10–2–2020
The gap between your birth and now is getting longer. Conversely, the distance from your last breath and the present is growing shorter.
We are now forty one days into the new year, the new decade, and this is my first writing attempt. It is not even the conclusion of the story I started and never finished last year.
It is me.
It is me, rousing about my idle thoughts trying to find substance.
Public Health?
In a matter of moments, I can go online, buy an airline ticket and be in another country, by sundown. Imagine telling someone from 1920’s that?! The idea of flight and petrol engines had been around for two decades already, but the first transatlantic flight took place in 1919.
Amazing that the year prior, 1918 would also see one of the worst influenza pandemics. What was frightening about the Spanish Flu, was that it effected young healthy people the most. A century later, and have we sowed the seeds of our own destruction?
Yes, and no. True it is easier to get around the world, and thus the spread of pathogens. Yet, the Spanish flu of 1918, hand hygiene wasn’t readily available (Nor were there antibiotic super bugs either. Hi MRSA), and immunizations were just starting to gain public acceptance. Even though Louie Pasteur had wrote germ theory in 1877.
Now we have immunization records for every child who enrolls in public school. Bill and Melinda Gates have taken great strides to prevent deaths from Polio worldwide. Considering the fact that the United States systematically ended usage of the vaccine in 2000.
Thus, the threat of a global pandemic is critical, but we have taken massive steps in mitigating the danger.
Public Health in the United States is failing it’s constituents in regards to chronic diseases. With big pharma, and big insurance impeding the treatment of the underlying causes and focusing instead of tossing over priced prescriptions to treat the symptoms.
Are people scared of going to the hospital?
The hospital is the last resort for many people. This maybe because of accessibility, financial implications, or belief in holistic medicine practices. Or the horror stories of a cancer diagnosis, and the choice of treatment or leaving your family financially ruined. This should not be the case.
It would be much more beneficial, if yearly physicals were followed. What this would allow is identifying pathological trends, and early detection of disease. But who has time for that?
It is an election year, and many of the democratic presidential candidates are platforming on Medicare for all (M4A). Conversely, you have Mr. Trump, trying to repeal Obamacare.
No one wants sick kids. No one likes seeing debilitating diseases wreck havoc on families. So why is there such a divergence of opinion on a healthy citizenship?
Money.
Somehow, crooks planted themselves at the top of the medical care industries and instituted policies that favor the shareholders instead of the patients.
We’ve tried to create examples, of those who took the necessities of prescriptions, and used it to their benefit, see Martin Shkreli. He is the most famous example, because he took an anti-parasitic prescription critical for HIV patients, and raised the price to $750 dollars per pill. Yet, as vile as that was, he was convicted on securities fraud, nothing to do with making the American Healthcare System so expensive.
Yet, I can not cast judgment on those at the top, because I am at the bottom. I may never have the chance to buy a two million dollar exclusive rap album. If someone is financially successful, they must be way smarter than me.
Luck is not a strategy.
(A little side tracked on the woe is me there.^)
It does not seem logical to profit off of someone’s agony, and suffering. “We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness — not by each other’s misery.”- Charlie Chaplin.
A person’s health is their most valuable asset. Why then would it not make sense to extend a person’s ability to be healthy? Indeed life expectancy is longer, but is that duration of time lengthening quality of life?
Granted life has an one hundred percent mortality rate. Preventing death is like trying to stop the sun from setting.
Yet, we can extend quality of life.
It seems with the numerous problems in the world, and my station in life, I can contribute little to the solution.
Better to keep scrolling Instagram then.
