Hippocrates In San Diego

Bubble News

An interesting series from James Fallows of The Atlantic covers Obama’s trip to Asia, or more specifically the US media’s coverage of the trip. It is making me reconsider some of yesterday’s criticisms of how the Obama administration has been handling human rights issues.

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Europe leads on human rights, exposes US shortcomings

I came across this post on Thich Nhat Hanh’s site for the Bat Nha Monastery in Báo Lôc, Vietnam. This appears to be the second statement to come out of the EP concerning the events at Bat Nha over the last several months, covered early on by Matt Steinglass of GlobalPost. In its resolution, the EP unequivocally lays blame for the violence (and the failure to stop it) on the government of Vietnam, and links support for human rights to current negotiations meant to reestablish ties between Vietnam and Europe.

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Why They Protest

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Sunshining

I’m sitting outside at the hospital, having already had my fill of caffeine and lunch, in the sunshine. My mind has been on events in Iran; popular uprisings like this always capture my attention, but this one is quite personal. I wonder if my many cousins in Iran — in Tehran, Ahwaz, and elsewhere — are out on the streets, putting their lives at risk for an ideal.

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Gettin’ wonkish…

My friend David emailed me today, asking if I had any interest in working to arrange a local, small scale discussion group on healthcare reform, as part of a call from President-Elect Obama’s healthcare advisory team. I think the idea is to have grassroots groups discuss the local conditions, and to provide some sort of input so that a national discussion can be had. This is exactly the type of discussion that was missing the last time Democrats tried to bring healthcare reform to the national stage: the Clinton plan was ill-timed (in the midst of an economic boom, with sharply decreased numbers of uninsured due to low unemployment) and poorly executed, politically. It wasn’t in the national consciousness like it seems to be now.

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Here’s hoping for some stimulation

N. and I have put an offer on a house in E [city].; the chaos of the last few weeks is what’s made putting up new posts lower on my to-do list. The offer has been accepted, and since it’s a short-sell (the current owner owes more than they can sell the home for) their bank needs to approve the offer before it can be accepted and move into escrow. We expect that to happen in the next couple of weeks.

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Burma: As It Happens

Those of you reading this have likely heard of the events of the last several days in the nation of Burma, also known as Myanmar. I encourage you to visit Ko Htike’s Prosaic Collection, a blog built by a Burmese man living in London who has received and posted images from eye witnesses to the terrible events there. The images are impressive and heartbreaking all at the same time.


Images courtesy Ko Htike’s Prosaic Collection

Georgetown Book Shop

Through an acquaintance, I’ve just discovered the Georgetown Book Shop, which appears to have a great collection of American propaganda posters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The true fascination comes when looking at posters that reflect the major political issues of the day; they sound remarkably familiar. I especially recommend the section of immigration posters. Many of the arguments used by anti-immigration forces back then (and much of the imagery in the posters) is still in use today, albeit in different forms.

Art. 25, Gen. Assy. res. 217A(III) of 10Dec48

I deal with the consequences of our healthcare insurance system every day. I work in two hospitals: one is a large urban public hospital that takes care of a large portion of the county’s uninsured, including homeless people as well as the working poor without adequate insurance; the other is a private hospital that is more like a hotel, with wealthy patients who have private insurance as well as Medicare or MediCal, California’s state insurance program.

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Veteran’s Day Blues

I spent the better part of an hour watching “Combat Hospital” on CNN. I could barely choke my pizza down past the lump in my throat. This was hard for me: although I had seen similarly gruesome visual images in medical school, the context of the images on the screen made them intensely powerful. Every one of the patients brought into the Combat Support Hospital (CASH) was under the age of 25, with the exception of a sergeant who collapsed from emotion after transporting two of his wounded troops to the hospital. American soldiers and Marines as well as Iraqi civilians of all ages were treated by the doctors and nurses. It seemed like an incredible waste of youth. To be 18 or 19 years old, given a powerful weapon (and often becoming a powerful weapon), to be taught unending discipline, all for the end result of a mangled limb or shattered psyche — this was the opposite of everything that I had been taught or trained to do in medicine. We are taught not to think of disease as the enemy, because that dehumanizes our patient, turns them into a battlefield rather than a person. “The War on Cancer” or “Assault on Diabetes” sounds antithetical to what I’m trying to do — improve the quality, and frequently the quantity, of life. Where in these soldiers’ field training manual is the quality of their life mentioned? Is it only addressed after a lucky, but incomplete, survivor leaves the CASH?

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