AdamSmith

Precursor scene:

CBD, that is. This aged brain...

Many thanks. She is OK due to moisturizing CDB creme derived from hemp. Available OTC, thus something that big pharma + insurance rackets suppress knowledge of with all their might. Asia abounds with natural-derived remedies that work. But our Western weaponization of medical economics...

You think? I bet 1/3 of him thinks that, but 2/3 still does not. In which case, one suspects he has already learned that St Peter is a very good statistician.

Your experience of high-quality care in NYC mirrors mine here in the N.C. Research Triangle area, with excellent med schools and teaching hospitals at both Duke U. and UNC Chapel Hill. And a rich density of excellent PCPs and specialists in the area. My mother's PCP, notwithstanding that stupid slip -- occasioned, as you so rightly say, by our pathologically over-connected culture -- is possibly the best she has ever had. Very attentive, inquisitive, responsive, readily referring to specialists, even -- especially -- when 'It may be nothing serious, but we need the specialist to look into it and be sure.' A 180deg change from the '80s and before, when Check 'em in and shove 'em out the door ASAP was the modus operandi of most general practitioners. Living in Boston in the '90s and the oughts, and being friends with a number of doctors, medical department directors, and faculty at the teaching hospitals, I watched with great satisfaction and relief the self-aware, well directed change toward patient-centered medicine. Although at the same time, as you (and I above) observe, the patient, and the patient's closest support people, still have to be the lead advocate for the patient's interest.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward H.P. Lovecraft https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_of_Charles_Dexter_Ward

My 91yo mother and I were seeing her PCP for some skin lesion problem (precursor to a bed sore, now resolved, thanks to my investigations, not her physicians), couple months ago. Her doc put on strerile gloves, began reaching toward the wound site — then stopped and answered her cell phone then started to rebegin the exam. With the same glove. We did not change doctors, but you can well imagine the things that came out of my mouth. We will keep watch and see.

Just as PrEP makes people think it’s safe to go bare, with no thought of thus contracting antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea or any of the other superbug STDs out there now — and still mutating.

Based on past experience with like diseases, they will only have the happy outcome of having become immune to any further risk of infection.

In some article on Downton Abbey of all things, the writer observed that what is nowadays called 'Victorian stiffness of manners' in always wearing gloves, and not shaking hands or embracing, in fact arose from a well informed awareness of the risk of transmitting microscopic disease organisms. For which obviously there was no cure then. By way of bacteria, which had been discovered and understood as a key source of disease by van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope, way back in the seventeenth century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonie_van_Leeuwenhoek

I think it goes both ways. There is to be sure an enormous cohort who are just sitting around waiting -- for what? For life to start without any effort on their part? As you and I have both said, in somewhat different contexts, good luck with that. But then there are the 200,000+ who marched to ask Please stop shooting us in our schools. And other forms of informed activism. So, in the 2020 vote, we shall see what their impact is. All your other thoughts above I agree with entirely.

I.e., who has the biggest belly in DC right now?

That truss again.

Well, exactly. The travel venues are where there is no way to ‘minimize personal exposure.’ And where you will be exposed to dozens if not hundreds who themselves have had similar exposure. Unless you are Warren Buffett and can afford entirely private air and land transport.

I don’t know. There is that phrase ‘the belly of the beast.’

One’s instincts say undercounting plus the forecasting algorithms are as ever too conservative.

At

I absolutely agree with that. I think in particular that the under-25-yo voters might just be the salvation in 2020.

All this is alas only too true. What consists of ‘facts’ for the voting majority today? My thought had nothing to do with ‘political agenda’ whatsoever, only unblinking recognition of objective fact.

Agree with all your statements. EXCEPT I don’t believe at all that it’s defeatism. Instead, it’s the starkly real possibility of self-extinction that we must openly acknowledge in order to ‘trigger’ ourselves into the unprecedentedly radical plans of action that may have any chance of saving the planet, and ourselves. A global Manhattan Project to invent, test and perfect proactive geoengineering technologies and methods is the only path to species survival that I can see, motivated as above. Or any alternative ideas? The Paris Accords are by the immutable laws of physics many orders of magnitude too weak to do anything at all, given where we already are today. Again, to beat a dead horse, before I was a lit-crit type, I was studying to be a chemical engineer. So I know how the inexorable equations work.

I don’t think H. sapiens, much less much else, will be around in 50 years. Want to bet 25?