Aggregator • MaxedOutMama • ID=61213 |
Sending Myself To The Doghouse - MaxedOutMama Jan 28, 2010, 3:01 pm
I cannot at this precise moment be polite about the State of the Union speech, so there will be a brief irascible silence as I struggle with my inner child. I always shudder when I encounter the type of New Agey therapeutic stuff that wants you to let your inner child emerge. On its best days, my inner child is a nasty brat.
I am not afraid to criticize our president, but there were some hopeful tinges here and I would like to make sure that my irritation over certain things doesn't overshadow the positives.
The other day several people and I got into a long discussion over at No Oil For Pacifists. The post is here, and the discussion was between some sort of technically educated person (OBH), Carl, the blog's proprietor, me, and Thai (a physician). I want to post a follow-up to that. Most interesting to me is that Thai zeroed in on the question of marginal tax rates leading to government control of the economy. This is a huge issue in economic theory (government control of economies has usually worked out disastrously), but it confounded me that Thai would focus on this issue.
Thai had previously given me a link to the Covert Rationing blog (written by Dr. Rich), and I've been reading it for months with interest. I spent yesterday's hospital interlude wondering why a physician would focus on this issue, and then I remembered that the question of control has been recurring in Dr. Rich's posts. Not just in terms of government control, but also in terms of the creation of a medical bureacracy that would prescribe treatment options to the point of preventing the most cost effective and successful treatments for individual patients. And that has some linkage to SW's series of posts which begins here.
Finally, during the now nearly two decades that the SuperDoc has been treating me, I had slowly realized that the SuperDoc's method of treating untreatable illnesses is really a matter of building margin back into the body (and sometimes mind) to change its functioning enough to expand treatment options.
And it's not just me. Take the Chief. Whatever has caused his situation is truly mysterious; many very good doctors have taken a crack at him and come up with nothing. There is one more test result we are waiting for, and SuperDoc tells me that if that one doesn't show anything, he's out of ammo. But it doesn't MATTER, because whereas the Chief had been worsening rapidly, over the last few weeks he has changed trajectory and is now improving rapidly. The underlying condition may not have been found or even addressed, but the human body is a complex, self-repairing system. SuperDoc treated one of the Chief's symptoms and and one medical problem that hadn't been found, and SuperDoc appears to have tilted the balance back toward life, because the Chief seems to have entered an self-reinforcing upward spiral rather than the downward spiral. I wouldn't necessarily discount the prayers either....
So probably Thai's approach is not surprising; both the human body and the economy are complex, highly interactive systems which must preserve a certain level of balance to maintain function, both are dominated by a lot of unknown or very difficult to measure balancing processes, and meddling with such a system when you don't know what's really going on can be dangerous. In both, the apparent problem can be a symptom of a self-corrective process.
