Tag: Doctors

It Hurts All the Same

 

It’s no surprise MAGA Mussolini has called the imminent danger of a coronavirus pandemic a hoax, nor is it a surprise his MAGA followers swallowed that lie and called for more. They always do. These developments have become so predictable that they no longer warrant the bother of linking to the news stories about them. All the rest of us can do, those of us who live in the fact-based world, that is, is resist the implementation of damaging policies by those who live in the fantasy world of MAGA hate-based politics.

 

J. Bond Francisco - The Sick Child - 1991.9 - Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Sick Child, an 1893 painting by the American artist J. Bond Francisco (1863-1931).

The great surprise is how well scientists and doctors have done in the past 100 years in restricting another pandemic like the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 and 1919, which killed 100 million people around the world. The Spanish Flu came on the heels of the close of World War I, and after it had finally flamed out it had claimed more lives than that most horrific “War to End All Wars”. That was the way the balance had worked throughout history, with battlefield deaths generally being outpaced by the communicable diseases unleashed in the gatherings of large armies and refugees. The later twentieth century holds the dubious distinction of tipping that balance toward human mayhem as the major cause of death in wars.

What is most remarkable about the efficiency of modern science in preventing the kind of communicable disease pandemics which have periodically scourged humanity is that scientists and doctors have done this despite the huge increase in population at the same time worldwide travel has skyrocketed in volume and speed. More people than ever before are moving faster and more frequently from one part of the world to the next, and all the while they are sharing untold numbers of germs both dangerous and mundane with local populations.

In the taking over of the New World by European colonists only two and more centuries ago, those sorts of introductions – though at a slower pace – led to genocidal destruction of the indigenous population through their exposure to an array of unfamiliar diseases. People more often lived in lighter concentrations then than they do now. Travel was certainly far slower, and most people then lived their entire lives in the familiar surroundings of one city or of a handful of farm villages.

The great danger now is the introduction of an unfamiliar permutation of a familiar virus or bacterium. And yet for 100 years the world’s scientific and medical professionals have forestalled the disaster that could easily overtake us if they weren’t vigilant. Calling their sincere efforts a hoax helps no one, and acting on such misinformation would amount to carelessly flipping a lit cigarette butt onto dry brush.
— Vita

 

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The Body in Question

 

On Monday, five Georgia state legislators introduced a bill that would require all men over the age of 55 to report to law enforcement every time they ejaculate sperm. The bill obviously has no chance of passing, and is meant to make a statement about a bill that did recently pass which makes abortion illegal in Georgia after about six weeks of pregnancy, when doctors can detect a heartbeat from the fetus, but also more generally about how men, particularly older, white men, use legislation to exercise control over women’s bodies.

 

The nation’s abortion laws are constantly under attack, predominantly from groups on the religious right. They seem to think they are the only ones concerned with the ethical issues surrounding abortion, as if the women facing that choice have little or no concern about ethics. There are women as well as men in the anti-abortion groups. The women should know better than the men the difficult nature of the decision to abort a pregnancy, yet they still favor taking the decision away from the person most concerned with making it.

Spermatozoa-human-3140x
Micrograph by scanning electron microscope of human sperm cells magnified 3140 times. Pore size of the polycarbonate filter in the background is 1µm, or 1 micrometer.

Since the ethical questions will likely never be sorted out to the satisfaction of all parties, we can only resort to legal answers. There is in this country something called the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Since it was adopted shortly after the Civil War, it was initially intended to apply to recently freed slaves, to ensure they received equal protection as citizens under the law regardless of their former status. The Equal Protection Clause has been invoked on behalf of many other causes in the past 150 years, and it seems it should apply to the abortion debate regarding how one class of citizens – women – are subject to laws that do not apply to another class of citizens – men.

Of course there are many physiological differences between men and women, perhaps the most important being that men do not carry an egg, fertilized or not. Men do contribute their sperm toward fertilizing women’s eggs. It seems that if men are not willing to cede legal control of their sperm to make sure it does not contribute to unwanted fertilization of eggs, then they should be willing to relinquish all legal oversight of fertilized eggs in women’s bodies. The eggs reside in women; that’s just the way it is.

Michael Palin sings “Every Sperm Is Sacred” in the 1983 film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. It’s not only Catholics who espouse this philosophy, but religious people generally.

Until such time as legal, medical, and ethical considerations are sorted out regarding whether men can have fertilized eggs or fetuses implanted within them, it seems they should have very little to say about women’s unwanted pregnancies. That a woman is contemplating aborting her fetus suggests a man has already expressed himself inappropriately. Men should leave women in peace to make the hard decision to abort or not to abort. It’s in the complications following the latter decision, after all, that men and all of society can contribute positive energy to the new mother and her baby to make life better for them instead of continuing to add to their troubles.
— Ed.

 

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Straining to See

 

Many folks may remember that as children they were admonished by their elders not to sit too close to the television because they would strain their eyes. If a child was a reader, a parent or other elder would express concern that the reading light wasn’t bright enough. If a child read in bed after lights out, then a concerned elder would issue a warning of punishment for staying up too late, in addition to concern about eye strain. Of course, this scenario is dated because children today may be reading from a backlit screen instead of a paper book. New technology, same worries about eye strain.

Looking at computer and phone (Unsplash)
View from a street in Toronto, Canada, into a building where a woman looks at her laptop computer and smartphone. Photo by Tim Gouw.

Asthenopia is the medical term for eye strain, and in a chronic case the condition can be a concern worthy of a visit to a doctor. With the prevalence of computer, tablet, and smartphone use now, adults are as apt to have asthenopia as children who don’t heed their parents’ warnings. Few people admit to reading from their smartphone or tablet in bed after dark, but most probably do it, because for one thing it’s an easy way to read without disrupting a partner’s sleep, even if it may disrupt their own sleep habits. Looking for hours at a time into a relatively bright light from a foot or two away, or perhaps mere inches, is a sure path to eye strain.

Other than changing behavior, the solution starts with turning down the brightness on all those screens, including the television. Most devices now come with sensors that detect room brightness and adjust the device brightness accordingly. A darkened room will require less brightness from the device in order for the user to comfortably view the screen. Find that control and use it. Next, devices made specifically for reading at close range, such as smartphones and tablets, may have a “Reader” mode in the display settings. Find that and turn it on. Some internet browsers also come equipped with a “Reader” mode.

Finally, if those native adjustments are insufficient to tone down the blue part of the spectrum, which is the part most responsible for causing eye strain, then seek out a third party application for computers, smartphones, and tablets that will shift the color temperature from blue to red, with many degrees in between. Such applications have timers built in order to shift the color temperature gradually as day moves to night, and vice versa. They take some getting used to, but after a day or two the warmer color temperature will feel natural and less noticeable. Your eyes will sense the difference, though, since they will no longer be asthenopic, a word which is such a strain to pronounce it’s just as well you no longer have to deal with it.
— Techly

 

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