack of the tech community to focus on product and on growth via development of product. It appears that like Big Pharma who for years eschewed vaccine development and using raising costs and preventing generics from being used as a more affordable opportunity for those who cannot afford the name brands. Drug Watch has an extensive list of those companies, along with medical device companies, the use their influence and peddle it to the Congress folks who once the check clears does their bidding to prevent any type of management and control over said prices.
And aside from that, the FDA and CDC actually rely upon them for the research and trials that dictate how drugs are permitted and distributed throughout the county. See Dopesick on how well that worked out. And if you think that Covid is any different, think again. Sorry folks I am vaccinated and boosted and will not put another drug into my body again until we have the full info on how long and how well the vaccine lasts, the interactions and in turn effectiveness of the vaxx with other drugs (this affects a wide cohort folks, not just elderly) and in turn how effective will it be as the variants evolve. I am pro a vaccine annually but again how many do we actually need or is this going to take a massive switch in both behaviors and attitudes. And with that we have two camps but anyone who thinks liberals are all on the same side, think again. And as that divide grows in fissure, we ask why? Why? Because we have THREE kinds of media – Liberal, Conservative, and Social. And when you limit your seeking of knowledge to a very myopic and bubble view you get just what you failed to pay for, a broad base of perspective or knowledge into which you seek facts and truth.
Peruse Twitter where they were in arms over the article below. Sorry folks I need to know who and where these people are, as unlike the ability to track Covid we do have a way to find them and make sure they are not elected into public positions, even school boards. Nope they are terrorists.
For Many Who Marched, Jan. 6 Was Only the Beginning
To many of those who attended the Trump rally but who never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.
By Elizabeth Dias and Jack Healy The New York Times Jan. 23, 2022
PHOENIX — There were moments when Paul Davis questioned his decision to join the crowd that marched on the United States Capitol last January. When he was publicly identified and fired from his job as a lawyer. When his fiancée walked out.
But then something shifted. Instead of lingering as an indelible stain, Jan. 6 became a galvanizing new beginning for Mr. Davis. He started his own law practice as a “lawyer for patriots” representing anti-vaccine workers. He began attending local conservative meetings around his hometown, Frisco, Texas. As the national horror over the Capitol attack calcified into another fault line of bitter division, Mr. Davis said his status as a Jan. 6 attendee had become “a badge of honor” with fellow conservatives.
“It definitely activated me more,” said Mr. Davis, who posted a video of himself in front of a line of police officers outside the Capitol but said he did not enter the building and was expressing his constitutional rights to protest. He has not been charged with any crime from that day. “It gave me street cred.”
The post-mortems and prosecutions that followed that infamous day have focused largely on the violent core of the mob. But a larger group has received far less attention: the thousands who traveled to Washington at the behest of Mr. Trump to protest the results of a democratic election, the vast majority of whom did not set foot in the Capitol and have not been charged with any crime — who simply went home.
For these Donald Trump supporters, the next chapter of Jan. 6 is not the ashes of a disgraced insurrection, but an amorphous new movement fueled by grievances against vaccines and President Biden, and a deepened devotion to his predecessor’s lies about a stolen election.
In the year since the attack, many have plunged into new fights and new conspiracy theories sown in the bloody chaos of that day. They have organized efforts to raise money for the people charged in the Capitol attack, casting them as political prisoners. Some are speaking at conservative rallies. Others are running for office.
Interviews with a dozen people who were in the large mass of marchers show that the worst attack on American democracy in generations has mutated into an emblem of resistance. Those interviewed are just a fraction of the thousands who attended the rally, but their reflections present a troubling omen should the country face another close presidential election.
Many Jan. 6 attendees have shifted their focus to what they see as a new, urgent threat: Covid-19 vaccine mandates and what they call efforts by Democratic politicians to control their bodies. They cite Mr. Biden’s vaccine mandates as justification for their efforts to block his presidency.
Some bridled at Trump’s recent, full-throated endorsements of the vaccine and wondered whether he was still on their side.
“A lot of people in the MAGA Patriot community are like, ‘What is up with Trump?’” Mr. Davis, the Texas lawyer, said. “With most of us, the vaccines are anathema.”
In interviews, some who attended the Capitol protests gave credence to a new set of falsehoods promoted by Mr. Trump and conservative media figures and politicians that minimize the attack, or blame the violence falsely on left-wing infiltrators. And a few believe the insurrection did not go far enough.
“Most everybody thinks we ought to have went with guns, and I kind of agree with that myself,” said Oren Orr, 32, a landscaper from Robbinsville, N.C., who had rented a car with his wife to get to the Capitol last year. “I think we ought to have went armed, and took it back. That is what I believe.”
Mr. Orr added that he was not planning to do anything, only pray. Last year, he said he brought a baton and Taser to Washington but did not get them out.
More than a year later, the day may not define their lives, but the sentiment that drove them there has given them new purpose. Despite multiple reviews showing the 2020 elections were run fairly, they are adamant that the voting process is rigged. They feel the news media and Democrats are trying to divide the country.
The ralliers were largely white, conservative men and women who have formed the bedrock of the Trump movement since 2016. Some describe themselves as self-styled patriots, some openly carrying rifles and handguns. Many invoke the name of Jesus and say they believe they are fighting a holy war to preserve a Christian nation.
The people who went to Washington for Jan. 6 are in some ways an isolated cohort. But they are also part of a larger segment of the public that may distance itself from the day’s violence but share some of its beliefs. A question now is the extent to which they represent a greater movement.
A national survey led by Robert Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, concluded that about 47 million American adults, or one in every five, agreed with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Of those, about 21 million, or 9 percent of American adults, shared the belief that animated many of those who went beyond marching and invaded the Capitol, Mr. Pape said: that the use of force was justified to restore Mr. Trump to the presidency.
“They are combustible material, like an amount of dry brushwood that could be set off during wildfire season by a lightning strike or by a spark,” he said.
Some downplay Jan. 6 as a largely peaceful expression of their right to protest, comparing the Capitol attack with the 2020 racial-justice protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder. They complain about a double standard, saying that the news media glossed over arson and looting after those protests but fixated on the violence on Jan. 6.
They have rallied around the 700 people facing criminal charges in connection to the attack, calling them political prisoners.
Earlier this month in Phoenix, a few dozen conservatives met to commemorate the anniversary Jan. 6 as counterprogramming to the solemn ceremonies taking place in Washington. They prayed and sang “Amazing Grace” and broadcast a phone call from the mother of Jacob Chansley, an Arizona man whose painted face and Viking helmet transformed him into an emblem of the riots. Mr. Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison after pleading guilty to federal charges.
Then it was Jeff Zink’s turn at the microphone. Mr. Zink is one of several people who attended the Capitol protests and who are running for public office. Some won state legislature seats or local council positions in last November’s elections. Now, others have their eyes on the midterms.
Mr. Zink is making an uphill run for Congress as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic swath of Phoenix and said he will fight for Jan. 6 defendants — a group that includes his 32-year-old son, Ryan.
Father and son marched up the Capitol steps together and were steps away as police subdued a man who smashed a window. Mr. Zink said he and Ryan were peacefully documenting the event, and never actually entered the building. A federal criminal complaint accuses Ryan Zink of unlawfully entering a restricted area of the Capitol and obstructing an official proceeding.
The complaint against Ryan Zink quotes a Facebook message from Jan. 6: “Broke down the doors pushed Congress out of session I took two flash bangs I’m OK I’ll be posting pictures in a little bit when we get back I’m hurt but we accomplished the job.”
Mr. Zink, a onetime church deacon, referenced the biblical Book of Proverbs as he outlined why he believed Covid-19 was a bioweapon meant to convert the United States to socialism, and lamented that the United States “was no longer a Christian nation.” And despite the fallout from their decision to join the Jan. 6 rally, Mr. Zink said he would “absolutely” do it again.
“Godly men and godly women need to stand up,” he said.
Julie McKechnie Fisher, who went to Washington to hear Mr. Trump speak on Jan. 6 last year, helped organize more than 30 candlelight vigils nationwide like the one where Mr. Zink spoke, to honor the defendants. She is working with a right-wing group called Look Ahead America, which aims to register new voters in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania, and train them to lobby for what the group’s website calls “America First initiatives,” like changing election laws and “helping to clean up voter rolls.”
“We just can’t become complacent,” she said. “I can’t see anything good that this administration has done for us, and it doesn’t feel like he loves our country.”
Several people who marched on the Capitol described the day as a kind of Trumpian Fort Sumter — part of a life-or-death fight against socialism, anti-Christian secularism and the tyranny of President Biden’s masking and vaccine mandate.
Their views began to take shape in the hours just after Jan. 6, and have been buttressed by a flood of misinformation on social media, talk radio and from revisionist documentaries. Some said they had watched a program by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson that floated conspiracy theories suggesting Jan. 6 was a “false flag” operation.
Several people charged in the breach of the Capitol have expressed remorse as they pleaded guilty and made requests for sentencing leniency, telling federal judges they now feel duped or wish they could do it over. A Colorado man wrote that he was “guilty of being an idiot.” A Kansas City man said he was “ashamed.”
Still, those who have been charged have supporters whose movement is wrapped not only in feelings of anger, but also of belonging. It is a reason the spirit of that day carries on.
That sense of community resonates for people like Greg Stuchell, a city councilman from Hillsdale, Mich., who took an overnight bus to Washington last year with his teenage daughter to protest the election results. He said he did not enter the Capitol. For him, Jan. 6 is like the annual March for Life in Washington, he said, where people simply show up to protest laws and values they believe should fall. For every one person who attends, there are another hundred who wish they could have too, he said.
Since the election Mr. Stuchell, a Catholic convert who opposes abortion, has channeled his anger by marching with other men around the Hillsdale courthouse on the first Sunday of every month. He found solidarity, he said, in similar men’s groups growing in Hungary and Poland. “Men got to step up, we don’t have that many men any more,” he said. At the machine shop he manages, some male co-workers have been tossing around ideas to protest what they see as a rigged government and election system going forward, like not filling out W2s, or not paying taxes, he said.
“If they don’t fix it, I don’t know what happens,” he said. “People need to stand up and say, ‘Enough.’”
The term often refers to someone who is about to be fired. I cannot think of a more expressive way to discuss the Sackler family of Perdue Pharmacy who make the drug cartels in Latin America and Mexico seem benign in comparison. Next on Narcos, meet Dr. Raymond Sackler who makes Pablo Escobar the equivalent of a low life street dealer.
No family has contributed such an impact on the drug addictions and deaths of Americans than the Sacklers. Hell the notorious Genovese Crime Family seem pale in comparison as they did not seek public acclaim and acknowledgement through funding the Art World as they have. Might have paid some attention to that if you did not want to be held in the eye of the storm. When the drug wars were launched the United States targeted ordinary citizens, largely Black, as the source of the problem. No they were the victims and only when the drug changed to ones legally prescribed did then they pay attention and promptly as always turned their back on those who enabled it – the moneyed class. That is your White Privilege for you.
The Crack Epidemic began in the 80s and targeted/affected largely the Black Community. And that debate has maintained today as to its origins and purpose but understand that drugs have always been a part of our culture to maintain order. We like our drugs in America and we like them legal and if they evolve into a sub culture that is not our fault. This blame the victim is why we have Drug Wars as they allow a second culture to evolve, for Black folks that became the Criminal Justice one for White people the treatment culture. But it has always been that way as we have long associated drugs with two kinds of people and we market and sell them that way, be it the drugstore or the street. My first recollection of a two tier drug market began in my home when I was a kid. My Cousin died of street drugs and my Mother was addicted to Valium.
In the 70s Valium was the drug, aka “Mother’s Little Helper.” This was a paean to Valium. Anyone who recalls the era, as I do this was a wildly popular drug and given to my Mother, who literally fell into almost a coma taking this shit. She had no idea how powerful it was and it left her out of her mind, what she could remember of it. Ah yes, women are so stressed out and must be managed, so pop a tranq and call it a day. And when you cannot remember it even better.
What a drag it is getting old ‘Kids are different today,’ I hear ev’ry mother say Mother needs something today to calm her down And though she’s not really ill There’s a little yellow pill She goes running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper.
– The Rolling Stones
This was a paean to Valium, a Benzodiazpine that today has many uses. Perhaps you have heard of GHB, aka “date rape drug”. From sleeping pills to Xanax, or Diazepam, Benzos are in many drugs and highly addictive and this is is one such a story from Britain about Valium addiction.
.Benzodiazepines at one point became the worlds most prescribed drug in a decade, but it was devised in the 50s, so when you hear about how long it takes to develop and test a drug, that is what they mean. It means finding an audience and a way to market and use it. Initially, benzodiazepines were hailed as a medical miracle, and they soon became the most widely prescribed class of drugs in the world. Even though the drugs’ addictive properties have now become clear, they remain widely available and are often prescribed for longer than the recommended 2–4 weeks.And in the 90s that torch paseed to a new a better helper – OxyContin. And while Valium is still around, Xanax or Diazepam are the current counterparts and this is is one such a story from Britain about Valium addiction.
So how drugs are created and in turn imagined often become secondary to what ends up when thousands of people are prescribed a drug that has properties less associated with healing and more about money and long term growth. Hence that is why vaccines and cures for long term diseases are back burnered as who needs a drug that will be used and not reused. Finding a drug that has a never ending lifespan is the wet dream of all big pharma. And with Valium they had a money maker. How does that work exactly?
Tolerance to the drugs is thought to develop because benzodiazepines weaken the response of receptors in the brain. That means a benzodiazepine user needs to keep ramping up the drug’s dosage to trigger the same calming effect of GABA. The drugs are also non-specific: they act on multiple subunits of GABA, which govern different actions, such as anxiety, restfulness, motor control and cognition. So even if a person goes on the drugs to alleviate social anxiety, they are invariably altering how they think, sleep and even move. That, in turn, explains why a person coming off benzodiazepines may experience wholly new symptoms, such as panic attacks and seizures.
Malcolm Lader, a psychologist and pharmacologist at King’s College London in the UK, began looking at the benzodiazepine craze as a young scientist in the 1970s. He initially assumed that most people on the drugs had ramped up their dose to such a degree that they had become hooked; instead, he found that users had largely remained on the prescribed dosage. “People couldn’t believe that you could still be on your original dose…and still have problems when you try to come off,” he recalls.
In the 1980s, Lader and a team of researchers issued one of the earliest warnings against long-term benzodiazepine use. Since that time, decades of evidence have made clear that taking benzodiazepines comes with serious risks, yet they remain hugely popular. Antidepressants (e.g. Prozac) and cognitive behaviour therapy are effective anxiety treatments, but neither act immediately; antidepressants can also initially worsen symptoms. For many people, benzodiazepines always seem like the better option.
Most patients in receipt of tranquillisers or sleeping pills do not consider themselves to be addicts until they attempt to reduce their dosage and, like Pat Edwards, find complete withdrawal impossible. It is not hard to find people who have suffered from benzodiazepine use, or people who are happy to talk of their experiences as a warning to others. The several men and women I spoke to tell stories unique only in their early details; their tales of involuntary dependence on their medication all end with a common catalogue of suffering and distress. They all find it hard to understand why this state of affairs has been allowed to exist for so long, and why we ever thought that these drugs would be the answer to our ills
So as you can see that getting on is easy, getting off not so much. And this becomes the case with regards to OxyContin.
The Sackler Family have been the subject of several lawsuits by States regarding their drug company, Perdue Pharmacy and the growth of OxyContin addiction that have led to a public health crisis in their community. With those lawsuits finally attention was paid to the nefarious way the family pushed the company to do more, sell more and up the dose across the country while they reaped billions and to assuage their guilt, divested their interests into the philanthropy of art and class. Nothing says class more than have a Symphony Hall, Museum wing or College building named after you – its a legacy baby. Just one built on a new kind of slavery.
The Sacker family are ones of medical science but their goals in changing how medicine is used and more importantly misused is the true story behind Perdue Pharma. They went to great lengths to push the drug while simultaneously enriching themselves as it truly contributed to the bottom line of profits for the company, despite the evidence that the drug was addictive and contributing to a significant crisis across the country.
Their efforts to obscure the addictive qualities were quite imaginative, including the phrase, pseudo addiction, to convince hesitant Doctors that while the patient appears to be addicted that is simply the bodies response to be under treated.
I found this explanation: Pseudoaddiction is a term coined in 1989 to describe the phenomenon of patients with pain being under-treated. The idea is that patients with legitimate pain that could be alleviated with opioid painkillers exhibit drug-seeking behavior that is misinterpreted as addiction.
My mother used to say, “Take it from the source.” In this case the source was well Perdue and their team of Doctors, former FDA medical staff who had approved the drug’s use and other con artists devised to pimp more pills. To say pill mill would be an understatement. As small communities one after the other were flooded with the drugs that led to higher crime, increased violence and of course overdoses and death. The hero of this story is a West Virginian Doctor in a small town, Art Van Zee, who took this to Congress and was shut down by Senator Chris Dodd, of Connecticut where Perude is located. He concluded this from his research: Opioid prescribing has had significant geographical variations. In some areas, such as Maine, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and Alabama, from 1998 through 2000, hydrocodone and (non-OxyContin) oxycodone were being prescribed 2.5 to 5.0 times more than the national average. And it was Kentucky that managed to be the state that finally brought the Sackler’s down. And their current Bankruptcy is still being settled in the Courts.
What was tragic is how they managed to hire numerous Doctors, pay them through third parties, to pimp the product, use their own sales persons to bribe or excahnge sex for orders with Doctors. And host large parties and conferences feuling them with gifts and perks, while these same individuals were over prescribing and managing care of people to the point where they were full on addicts and some died as a result. The images of these individuals as they lay dead show a life not in pain but death in shame. Families who were lied to, manipulated and blamed for their family member’s death. And this is why I believe many today are resistant to vaccines as they see the same manipulation and promise that may be false. I get it, I really do. I loathe the Medical Industrial Complex and this does little to change my mind but I am intelligent enough to discern the truth when it comes to the role of what a drug is to do. We can look back on time to see how little changes in health have been the result of simply changing a few elements in society, pasteurizing milk, chlorine in water, the use of penicillin (which is mold folks) to extending the lifespan of us all. It is also done with resistance, as the Physician, Dr. Semmelwiess , who recommended washing hands before touching patients was ridiculed for it.
Life is a crapshoot. We idolize false idols all the time. We elected one to the highest office in the land so we are not perfect, we too are flawed individuals. But when the wealthy take advantage of our stupidity and unwillingness to say no, to not ask questions then the first time is shame on them but then to allow it then shame on you. We have failed to truly inform and educate our citizenry, our education system is so damaged, so segregated and so badly managed that it can explain much of. this. It is why I have a soft spot for Kentucky and their people. They are not the hideous Racists or Trash bag idiots, they are neglected and ignored and in turn manipulated by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul. They deserve better and they can and will but it is heavy lifting and that is not easy given that the minority rule the majority there and they do so by FEAR and that is the co-dependence I found throughout the area. FEAR but not HATE.
There have been endless scandals with regards to someone’s credentials not as they have claimed on their resume. And to that I go, big fucking deal. Unless you are killing someone or could whatever fake degree you have claimed to earned, then a business hires you without vetting said degree is their issue, problem and not one I need to concern myself with.
First up, Liar number 1. Joe Biden’s accuser has been under fire for not being forthcoming with her story sooner, her lack of substantiative evidence to support that accusation that Biden sexually assaulted her. This comes as the comment that all women are to be believed is of course bullshit as we know that is not true. No one is believed about anything ever unless they can PROVE it. And even then how to prove it seems to be a matter of debate including photos, films, affidavits, eye witnesses and even video seem to somehow never be enough to PROVE it.
Funny Cops can lie and they have the Supremes to thank for that.
The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed police to falsely claim that a suspect’s confederate confessed when in fact he had not (Frazier v. Cupp, 1969) and to have found a suspect’s fingerprints at a crime scene when there were none (Oregon v. Mathiason, 1977), determining such acts insufficient for rendering the defendant’s confession inadmissible. State courts have permitted police to deceive suspects about a range of factual matters, including, for example, falsely stating that incriminating DNA evidence and satellite photography of the crime scene exist (State v. Nightingale, 2012).
But regular folks not so much. The New York Times did a lengthy expose on the Biden accuser, Tara Reade, after her Attorney dropped her after information about her varying degrees came into question. This was when #MeToo was the rage and the conviction of Harvey Weinstein has made it okay to defend women when it comes to accusations on sexual assault. Funny how that worked out as a few years ago when girls called the Police, when Women were harassed on the job and ignored it took just one famous case to be covered by the Times and The New Yorker and game on! Bring it bitches! For most of the women post #MeToo they found their lives upended and have now massive company at the Unemployment office with the varying new casualties of the cancel culture from Bird lady, the Pump Rules folks, to Adam Rapport of Bon Appetit! It appears that social media is just a treasure trove of bad thoughts and words that need to be reprimanded and in turn punished. In some cases one realizes that for years as in the case of Bon Appetit it was a typical Conde Nast masthead with white folks running the show and the Devil was wearing Prada. But at some point what the fuck has that got to do with you sitting at home trolling Twitter. As a reader of Bon Appetit it lacked a lot of cultural foods but hey I can do this thing called going to a store, a restaurant or simply asking people about how to find Peruvian food, etc. So while that idiot is gone there is another waiting to take his place and that for a moment it was a good thing and then back to the same as that is the way it goes.
When I read of Tara Reade I did not give a shit then, I don’t now. Clearly none of the same accusations affected Trump and to me Biden’s mistreatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearing is by far more significant as we have that dolt sitting on the Supreme Court doing nothing of value. As for Biden yes I am voting of him, sadly as he sits and decides which woman of color he must pick to prove his credibility. Not that any of these women have any major significant Governmental experience and history in office is relevant as clearly we have a man in the Presidency who hasn’t so what could go wrong? Oh wait.
So while Covid rages and the streets are filled with protests across the nation I try to decide what issue and which lies are more critical. Well right now the ones around Covid seem to be important as that affects global health and well being and in turn affects how we move around, work and live in a time of contagion with no end in sight.
Liar number 2 is the Scientist behind the bullshit studies that had Trump “allegedly” claiming he was taking hydroxychloroquine a preventative of Covid. That drug was pimped by the right wing as they were doubling down on stocks and in turn led Trump to hire another drug lord into the Administration to be the head of fast tracking a vaccine for Covid. Gosh what could go wrong? Oh wait.
These are not the first lies in Science as we have had many scandals of late of varying studies and frauds, many coming from China (irony not lost), that have been less that valid so this again proves that in the haste and demand for Covid stories it led to two major science journals having to retract their stories. What others that have yet been found that may have led to further deaths or issues related to Covid that put us all at risk? This is by far more essential and yet no front page stories of record on either the Time or the Post our only two national journals of record. And certainly no hysteria from CNN where they put breathless in their reporting long before Covid.
Surgisphere: mass audit of papers linked to firm behind hydroxychloroquine Lancet study scandal Questions continue for Surgisphere and CEO Sapan Desai as universities deny knowledge of links to firm behind Lancet’s now-disputed blockbuster study
Melissa Davey in Melbourne and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington Guardian Wed 10 Jun 2020
Papers co-authored by Dr Sapan Desai of Surgisphere are now being reviewed in the wake of the Lancet hydroxychloroquine study scandal.
Dozens of scientific papers co-authored by the chief executive of the US tech company behind the Lancet hydroxychloroquine study scandal are now being audited, including one that a scientific integrity expert claims contains images that appear to have been digitally manipulated.
The audit follows a Guardian investigation that found the company, Surgisphere, used suspect data in major scientific studies that were published and then retracted by world-leading medical journals, including the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Further inquiries by the Guardian into Surgisphere and its founder and chief executive, Dr Sapan Desai, have confirmed that:
Major institutions including Stanford University, which were described as research partners on the Surgisphere website, said they were not aware of any formal relationship with the company.
A study that formed the basis of Desai’s PhD may contain doctored images, according to expert claims, and the global medical publishing company Elsevier is conducting a review of his papers published in its journals.
Claims made by Desai about his qualifications gained since his medical degree have been called into doubt, including his claims to hold two PhDs, a master’s, and affiliations with major universities and colleges. Some of these affiliations have now been removed from his website and online profiles.
The blockbuster Lancet study based on Surgisphere data led to global trials of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 being halted in May, because it appeared to show the drug increased deaths in Covid-19 patients.
The study was retracted after a Guardian investigation and researchers found inconsistencies in its data, which came from a database owned by Surgisphere. Desai was a co-author of the paper.
The New England Journal of Medicine also retracted a study with findings based on Surgisphere data and which also listed Desai as a co-author. A third paper involving Surgipshere and Desai, which examined the impact of the drug ivermectin on Covid-19 patients, has been removed from the website SSRN, a repository for scientific papers.
The Guardian can confirm that studies authored by Desai and published before he established the Surgisphere database in 2019 have come under scrutiny by the scientific community and journal editors.
Dr Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist specialising in scientific integrity, examined a research paper co-authored by Desai and published in 2005 which formed the basis of his PhD in anatomy and cell biology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The paper, published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, examined differences in the inner-ear tissue between species of rodents. It included a collage of nine images of tissue sections obtained from different species including a mouse, a chinchilla and a tree squirrel.
Bik works full time identifying scientific fraud, and researchers around the world send her images for review. After the retraction of the Surgisphere papers she began examining some of Desai’s other work. Bik said when she looked at the tissue images in Desai’s PhD paper, repeated patterns jumped out at her.
“They are supposed to be from different rodents, yet the rat and the gerbil images have areas shared between them,” she said. “There is not only copy-pasting within the images, but also between rat cells and gerbil cells, for example.”
Bik highlighted her suspicions on PubPeer, a website where scientists can provide feedback on papers.
“I cannot think of any other explanation than these images have been digitally manipulated,” she told the Guardian. A spokeswoman for the journal told the Guardian the editorial board was “aware of the situation and is reviewing the matter”. Neither Desai nor his supervising author at the University of Illinois at Chicago responded to a request for comment.
According to online profiles, Desai, who is now 41, has had an extraordinary and varied career. In 2010 the online encyclopedia Wikipedia flagged his page for deletion after editors raised queries about his accomplishments.
“If half of the claims in this article are true, this is indeed an exceptional young man,” one website editor wrote of Desai, who at the time was 31. “However, exceptional does not necessarily equal notable. Most claims are unsourced or sourced to the subject’s own websites. Many claims are over the top.”
As well as holding at least one PhD, a medical degree and working as a vascular surgeon, Desai has also founded several companies including Surgisphere and a charity. His claims (on the deleted Wikipedia page) of having a second PhD and a Juris Doctor, or law degree, could not be independently verified by the Guardian and Desai did not respond to questions about this.
The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?
His biography also says he completed his master’s of business administration in healthcare management at Western Governors University. The university did not respond to requests for confirmation of this MBA. But according to the university archive he gave a speech to a graduation of university students in 2012, telling them: “Nothing that is easy is worthwhile. Because at the end of the struggle is a fountain that never stops, a fountain that showers us with the twin gifts of knowledge and wisdom.”
In a video he made for a crowdfunding campaign to support a product he designed, described as a “wearable neural induction device”, Desai said he also held a PhD in neuroscience. The device, which Desai boasted could increase brain function and creativity, never came to fruition. The Guardian could find no other record of his having neuroscience qualifications and Desai did not respond to questions about this.
Meanwhile Elsevier, a well-known Dutch publishing and analytics company specialising in scientific content, told the Guardian it was “initiating the process to thoroughly re-assess” papers involving Desai. The Guardian has contacted several of Desai’s former co-authors and colleagues for comment.
The Guardian’s investigation has also raised questions about other Surgisphere claims. The company’s website previously stated that it was “partnered” with a handful of researchers at leading universities to complete “groundbreaking projects”, including Harvard, the University of Minnesota, Stanford, the University of Utah and the University of Glasgow. Those affiliations were removed from the Surgisphere website on Friday.
When asked about collaborations, the universities said they had no formal relationship with Surgisphere.
A spokeswoman for the University of Utah said it was not aware of any institutional relationship. One co-author of the Lancet paper, Dr Amit Patel, is listed as being affiliated with the university but a spokeswoman said Patel had been an unpaid adjunct professor and had not held a faculty position since January 2017.
On Monday Patel announced on Twitter that he had resigned from the university. “I had verbally terminated my affiliation with the University of Utah over a week ago and formally this past Friday,” Patel wrote. “There is a much bigger story for which I still do not have the information.”
He said in the tweet he was related to Desai by marriage. But this was “old news”, he said. “Despite this I still do not have the information of what happened at Surgisphere,” he said.
Patel did not respond to requests from the Guardian for comment. A university spokeswoman said: “The University of Utah does not comment on the reasons surrounding termination of academic appointments.”
Harvard University medical school also said it had “no formal research agreements or partnerships” with Surgisphere, and said the reference on the company’s website could reflect Desai’s collaboration with Dr Mandeep Mehra, an investigator and cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s hospital, which is affiliated with the medical school.
Surgisphere: governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company
Mehra was listed as a corresponding author on the Lancet study, which said: “The corresponding author and co-author had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.”
In a statement to the Guardian after the retraction of the Lancet study, Mehra said his intentions “have always been to contribute to scientific discussion and to ensure that the practice of medicine is based on the best evidence available”.
“During this pandemic, I have felt this even more keenly, and believe that it is imperative to provide timely data that informs both the scientific field and the care of our patients,” he said.
Mehra said he understood Surgisphere to be a privately held company that purported to have data from hospitals around the world “that could be leveraged to answer important public health questions I posed in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic”.
“Since we do not have the ability to verify the primary data or primary data source, I no longer have confidence in the origination and veracity of the data, nor the findings they have led to,” he said.
“It is now clear to me that in my hope to contribute this research during a time of great need, I did not do enough to ensure that the data source was appropriate for this use. For that, and for all the disruptions – both directly and indirectly – I am truly sorry.”
A spokeswoman for the Lancet said the journal was “reviewing our requirements for data sharing and validation among authors, and data sharing following publication” as a result of the retracted study.
The University of Minnesota said it had no record of anyone at the university collaborating with Surgisphere. A spokesman said the university had sought to contact the company for clarification when it discovered it was being promoted on the company’s website but that its outreach had gone unanswered.
Both the University of Glasgow and Stanford told the Guardian they were not aware of any relationship with Surgisphere.
Guardian Australia has contacted Desai numerous times for comment.
Back in the day we used that expression for whatever drug was on offer. Today that is the siren call for the Pharmaceutical companies to create a version of another drug, raise prices on ones that exist to pay for said new version and then make sure we are all in need of it some way or another.
And that argument is vested in Capitalism and of course the idea that winner take all. So public health is the Knight int the Chess game and we are playing for our lives. The idea that profit over safety is not a debate and not mutually exclusive. But then again it has been as we have the most horrific health care system in the world, not the best, or would we see on the nightly news medical professional after medical professional begging for equipment, some of it just made of paper?
Now why we have so many different groups and agencies on the trail of Corvid is because they all want to patent the miracle cure or test that will generate millions. But the reality is that what should be a collaborative cooperative process is now a divisive and protective one largely not due to just economics but to trade wars, borders and other prohibitive restrictions that make this type of process nearly impossible.
And why the hysteria over unproven drugs for other treatments such as Malaria and Arthritis are being tested in desperation and out of need as something is better than nothing. And we got nothing.
The New York Times did an amazing essay story on Why We Can’t Have Nice Drugs which explains in detail the drama behind why this is happening. It begins on this note:
The United States, an unrivaled scientific power, is led by a president who openly scoffs at international cooperation while pursuing a global trade war. India, which produces staggering amounts of drugs, is ruled by a Hindu nationalist who has ratcheted up confrontation with neighbors. China, a dominant source of protective gear and medicines, is bent on a mission to restore its former imperial glory.
Now, just as the world requires collaboration to defeat the coronavirus — scientists joining forces across borders to create vaccines, and manufacturers coordinating to deliver critical supplies — national interests are winning out. This time, the contest is over far more than which countries will make iPads or even advanced jets. This is a battle for supremacy over products that may determine who lives and who dies.
This is World War Z. Talk about the War on Drugs!
Now the reality is that we also have testing issues such as well getting tested without meeting the strict criteria in which to do so. So you lie and in turn are tested and are you certain you are either POS or NEG? Well the margin of error is not given in the daily updates when the varying Governors announce the current POS and in turn Hospitalized and those are now broken down into those admitted into ICU and those on Ventilators which again says nothing about the remaining core group. Are they sick, sickish or what, just walking super spreaders?
Which brings me to the core of the story about how irony or is it an oxymoron that a drug company became the super spreader not just in America but globally. I love this story and wonder if it will affect their stock prices as that is all that matters. And how about the Lifetime movie on this one! Also that it started in Boston home of the Massholes. Then it went to Nashville. Shit that poor city can’t get a break! And did they release Pharma Bro yet from prison as he thinks he can find a cure? But really shouldn’t Tiger King get a pardon too?
How a Premier U.S. Drug Company Became a Virus ‘Super Spreader’ Biogen employees unwittingly spread the coronavirus from Massachusetts to Indiana, Tennessee and North Carolina.
By Farah Stockman and Kim Barker The New York Times April 12, 2020
BOSTON — On the first Monday in March, Michel Vounatsos, chief executive of the drug company Biogen, appeared in good spirits. The company’s new Alzheimer’s drug was showing promise after years of setbacks. Revenues had never been higher.
Onstage at an elite health care conference in Boston, Mr. Vounatsos touted the drug’s “remarkable journey.” Asked if the coronavirus that was ravaging China would disrupt supply chains and upend the company’s big plans, Mr. Vounatsos said no.
“So far, so good,” he said.
But even as he spoke, the virus was already silently spreading among Biogen’s senior executives, who did not know they had been infected days earlier at the company’s annual leadership meeting.
Biogen employees, most feeling healthy, boarded planes full of passengers. They drove home to their families. And they carried the virus to at least six states, the District of Columbia and three countries, outstripping the ability of local public health officials to trace the spread.
The Biogen meeting was one of the earliest examples in the United States of what epidemiologists call “superspreading events” of Covid-19, where a small gathering of people leads to a huge number of infections. Unlike the most infamous clusters of cases stemming from a nursing home outside Seattle or a 40th birthday party in Connecticut, the Biogen cluster happened at a meeting of top health care professionals whose job it was to fight disease, not spread it.
“The smartest people in health care and drug development — and they were completely oblivious to the biggest thing that was about to shatter their world,” said John Carroll, editor of Endpoints News, which covers the biotech industry.
The official count of those sickened — 99, including employees and their contacts, according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health — includes only those who live in that state. The true number across the United States is certainly higher. The first two cases in Indiana were Biogen executives. So was the first known case in Tennessee, and six of the earliest cases in North Carolina.
All the people outside Massachusetts whom The New York Times has connected to the cluster have recovered. But it’s impossible to say for certain whether anyone became gravely ill or died from the spread out of the conference.
In hindsight, many people have criticized Biogen’s decision to continue with its leadership meeting in late February, which was attended by vice presidents from European countries already hit by the virus. Others in the industry fault Biogen for being too tight-lipped about the outbreak.
At least two of the company’s senior executives have tested positive. Citing privacy concerns, the company has declined to name them, even as other chief executives in biotech have disclosed their positive tests.
Responding to questions from The Times, Mr. Vounatsos refused to say even whether he had been tested for Covid-19.
“He is completely focused on employee safety, supplying medicines to patients, and leading the company,” said a Biogen spokesman, David Caouette. “This takes precedence over his personal health status.”
The company has defended its handling of the leadership meeting and its aftermath, saying it made the best decisions it could with the information available at the time.
“For a company whose mission is to save lives, it was very difficult to see our colleagues and community directly affected by this disease,” Mr. Vounatsos said in his first public comments about what happened at Biogen. “We would never have knowingly put anyone at risk.”
Founded in 1978 and based near Boston, Biogen helped pioneer the biotechnology industry, specializing in multiple sclerosis drugs. The company is best known now for its work on a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s.
Its experimental drug was seen as a potential holy grail — until the company announced about a year ago that the drug appeared to be a failure in large-scale trials. Patients were devastated. The company’s stock nose-dived.
But last fall, in a stunning reversal, Biogen announced that further analysis of the data suggested the drug actually worked at higher doses. Mr. Vounatsos said the company planned to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration “as soon as possible.” The stock soared; the company pulled in record annual revenues of about $14.4 billion.
By the time of Biogen’s annual leadership meeting on Feb. 26 and 27, spirits were high. So was the pressure to deliver.
Although some other companies canceled international meetings around that time, Biogen never discussed doing so. The outbreak was raging in China but had not yet been declared a worldwide pandemic. As of Feb. 21, the Friday before the meeting, the United States had only 30 confirmed cases, according to data compiled by The Times. Biogen executives in Germany, Switzerland and Italy — where there were just 20 known cases — packed their bags.
On the first night, about 175 executives gathered for a buffet dinner and cocktails at the Marriott Long Wharf overlooking Boston Harbor. Colleagues who hadn’t seen each other in a year shook hands and vied for face time with bosses. Europeans gave customary kisses on both cheeks. ImageOn the first night of Biogen’s annual leadership meeting, 175 executives gathered for a buffet dinner and cocktails at the Marriott Long Wharf in Boston, touching off a Covid-19 cluster in Massachusetts and several other states. On the first night of Biogen’s annual leadership meeting, 175 executives gathered for a buffet dinner and cocktails at the Marriott Long Wharf in Boston, touching off a Covid-19 cluster in Massachusetts and several other states. Credit…Cody O’Loughlin for The New York Times
“It’s unfortunately the perfect breeding ground for a virus,” said one former vice president, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his ties to Biogen.
Two days later, the senior executives returned to their offices. One drove to a manufacturing center in North Carolina. Others flew back to Europe.
Peter Bergethon, the head of digital and quantitative medicine at Biogen, went home to his wife, an infectious-disease doctor.
A Biogen vice president in the Alzheimer’s franchise and her husband attended a party the following Saturday night at a friend’s home in Princeton, N.J., with about 45 other people.
They celebrated a holiday in the Greek Orthodox calendar, the end of the Carnival season, with special sweets and traditional dances that involved holding hands in a circle. Although celebrations in Greece had been canceled, the party in New Jersey went forward, since White House officials had just pronounced the virus in the United States to be under control.
That night, Allana Taranto, a photographer who covered the leadership meeting for Biogen, celebrated her 42nd birthday with her boyfriend and another couple.
Over that weekend, though, some people in the company had already started feeling sick.
Jie Li, a 37-year-old biostatistician who worked on the Alzheimer’s drug team, had chills, a cough and aches. She was too junior to attend the company’s leadership conference, but her boss went, and showed up at the office afterward.
On March 2, the following Monday, the company’s chief medical officer sent an email informing everyone who attended the leadership meeting that some people had fallen ill and telling them to contact a health care provider if they felt sick.
“We moved quickly,” Mr. Caouette said.
Still, that same day, the company’s four top executives attended a huge health care conference hosted by the investment firm Cowen. At another Marriott in Boston, they held meetings in hotel rooms with potential investors. Another attendee who met some of the same investors said he heard that members of the Biogen team looked sick.
At the conference, concern about the coronavirus mounted as word spread that some companies, including Vertex and Seattle Genetics, had canceled their appearances. By Tuesday, the second day of the conference, many attendees had stopped shaking hands.
Later, investors were informed that two of the four Biogen executives at the conference tested positive for the virus.
In defense of his company’s decision to attend the event, Mr. Vounatsos said, “When we learned a number of our colleagues were ill, we did not know the cause was Covid-19.”
That Tuesday, Biogen contacted the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and reported that about 50 employees in the Boston area and overseas had flulike symptoms. Biogen employees began showing up at the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital, demanding tests. They were told their cases didn’t satisfy the testing criteria at the time, since none had traveled to a hot spot or had known exposure to someone who had tested positive for Covid-19.
The next day, confirmation of the worst arrived. Two Biogen executives who had returned home to Germany and Switzerland, where tests were more widely available, had tested positive.
On Thursday, the company held a call with its staff and shared the news. All office-based employees were directed to work from home.
Yet on that same day, a Biogen executive visited the Washington office of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, the industry’s top lobbying group. Soon after, that executive tested positive, prompting the group to close its headquarters for deep cleaning.
The next few weeks turned into a blur of Biogen employees leaving casseroles on one another’s doorsteps and trading news about who had fallen ill.
Dr. Bergethon infected his wife, the infectious-disease specialist. While their symptoms were manageable, the scariest part was the uncertainty, Dr. Bergethon recalled recently at a virtual event hosted by the University of Rochester.
“We didn’t know we were going to recover,” he said. “We didn’t know what was coming next.”
Ms. Taranto, the photographer who had been at Biogen’s leadership conference, unknowingly gave the illness to a friend at her birthday dinner. She had felt healthy at the time.
Of the four dozen people who attended the party in New Jersey, at least 15 later tested positive, according to public health authorities.
A Biogen executive, Chris Baumgartner, became the first Covid case in Tennessee. “I was patient zero,” he wrote on Facebook. He added: “Imagine having to confront a virus so feared, it now has the entire world on the brink of mass hysteria.”
The earliest cases in Indiana and North Carolina were tied to the company. One Biogen employee even carried the virus back to China.
After falling ill with flu-like symptoms, Ms. Li called an ambulance and was given a coronavirus test, according to a public health official in Belmont, the upscale Boston suburb where she lived. But before she received the results, she booked a flight to Beijing, boarding a plane with her husband and son, leaving behind their house, a white BMW and other trappings of the life they had built in the United States over 15 years.
“They must have been desperate,” said Dr. William Q. Meeker, a statistics professor at Iowa State University who had worked closely with Ms. Li’s husband, Yili Hong, also a statistician. The couple worried most about their 2-year-old, who would be far from relatives if they both fell ill, according to a former graduate school classmate.
Ms. Li took medicine to conceal her symptoms, and revealed her health condition to flight attendants on board the flight, Air China and Beijing disease control officials said last month.
After she landed in China, authorities placed her under investigation for “obstructing the prevention of infectious diseases,” a crime that reportedly carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison.
In Beijing, the couple suffered from high fevers and lung infections and were hospitalized, Dr. Meeker said. He recently received an email from Mr. Hong that said they were recuperating, but that their lives “will be different in the future.”
It appears that all of Biogen’s employees who fell ill have recovered. Aside from Ms. Li, who was fired, all have returned to work, Mr. Caouette said.
Biogen has since joined the fight against the virus. The company donated $10 million to expand access to testing and to provide emergency food and protective gear for hospital workers.
Company officials said its struggle against the pandemic is just beginning: Biogen, for instance, has also entered into talks with Vir Technology about manufacturing a potential treatment for Covid-19, another pharmaceutical holy grail that could make untold amounts of money.
Well another week filled with shootings which means more medical emergencies and long recoveries for those whom survived from their injuries and those whose injuries are no less visible but no less damaging and both with equal chance of finding recovery and help once they enter the medical industrial complex. We already know about the outrageous costs involved and in turn the time and expertise required to treat the victims but are any of these Doctors and others any more qualified or better prepared to handle what this means? All people are different and respond and heal and in turn demand and need individualized treatment and care and if you think you are getting that from your Physician that you believe has your best interest at heart think again.
Just my endless strum and drang with Vanderbilt constantly reminds me that despite having familiar faces and a well established treatment plan you will still hit road blocks and issues that no one in the medical field deals with well and in turn feels compelled to project and in turn blame you the patient for their failures. I have no doubt the Intern who fucked up my Dental Implant if he knew (as they rotate every four months so I have never seen or spoken to him about that mistake but it was clearly pointed out to the next Intern who assisted the Surgeon during the corrective process) would blame me somehow for his fuck up it. It is how they roll in the complex.
The below article discusses just how those biases and beliefs affect diagnosis and treatment. This week it was revealed that heart surgery is often unnecessary when drugs can do the trick. Shocking! I know, not really. We have heard that many medications do not do what they are believed to do and we are already overmedicated and overprescribed from antibiotics to opioids. And yet the costs of drugs continue to rise. We already know people of color, those uninsured and of course women are often misdiagnosed and in turn arrested, dismissed or placed in confinement due to laws, regulations and of course White Male Physicians who just know better. What.the.fuck.ever.
Your diagnosis was wrong. Could doctor bias have been a factor?
By Eve Glicksman The Washington Post November 18, 2019 at 4:26 p.m. EST
Doctors, like the rest of us, make mistakes. Every year, upward of 12 million Americans see a physician and come away with a wrong diagnosis. The top cause? Bad judgment, says David Newman-Toker, director of the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality’s Center for Diagnostic Excellence.
Newman-Toker found that judgment errors accounted for 86 percent of 55,377 medical malpractice claims he evaluated where misdiagnosis led to death or disability. The judgment blame bucket includes an assortment of knowledge gaps, inattentions, misinterpretations and what Angie Rosen believes led to the misdiagnosis of her stroke in August: implicit bias.
Implicit bias occurs when a well-intended physician’s unconscious assumptions get in the way of objectively gathering or assessing a patient. Rosen, 37, thinks that her age, gender and possibly her same-sex spouse were behind a doctor’s dismissal of her symptoms in a Philadelphia hospital emergency room.
Rosen experienced a terrible stabbing pain in the back of her head that became a migraine. Her left eye started drooping, her right side was numb, she couldn’t swallow. When she tried to walk to the bathroom, she felt as if she was intoxicated.
An ER doctor examined her, ordered tests and told her to go home. It was unlikely she had a stroke, he responded when she asked. Through a video consult, a neurologist concurred with his assessment.
Rosen insisted, however, she felt too ill to leave the hospital, and she was admitted. Two days later, the doctor said her returned studies did not indicate a stroke and discharged her.
Rosen’s migraine continued to rage, however. Her family took her to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for another opinion. “Do you believe me?” she remembers asking the staff desperately. Within two hours, doctors determined she had suffered a stroke, admitted her and started treatment.
At home now, Rosen continues to make progress in physical therapy. It’s uncertain whether the treatment delay will prevent full recovery.
If you are having a stroke, there is about a 9 percent chance you will be misdiagnosed in the ER — a statistic that applies to all age groups when the patient is seen initially in the ER. But if you are young, female, a person of color or have limited education (less than a high school degree), your risk of misdiagnosis soars, Newman-Toker discovered.
Rosen, in the 18-to-45 age group, was seven times more likely than a 75-year-old to be misdiagnosed, his research showed. Simply being a woman raised the risk a doctor would miss her stroke by 30 percent.
Is implicit bias a gateway to health-care disparities? It’s hard to tease out whether some diagnostic errors are caused by racism or sexism, or simply a lack of knowledge about how certain diseases appear differently because of a person’s race, age or gender, says Newman-Toker, also a professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Bias thrives in the void of expertise.”
Alyson McGregor, co-founder and director of the Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine Division at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, maintains women get the short-shrift in health care.
“It’s the bias of a whole medical system,” McGregor says. “One-sex medicine,” she calls it, when physicians are trained to identify symptoms only as they appear in white men.
Add that to centuries of women’s medical complaints relegated to feminine hysteria. “Anxiety is a wastebasket diagnosis for the unknown,” says McGregor, which can happen when a woman’s symptoms don’t follow specific patterns learned in medical school.
Then, there’s race. African Americans with severe depression are four to nine times more likely to be misdiagnosed with schizophrenia compared to white Americans showing the same cluster of symptoms, says Stephen Strakowski, acting senior associate dean of research and a psychiatry professor at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. As a result, they do not get the antidepressant or mood stabilizer they need and may suffer unnecessary side effects from schizophrenia medications.
In Strakowski’s studies, doctors consistently put more emphasis on the psychotic than the depressive or manic symptoms when evaluating black patients. “This almost certainly stems from unconscious bias,” he says, noting that the rate of schizophrenia is the same for all races.
People with mental illness may be affected the most by implicit assumptions overall, says Mark Graber, chief medical officer of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine. Physicians are focused on the patient’s mental health so they may not notice a heart problem. Or when the patient complains about abdominal pain, the doctors may tie it to depression or anxiety without testing.
So what’s a patient to do?
Doctors get the diagnosis right 9 out of 10 times, Graber says. Our brains are hard-wired to take shortcuts and this usually serves us well.
“It isn’t feasible to explore dozens of explanations for each symptom during an appointment,” says Thomas Yuen, on the faculty of the Family Medicine Residency Program at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland, Pa., who has studied cognitive biases. Patients need to speak up if they think a doctor is missing something, he says.
By doing the legwork of gathering medical records yourself to bring to an appointment, you give the doctor more time to think, not generalize about symptoms, Newman-Toker says.
Keep in mind that attributing a symptom to stress or anxiety can be a default position when a doctor is stumped.
“Ask ‘What is the most worrisome thing this could be and why isn’t it that?’ ” Newman-Toker says. If your doctor can’t support an opinion or is dismissive, it’s a red flag that the diagnosis may be a gut reaction, he says.
Whenever you have doubts, “Ask the doctor if there can be more than one thing going on,” Newman-Toker adds. Obesity may cause back pain, for example, but if a doctor concludes that without looking further, that is unconscious bias.
And while you want to believe all is well, check your own blind spots. Don’t let a physician tell you there is nothing to worry about if a referral seems wiser. “Keep at it,” Graber says. “If you are not reassured, get a second opinion.” Likewise, revisit your doctor if symptoms persist; it could be a wrong diagnosis, not medicine that isn’t working.
Implicit bias in clinical settings is hard to measure and good data is lacking.
“[Bias] may be a bigger problem than we think,” Yuen says. “The final frontier [for physicians] could be our own judgment and emotions.”
It is the Yale motto meaning Light and Truth. Funny when I think of the Ivy League those are two words that don’t come to mind in the least.
Yale is the Alma Mater of the Bush Dynasty and the Romney Clan. The Clinton’s met there and even Jodie Foster has a degree from said institution. She took a long break from being a child actor and has a fairly well established pedigree. There were many actors who have benefited from Yale’s acclaimed theatre and arts program and with that I give them a pass but as for any other white bread that found themselves in the acclaimed hall I will pass. I have not met one single individual that had one ounce of dignity and perspective that possesses degrees from said institutions like Yale.
The “writer” J.D. Vance of Hillbilly Elegy went to Yale and is as a big a right wing douche as any of the others with less colorful backgrounds which may include Dr. Ben Carson who is also a Yale Graduate. He seems to be on the drugs he administered to patients given his bizarre demeanor and arrogance. Intelligent? I would not have him remove a fatty tumor from my body but I am sure in his heyday he was a good surgeon. Whatever that means. I bet that he and John Bolton really yuck it up in Trump Cabinet meetings. Shame Clarence Thomas can’t join them.
I could go on with the famous grads of Yale and again realize they have an acclaimed theater college so don’t count any of them… HEEYYY Fonzie! But the bulk of the minds are largely conservative and even those liberal are not very left of the right as there in the esteemed halls one learns early the art of self preservation.
I read this in the UK Guardian and it outs the writer as an Addict and in turn Graduate of Yale who brilliantly reminds the readers that much of the wealth and history of the esteemed school are vested heavily in hypocrisy. Shocking, I know! Not really. There is your truth and light.
As an Oxycontin ‘junkie’ at Yale, I saw how my addiction helped fund the university
Through attending an Ivy League university as an addict, I learned that while I might be considered ‘deplorable’, elites are not much better
Mon 28 May 2018 Matthew Jeffrey Abrams Guardian UK
I’m a junkie – recovered now for 14 years, but a junkie just the same. A high-school dropout and chronic runaway, I spent my later teenage years shooting black tar heroin and smuggling drugs across the Mexican border – mostly ketamine and OxyContin, the latter of which I also shot. Back then I was a loser, a washout, a petty narcotrafficker, a statistical blip in the opioid epidemic.
But today I’m also a doctor (of the illegitimate variety, mind you). Clean at 19, I spent my later twenties at Yale University earning a PhD, which I completed last spring. There I was a scholar, a student, a teacher,a valued member of an exclusive intellectual community.
Being a junkie in the Ivy League doesn’t guarantee success, but it does guarantee perspective. I learned a lot about America’s upper crust, and I saw much that my colleagues never could. But only last week, during a visit to my alma mater, did I begin to understand the role that Yale played in my own addiction.
Believe me when I tell you that you are not deplorables, that you are assets to this country.
Spring having arrived, I visited Yale, which wears the season well. I wandered the campus before entering Dwight Chapel, which stands in the heart of Old Campus and hosts a small morning AA meeting. I used to attend that meeting quite regularly, although I remember our fellowship being mostly indigents from the nearby New Haven Green and kids from local rehabs. I remember two things: we were opioid addicts, and we were invisible to the Yale community – ignored, really, like unwelcome pests.
And it was then, sitting alone in that musty chapel, when it hit me: to my left stood the Skull and Bones crypt , the secret windowless clubhouse for the country’s most exclusive private society, whose founder’s extended family had become the largest American merchants in the Indo-Chinese opium trade. And beyond the crypt stood Yale’s medical campus, which has received major gifts from the Sackler family, whose wealth comes largely from owning Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin. Purdue Pharma criminally misbranded that drug to make it appear harmless. The company pleaded guilty in 2007 and agreed to pay around $600m in fines.
But behind me, I also realized, beyond the Old Campus quad filled with elite Yale undergrads (one of whom, I’ll never forget, once wore a $70,000 Patek Phillippe wristwatch to my class), stood the New Haven Green. Many times while crossing the Green I was offered heroin and OxyContin, and more than once I saw EMTs attempting to revive an addict with naloxone. What’s more, across the street stands New Haven City Hall, where last October the city formally sued Purdue Pharma for their brazen behavior and illegal practices.
The irony would be comical if it were not so lethal: I once violated federal laws to smuggle a drug across an international border that was manufactured by a company whose malfeasance simultaneously exacerbated my own addiction and, through the personal donations by the owners of Purdue, enriched a university that would later grant me a PhD.
While Oxycontin had almost killed me, it had also helped build Yale’s vaunted Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences. So had every opioid addict in my little chapel meeting – so had every dope fiend in America.
I’ve learned much about this country’s powerful and elite, but I have no interest in scolding them. People and places like Yale will never change. I’d rather address my junkie brothers and sisters, and everyone else that this epidemic has touched:
Listen, friends, I have a dual identity, and I have for most of my life. I’m an addict kid and a suburban child, an Ivy-League insider and a dope–shooting outsider, a deplorable and a doctor. I’ve learned first–hand how little regard the wealthy, corporate and institutional worlds have for us, even supposed liberal bastions like Yale. I’ve learned that while we have the privilege of perspective, they have the perspective of privilege. And I’ve learned something else: they are wrong about us. We are not worthless, or weak.
Dear brothers and sisters, believe me when I tell you that you are no less special or brilliant or talented or ambitious than the Yale students I once knew and taught.
Believe me when I tell you that you are not deplorables, that you are assets to this country, that your will and resolve to hustle and survive make you uniquely equipped for the contemporary world. Believe me when I tell you that you are wanted, and useful, and important and deserve to thrive. Believe me when I tell you that I love you, and so do so many others, and that you should never, ever give up.
As I wrote about in The Card what it feels like and what it means when a negative word such as RACIST is leveled against you. I am pretty sure that is the King of Spades (yes that is pun) in the deck and in turn few others carry the weight of a full house. Misogynist, Sexist, Islamaphobe and Anti-Semite are all cards that comprise the cards to fill out the run but are still lesser cards. Being a racist is somehow equivalent to Slaveholder I guess as again I am not sure what that label means when one declares you as such. For now there are federal hate crime laws if one acts upon said racist ideology but being one is not criminal nor a crime. And unless you take to the streets with a Tiki torch I am assuming that like kinky sex you could easily closet it, like being Gay in the 50s!
Sarah Braasch of Yale is a RACIST as she has immense issues with her Black Yale Classmate to the point of calling the Police when she found her sleeping in the Common Room. The Common Room denotes this common thing and clearly you may find a sleeping colleague and compared to the other options this may not be a bad thing, annoying as should you be quiet, keep the lights off and leave or turn them on go about your business whatever that would be in the Common Room? I have never attended Yale or Harvard but what I have come to know about them is that they are the elite and they have privileges in ways I will never understand or come to know. So Sarah is spoiled no doubt and I am not sure she is akin to the Starbucks Manager who seemed to have some issues buried in the Starbucks policy that enabled her to either mask her biases or prejudices towards those not like here, but again we will never know as we have never heard her story about the event. But it also appears that in this case with Sarah we will never either. If ever was an appropriate time for Restorative Justice this moment is it.
I was at Publix and I watched three teenage girls grab a sheet cake and run out of the store being chased by a Publix employee who took a photo of the car license plate and I doubt seriously that the Police pursued the cake thieves. At the Opry Mills mall shooting the three young people all 22 were having a disagreement over an insult posted on Facebook and in turn one shot and killed the other and the female companion had in her purse two other guns that led to her arrest as well. Those and the one in the shooting were stolen, The woman who owned the gun had said gun in her car as her father was shot and killed decades ago and she needed it to feel safe. It appears the kids or someone whom they knew stole the gun form her car. The woman, white, the kids are black, one dead one definitely going to prison, the other undoubtedly to jail All over a sleight and gun that was never needed nor ever used for its intended purpose. Every single day another story is about a theft, a shooting or an act of violence, almost all of it young and almost all them black. And this is the justification behind the behaviors and beliefs of many as this Mayoral candidate here believes.
And I have never felt compelled to care about race as the first thing I saw in the case of the cake was that the girls were young, really young. But every day we hear about the kids who are stealing, carjacking, shooting or harming others and here in Nashville it is almost always exclusively black children. A less that 20 percent of the population are the largest committers of crime? But then today I watched a White woman on a security camera shove stuff in a stroller at White’s Mercantile in Franklin, one of my most favorite stores and I was relieved. This is what it has become I again note the race of the perpetrator for what and for whom I have no idea.
But in this lies in with the idea that it was the white working poor who brought us Trump. No, no they weren’t. Just as we are as appalled with Kayne West or others of color who seem to validate the Trump the reality of life is that we all are who we are and that nothing is as it seems. I do think we have found ourselves at a real precipice dealing with the issue of race that we never did during the Obama years. And now that we have the epitome of the Southern Boss as President we finally are. And we still stereotype and segregate among races of the same color. There are White Elites and Liberals vs Progressives, Conservatives and Fundamentalists and of course White Trash. Funny those are the same people whose Teachers took to the hills to strike for better school funding and did not vote a moron in the primary in West Virginia. Yes all of the problems in America seem to be in Appalachia or in the Midwest or as we now call it Trump Country. There are no disgruntled sad angry drug addled under/unemployed white people anywhere else. And we can thank the obsession due to one book – Hillbilly Elegy.
If you have not read Hillbilly Elegy you can and should but be advised that J.D. Vance is too a Yale graduate and his smugness and arrogance is that of fully forged identity with the G.O.P which is not surprising given his Ivy League credentials. That also means his assessment and attitudes are very much colored by his politics. Sarah Evans in The New Republic is quick to point out that while he writes of a white community largely decimated by a lack of work, opportunity, education he writes of his own world and not of others who share the region as home. The Bitter Southerner also has an essay from two young people who have words of rebuke after Vance spoke a group in their region.
Funny how the Opioid Crisis is a Crisis as in reality that is not the first nor last where drugs have been featured in American crisis, as we have had the Marijuana one, the Crack one and the Meth one. Ah I remember them well and the endings were very different for those who lives were touched by our War on Drugs. Like the one on Poverty there were no winners in either.
I could spend the entire day documenting each encounter with those “different” than myself and guess what that is pretty much everyone. Unless I meet an Educated White Atheist woman age 58, from Seattle, who is not married, never had children, is not Gay is self sufficient, highly read and informed and highly independent then no, no one is like me. I am different like everyone else. I am not solely defined by my race or gender.
There is one thing that you understand reading Vance’s book, or Evans article or the essay from The Bitter Southerner is that those in the South and those who are poor are immensely complex and complicated people and much of this passed on like a STD that runs generations. It appears that once one leaves they do not return and if they do only as observers or sylphs that impart wisdom that they got out and you can too if you work hard enough, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, stay off drugs, get an education, pray and then you too will get a job that will take you out of here. Again what that says is that anyone who stays is not smart enough, good enough and people don’t like them is because they were not strong enough or good enough or worked hard enough or did enough and/or failed to pray enough in which to do so. It is never enough.
My South, well that is just that – not mine – has truly been a revelation. I came here two years ago and cannot wait to leave. I am exhausted trying to reconcile my anger and rage, a dental treatment has no timeline, my loneliness with no friends or even solid acquaintances to shoot the breeze or catch a movie with and in turn my work in public schools that embarrass and bore me on a daily basis. When my singular largest encounters are with children so traumatized by poverty and their social and racial isolation it affects you in ways you could never anticipate; I get the anger but I have no interest in which to connect or even try to assuage it. I am exhausted from trying to care and pretending I do when in actuality I count the days like a Prisoner in solitary. That is how I feel here that I can never be enough it rubs off on you like the humidity and it is oppressive. I drink way too much wine every night, watch way too much bad TV and in turn wake up as angry and alone as I was the day before. I am fortunate enough to be able to rent cars, take Yoga or sign up for Barre classes, swim at the Y or take holidays that at least temporarily revitalize me. I cannot believe that I will turn 60 here and not be vacating within the few moths that follow that I worry about it daily as I see faces of such anger here and this is in the “it” city and by it I am not sure what that truly means.
It seems to be mismanagement of city and school funds, a State legislature that overrides any Municipal policies, decisions or plans. It means that most of our Government is dictated by an electorate that is less than a third of the population and that only a third of the population is in fact educated. It means substandard education opportunities, a legacy of racism and oppression of women and an obsession with religion. But even a coffee shop here is under fire for trying to do the right thing but it is never enough. The card has been tossed and he too must make amends. Okay what are those? It is never enough.
And there is little I can say or do that will change hearts or minds here about anything. This is not a place that embraces knowledge or conflict they see it as rude, aggressive and elite. Check, check, check, all of the above. I have never called the Police or been afraid of any minority individual in my life. I have never reported, graded or treated anyone differently because of their color/ethnicity/gender/sexuality in even unconscious micro aggression ways. And if I did I would immediately apologize but that is not enough it seems today. If I don’t like you I DON’T LIKE YOU. And I have met many kids I don’t like I am pretty open about our conflict and I work around it or at least try. You can when you teach, you do group projects, never read a paper with the name first and in turn write exams that are machine graded and you can handle with some effort if you choose. Conflict resolution is what they call it and if you can manage it with a child you can take this into adulthood. It is possible as ask yourself when you are working with someone you don’t like what do you do? I assume whine as today working through and finding compromise seems to be a problem. Blame, point fingers and excuse. Good working philosophy and it appears that Amazon has mastered that quite well.
Then I came here and I feel that regardless that only seeing people through a prism of race is a problem. Add to this that every encounter is broken down, over analyzed, digressed and dissected to the point I cannot live in the moment and embrace it. I worry that this will carry over with me the longer I stay. This is my South, a dying vine that has been pruned and some living blooms are there but it is only a matter of time before it will finally die. There is nothing here that tells me otherwise. Generations used to be a soap opera and that is what runs in the water like lead – anger, resentment, jealousy all the elements that they preach in the Church is why they do. The love money almost as much as they love God and it is that which is their lead its toxic.
Off the Rack Publishing 