Thank you:
http://www.globalgiving.com/projects/diabetesmaya/
Many Maya patients and families struggling against poverty, racism and diabetes have found solace through Wuqu' Kawoq's ongoing solidarity.
Much thanks to those who have already given!
These are uncertain times for everyone. Please help, as you are able, to ameliorate the insecurities that plague Wuqu' Kawoq's patients.
~Shom
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
At the risk of ethnocentrism...
It is a horrible experience to talk to your friend in Kaqchikel about his mother's fatal stroke and recognize his description as decorticate, then decerebrate, posturing.
I know this speaks more to my linguistic incapability and to some latent Orientalism in me. But still, it really was horrible.
My familiar friend, speaking in familiar words--and suddenly, I see the pathophysiology of a herniating brain.
I did not explain to him what had happened to his mother's brain.
I suppose it did not matter, either way.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
WWKD (What Would Karl Do?) - stamina, starts and fits
From The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
"Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit: but they are short lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm and stress period. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out:
"Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit: but they are short lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm and stress period. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out:
Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!
[Here is Rhodes, leap here!
Here the rose, dance here!]
Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!
[Here is Rhodes, leap here!
Here the rose, dance here!]
Friday, July 10, 2009
Never talk politics and religion...
Fourth year medical students are warned at my school to avoid the topics of politics and religion when applying for residency programs. We are taught in the preceding years that this applies to clinical encounters with patients and to professionalism in medicine.
The fundamentally flawed assumption in all this is that the practice and discourse of medicine are scientific and therefore fundamentally non-political.
This is, of course, entirely untrue. The provision of allopathic medical care at wealthy academic medical centers is absolutely political, based on access to the accruing benefits of power and violence that permit capital accumulation.
I wish I could say, however, that the political practices of biomedicine are limited to such insidious phenomena. In that case, one could say that at least physicians, nurses and everyone else is just doing their best. Any instances of collusion in regnant economies of inequality and harvests of violence are unfortunate and unintended. If politics is implicated in medicine, it must be working behind the backs of those teams of sleep-deprived people in white coats who congregate every morning before most other people are awake.
Fine. If that is so, then why is it acceptable on the in-patient wards to complain about Medicare physician payment cuts, and about Obama's "socialist" healthcare plan?
If it is so damn hard to pay taxes out of a six-digit physician's salary, then why not complain about the "hard-earned tax dollars" that go to the military budget every year without fail? That is, ~$500 billion per year, depending on how you do the math. Comparing this figure to Obama's stimulus package CBO and to the healthcare budget, we are faced with the gut-wrenching realization that people (who happen to be physicians) can be bitterly opposed to "government-sponsored" healthcare while having little problem with government-perpetrated violence.
Physicians can be as self-serving and reactionary as anyone else who benefits from the way things are. Unfortunately, the contemporary industries of medical education and healthcare provision reward these qualities.
Lest this sound like an angry rant, I should say that I am deeply, deeply saddened by all of this. I have had the luxury of persisting, albeit in little ways, in those brands of radical idealism that call for lived and pragmatic solidarity with the poorest and most marginalized.
And it is horribly, devastatingly disappointing to witness such countervailing ideologies and ways of being-in-the-world in people with whom I share something so presumably sacrosanct as the mandate to alleviate suffering.
The fundamentally flawed assumption in all this is that the practice and discourse of medicine are scientific and therefore fundamentally non-political.
This is, of course, entirely untrue. The provision of allopathic medical care at wealthy academic medical centers is absolutely political, based on access to the accruing benefits of power and violence that permit capital accumulation.
I wish I could say, however, that the political practices of biomedicine are limited to such insidious phenomena. In that case, one could say that at least physicians, nurses and everyone else is just doing their best. Any instances of collusion in regnant economies of inequality and harvests of violence are unfortunate and unintended. If politics is implicated in medicine, it must be working behind the backs of those teams of sleep-deprived people in white coats who congregate every morning before most other people are awake.
Fine. If that is so, then why is it acceptable on the in-patient wards to complain about Medicare physician payment cuts, and about Obama's "socialist" healthcare plan?
If it is so damn hard to pay taxes out of a six-digit physician's salary, then why not complain about the "hard-earned tax dollars" that go to the military budget every year without fail? That is, ~$500 billion per year, depending on how you do the math. Comparing this figure to Obama's stimulus package CBO and to the healthcare budget, we are faced with the gut-wrenching realization that people (who happen to be physicians) can be bitterly opposed to "government-sponsored" healthcare while having little problem with government-perpetrated violence.
Physicians can be as self-serving and reactionary as anyone else who benefits from the way things are. Unfortunately, the contemporary industries of medical education and healthcare provision reward these qualities.
Lest this sound like an angry rant, I should say that I am deeply, deeply saddened by all of this. I have had the luxury of persisting, albeit in little ways, in those brands of radical idealism that call for lived and pragmatic solidarity with the poorest and most marginalized.
And it is horribly, devastatingly disappointing to witness such countervailing ideologies and ways of being-in-the-world in people with whom I share something so presumably sacrosanct as the mandate to alleviate suffering.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
So now I tried to bring it up...
During moments of downtime, I introduced the topic of high neonatal and infant mortality in communities in Guatemala where I have friends and patients.
The most I've gotten as a response? "Yeah, that makes sense. I mean its not like some places in Africa..."
What?
The most I've gotten as a response? "Yeah, that makes sense. I mean its not like some places in Africa..."
What?
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