In my early years in medicine, I had a shocking experience relevant to Mike’s commentary, "The New Belt and Road.” Ethel Wilson was a middle-aged African-American woman with metastatic breast cancer that was under my care in 1975, coming to my office in Los Angeles once a week for chemotherapy. I was examining Ethel on one of these visits when she told me another doctor’s office called her and asked her to come to their office. It seems, Ethel related to me, that one of her friends was diagnosed with TB, and this doctor’s office felt obligated to run tests on Ethel. Note that the usual procedure or protocol would be for the MD to call me and relate the pertinent history, and for me, Ethel’s key MD, to decide what to do. Instead, Ethel informed me, they ran blood tests, skin tests, X-rays, and an ECG (electrocardiogram). Ethel did not have to pay for this since she was on Medicare, and I believe she had co-insurance like Medicaid.
I could not believe that another MD would do something like this, so I called Dr. Corday, a now deceased cardiologist, and asked him, “Why didn’t you call me and allow me to decide what was pertinent testing for Ethel?” She has had a recent chest x-ray, and there is no indication that an ECG will help in ruling in or out an infectious disease like TB. Moreover, none of the blood tests you ordered are indicated. And along with all of this, you never informed me or sent me the results of what you did.
Corday’s response was truth-telling. It sheds light on the behavior of what Mike talks about, and what Dee Hock, founder of VISA, wrote about in The Birth of the Chaordic Age. Hock called them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
Ego, Envy, Avarice, Ambition
Corday’s glib reply to my asking, “Why did you do this?” was,
“Dr. Strum, you don't know the name of the game.”
PS. I have never compromised my principles. I have never positioned physician income as a higher priority than patient outcome. I have been able to have a well-led life, and I never financially raped a patient.
What we have with Trump is a rapist. He is a rapist of women, of the people and the planet. And we are so fucking naive that we have not learned to know a person by the company they keep. We have not learned that the acorn does not fall far from the tree. We have not learned that we know a man or a woman by their deeds, not their spiel.
And now, our nation, and it seems a lot of the world, has fallen prey to the wisdom of the adage:
Of deep concern is the potential to take this capacity to unimaginable reaches, with computer capacity to track /control choices and actions of individual citizens…. Way beyond what Hitler was able to accomplish.
The Name of the Game.
In my early years in medicine, I had a shocking experience relevant to Mike’s commentary, "The New Belt and Road.” Ethel Wilson was a middle-aged African-American woman with metastatic breast cancer that was under my care in 1975, coming to my office in Los Angeles once a week for chemotherapy. I was examining Ethel on one of these visits when she told me another doctor’s office called her and asked her to come to their office. It seems, Ethel related to me, that one of her friends was diagnosed with TB, and this doctor’s office felt obligated to run tests on Ethel. Note that the usual procedure or protocol would be for the MD to call me and relate the pertinent history, and for me, Ethel’s key MD, to decide what to do. Instead, Ethel informed me, they ran blood tests, skin tests, X-rays, and an ECG (electrocardiogram). Ethel did not have to pay for this since she was on Medicare, and I believe she had co-insurance like Medicaid.
I could not believe that another MD would do something like this, so I called Dr. Corday, a now deceased cardiologist, and asked him, “Why didn’t you call me and allow me to decide what was pertinent testing for Ethel?” She has had a recent chest x-ray, and there is no indication that an ECG will help in ruling in or out an infectious disease like TB. Moreover, none of the blood tests you ordered are indicated. And along with all of this, you never informed me or sent me the results of what you did.
Corday’s response was truth-telling. It sheds light on the behavior of what Mike talks about, and what Dee Hock, founder of VISA, wrote about in The Birth of the Chaordic Age. Hock called them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
Ego, Envy, Avarice, Ambition
Corday’s glib reply to my asking, “Why did you do this?” was,
“Dr. Strum, you don't know the name of the game.”
PS. I have never compromised my principles. I have never positioned physician income as a higher priority than patient outcome. I have been able to have a well-led life, and I never financially raped a patient.
What we have with Trump is a rapist. He is a rapist of women, of the people and the planet. And we are so fucking naive that we have not learned to know a person by the company they keep. We have not learned that the acorn does not fall far from the tree. We have not learned that we know a man or a woman by their deeds, not their spiel.
And now, our nation, and it seems a lot of the world, has fallen prey to the wisdom of the adage:
We get too soon old and to late smart.
Of deep concern is the potential to take this capacity to unimaginable reaches, with computer capacity to track /control choices and actions of individual citizens…. Way beyond what Hitler was able to accomplish.
And to alter elections, which, if Trump is to be believed 🤔 2024 "was rigged"
Rest assured the penguins of Heard Island and McDonald Islands will not be signing up to spylink