Thursday, December 27, 2007

Two main events

Today they discussed Benazir Bhutto and the tiger at the San Francisco Zoo. Two events worlds apart, both fatal were discussed with the same passion and intensity. Bhutto is dead and the world is the worse for wear. The tiger Tatiana killed one young man and then was killed herself. The tiger did what tigers do. The tiger killed on instinct. Policemen do what policemen do. Do they also kill on instinct? What about Benazir Bhutto's killer, did he do it on instinct? Or did he have to be drugged before he sacrificed one of the great women of the world and himself and scores of others in his suicidal rage? Is it in all of us to follow blindly some outrageous order that lacks the sense that nature has given only in self-defense? I always thought that man had reason. Is the human intellect really more than mere instinct? The instinct for killing in the predator is for gain where the hunted at least serves as prey. What has nature come to when the killing doesn't serve as gain to the killer. It's a sick world that we are inheriting where the assassin does not even reap the rewards. How low have we sunk?

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Checking on the truth

It seems to me that the majority of my friends are not interested in hearing the truth. Ignorance is bliss, I presume. I tell people about my interest in vitamin D and all I hear is "you are scaring me." I am probably too obsessive about it. I am more of the persuasion that knowledge is power. The more I know about the basics of life, the less I am taken in by charlatans, and of those there are many. Whom do I trust, the God or evolution or a natural selection phenomenon or that pharmaceutical company that tries to make loads of money off of all of us? The entity that made us who we are as a group intended us to spend time outdoors in the sun. If that were not so, that entity would have given us the liver of a cod, or seal, or a fatty fish. But we were not made that way. We were made naked so that our skin could make as much vitamin D from ultraviolet rays as possible. So let's face it there is something wrong with those voices who have told us to stay out of the sun. And looking for the truth, there are in fact real scientist who agree. Check for yourself in the New England Journal of Medicine
for the facts on vitamin D.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Christmas is not far off

Christmas is not far off, and I should feel more in the spirit. The only thing that, at this time, tells me that Christmas is nearing is the Christmas tree I bought yesterday. The persimmons on the tree in the front yard don't count. They look beautiful, but they represent fall. Things are not made easier by the fact that we are meeting Erik's doctor next Tuesday. Erik's urologist is not one who'll mistake Erik's age by ten years; that has actually already happened. He does not invent out of the blue the diagnosis of cerebral palsy to cover his butt because he suspects that he didn't consider osteomalacia when he should have. But there are many others who have done that.

It's not enough that I get confused by the Kafkaesque situation produced by reading doctors' reports that have the air of Alice in Wonderland. Here no one fell down the rabbit hole, though. Nobody turned LARGER and then smaller. Nobody changed the notion of time the way the Mad Hatter did. No, all this is pure science. All the doctor has to do is state it and it comes true, as if what happened twenty years ago didn't weigh. Think of yourself as a doctor, and you have certain ambitions. What you do is follow you ambitions, namely that you strive to forage for feathers in your cap in a certain field, and pronounce that this or that person has Hurlers mucopolysaccharidosis. All the tests are done. When the results come in low and behold you notice that you are barking up the wrong tree. You don't keep looking up another tree to possibly see something much simpler like rickets. Oh, rickets is so dated. Rickets doesn't live here anymore. What if it's renal osteodystrophy. It sounds more important. You wouldn't do that. What you do instead is drop the patient like a hot potato and look for another undiagnosed something up a tree, and the real thing in the right tree is left all alone.

Erik is in a wheelchair because of that type of thinking. No wonder that so many mothers are turning to alternative medicine. I would do that if it could help. Unfortunately the internet and virtual searching came about 36 years too late for me.