pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WILLFUL IGNORANCE Coolio and I laughed mightily at last night's birthday party. We also gave each other some interesting looks during another guest's health-care tirades. Susan was on her high horse about there being no need for people to see doctors or take medicine because doing so just makes the pharmaceutical companies (where, incidentally, several guests do research) rich. Programs that educate poor people about how to live healthily disgust her too, because everyone knows that rich Americans just watch television commercials and decide which drugs they need (which drives up health-care costs for everyone and guarantees that poor people will not receive health care). I said I agree that some of the worried well waste medical resources and that pharmaceutical commercials are designed to encourage people to seek out the medication, but did I really just hear her say that people don't need health care in the first place? And I told her that, if she had a family member with schizophrenia, as I do, then she would have a different opinion about the value of medications. And that's when she informed us that those medicines just lobotomize people for the sake of raking in higher profits. Coolio asked Susan if she believes that a person who can afford health care should not receive it if anyone else else cannot afford it, and Susan said that rich people wouldn't even need health care in the first place if they would live in a more healthy way. They won't do it though. They sit at home and eat cream sauces and drink expensive alcohol and drive up the cost of health care for everyone else. (Interesting. I heard an inversion of this argument not long ago from a wealthy Republican not so long ago, only he doesn't want his tax dollars paying for the health care of smoking poor people whose diet consists of Cheet-ohs and French onion dip and fast food.) If she is saying that my friend Shakespeare should not have received treatment for her breast cancer because someone else couldn't afford to go to the best hospital or that we should not be grateful that Shakespeare was diagnosed after Tomoxafin came to the market—or that, hey, cancer patients don't need doctors in the first place because they are somehow not living healthily enough—then she is just willfully ignorant. (I resisted saying that to her face though.) Coolio, who recently returned to school for a master of public health degree, educates patients about healthy nutrition, and had to respond when Susan said health-education programs are useless. Coolio mostly counsels diabetic patients, many of whom grew up poor and lacked adequate medical care, and many of whom did not understand the relationship between what they put in their bodies and their illness. She said she knows her educational sessions are improving her patients' health and that, if Susan saw such sessions, she would understand that too. Then Susan said that practically every kid in her child's school who sniffles has been diagnosed with asthma and that doctors are just making shit up because there's a new asthma medicine on the market. As an occasional sufferer of exercise-induced asthma, I know very well that an inability to catch your breath is not the same thing as sniffling. And doctors do too. But arguing that no one in Susan's kid's classes ever had a diagnosis is just irrelevant (as is my one isolated case). I asked if she had ever considered the amount of environmental pollution that children are exposed to now, or the fact that children are becoming overweight in our country in epidemic numbers This was all wasted breath, however, so most of us just quit responding to her tirades, because she was obviously not interested in hearing alternative viewpoints and had already made her up her mind about what's what and we were sick of listening to her up on her soapbox. Meanwhile, my ex tree, who has a PhD in molecular biology and did hearth research before she returned to school for her MD before she returned to school for her master in public health, just listened. I should have done the same. LISTENING TO: Broken Butterflies by Lucinda Williams READING: Organic Style magazine SINGING IN SHOWER: Language by Suzanne Vega: (if language were liquid it would be rushing in, instead here we are in a silence more eloquent than any words could ever be . . .) 10:24 a.m. - 2005-04-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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