- Joined
- Feb 21, 2002
- Messages
- 4,358
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I don't know how you can in good conscience operate a fast food joint that ruins peoples' lives and health like Pop Eyes and then pretend to be a medical professional. This guy was literally killing tens of thousands a people a year and making hundreds of thousands more into bariatric indivudals. He definitely did more harm operating the soda/fast foot eateries than good as a surgeon. He should have just sold heroin on the street. He would have done less damage to society.
I guess you've never read Medical Nemesis, have you? Chapter 1 and the first part of Chapter 2 should give you an idea of how much we collectively are really worth around here.
http://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/0303critic/030313illich/Frame.Illich.Ch1.html
If you think about what your normal day-to-day practice really is, how much are you really "helping" others? Not to say that modern medicine is not useful, but it's far less useful beyond a certain baseline (there are incredible and obvious gains to be made from clean and wholesome food, clean water, immunizations, and public sanitation utilities of sewage and garbage, less so for the rest).
Once you figure this out, there are three possibilities:
1. Blue pill: Ignore the reality, and live out your days in your personal form of the Matrix where you will be "taken care of." (Most of us)
2. Red pill: Reject the reality, and actually seek to do your job which honestly will not make you a happy person and possibly a worse person. (A minority of us, rank and file workers in Criminal Investigation Departments or Provost Marshals)
3. White pill: Embrace the reality, and make the system your own. (Pharmacy school deans of for-profit institutions, Najarian (did I forget to mention that he got UMN on HHS suspension for two years?), your average I-banker).
And that choice not a contingent choice, I know people who have hold all three philosophical conclusions simultaneously (accept the reality while rejecting certain parts of it to take advantage of it in other ways). I'm definitely red pill for teaching and academic matters, but I'm also definitely white pill in the civil service where I want things done my way.
It's greed, but it's also, what do you do in a system that's fundamentally insane? I'm not looking askance at people who come to different conclusions based on those facts, I just don't want to be affected directly by them. In reference to another thread, it's not that I disagree with the fundamental gloom and doom of this forum given this reality, I don't necessarily think it has to end badly for any of us. The more one struggles with the reconciliation between the ideal and the reality of healthcare work is ultimately a personal concern to what extent you are willing to believe in the system.