Health Care and Health, Are Two Totally Different Things
The health care industry would like us to believe that health care comes from the health care system -- rather than that it is integral to life and the fulfillment of it. So any honest practitioner (and they are to be found in every field of endeavor and enterprise), are those one wishes to consult on any matter -- rather than believing they are all alike and the same, because of some less reliable standard of certification. Unfailingly, that is because they are good human beings who transcend whatever label they’ve placed on themselves.
When you have the health care provider providing the information and advice on health, there is an inherent conflict of interest, because while the doctor would like one to be healthy, he doesn’t want him to be so healthy that he no longer requires his services. Healthy people generally don’t see a doctor while the unhealthy, think that is where they obtain health from -- rather than that it is integral to their being.
At the other extreme of this co-dependency are those who have become so reliant on the health care provider that such dependent individuals do nothing for themselves -- and expect the doctor alone to make them well. Meanwhile, they do everything they can to undermine the efforts of the health care providers -- at which point, the health care providers have to give up in despair and say, “There’s nothing wrong with you but your own unwillingness to make yourself healthy and happy,” although there may be actual clinical symptoms. It is hoped at that point, they will consider also finding another health care system to drain.
So a health care vision of a future in which half of the population is employed caring for the other half -- who may or not be pulling for the same result -- is not an attractive and viable vision of future life. Even most “health” professionals don’t want to be trapped and confined entirely to the company/clientele of sick and dysfunctional people -- who rob them of their own will to live and fulfill their own lives. So the leading edge of the profession has deliberately sought out that end of people wanting to use medicine to enhance their lives rather than merely sustain it at the lowest level of functioning, which is also the most costly.
As an acute experience, that is sometimes what one has to overcome, but the life in chronic disability should have a prognosis for recovery and highest actualization despite the handicaps. Life is never so perfect that only then is it possible to do what one really wants to do -- if only one were in perfect health, with all the money one could ever desire, attracting all the best and the brightest to one’s immediate circle, etc. Life just has to go on as best it can -- under whatever circumstances.
Ultimately, health is about accepting conditions as they are and doing the best with them -- regardless of who is to blame, that things are not perfect -- and only then can life begin, because that day never comes. Instead, life is perfecting that possibility, and increasing its probability.
posted by Mike Hu @ 1:21 PM
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3 Comments:
This is also the problem of education -- in which there is a greater need for education, the more education one receives -- in a perpetual self-fulfilling demand. Obviously, education has now moved beyond the institutionalized setting -- to where it can actually be best done at home, in more personalized settings, self-directed. The first hint of it is the online courses -- that now enable a person anywhere in the world to attend the courses of the foremost authorities on the subject matter -- directly. The need for all the layers of intermediaries have disappeared. That is the disintermediation of learning, information and communications -- eliminating the middle man. That is also the great problem of the old mass media -- in the possibility of personalized, customized media.
While one can still take the mass approach -- at what level does one target? The lowest level, the middle, or the highest level? -- and when contemplating that, if one goes a little farther, he realizes that the ultimate solution is to personalize and customize the experience. Fifty years ago, people had already developed such learning machines because it was clear what the mass education model was doing and failing. Up to that point, education was moderately successful as it brought the education professionals to that realization -- at which point they became unionized with the higher priority placed on their own job security, even if it meant perpetuating the problems, which in this case, is the perpetuation of ignorance and incompetence to do one’s own thinking for themselves -- but rather, to undermine that capacity and confidence.
Now we live in a time in which most of those on the cutting edge of cultural developments would agree that 95% of the learning one will do in life, will be, and must be done out of formal institutional instruction -- if simply one wants to. Education/information/communication professionals, sensing this also, will try to make themselves even more indispensable to the susceptible, remaining few -- making it even more necessary that one can only learn in their approved, certified conditions.
Undoubtedly, there is a clear clash of visions for the future. One produces a lot of problems at escalating high costs -- while the other virtually eliminates that problem for society henceforth. The story of evolution is that societies that survive, choose the latter option; those that simply hope to perpetuate a static vision of society for all time -- can be witnessed in the stone images of Easter Island, where all the graven images are perennially identical, but all the traces of the people who once lived there, have otherwise completely vanished.
The problems of health and the problems of education are inextricably bound: it’s often been noted that very senior persons regress to their childhood ways, for which many people’s response is to treat them as a sick child -- rather than as a growing adult.
The people who can benefit the greatest from education is not the young but the old -- they need to be re-taught and re-created in a new world than the one they were originally programmed and conditioned in/for, which has made them obsolete, which is the true meaning and purpose of recreation, and not just amusing oneself aimlessly. Most children will just learn on their own or from others -- because that is what they inherently do, and particularly in an environment and culture that predisposes it. One cannot help but wonder how does one get those magical images to appear in that box? Or how high can I jump? How fast can I run?
But for the older folks, we don’t think they are capable of learning anymore, and are lucky merely to hang on to declining abilities -- rather than that they need to learn new things to remain viable, just as teaching the children only the ideas of the past makes any of that knowledge useless. What a person has to learn, both young and old, is the best responses to the present actualities -- which implies the past and future also. Then, one is not just living in their knowledge and memories of the past, but are living vitally on the cutting edge -- as is possible for anyone recognizing that challenge and possibilities.
We’ve never thought that way before -- but a few are and they are the pioneers of the future, defining and creating the life never lived before -- as has been the challenge of living in any age. A large part of the aging process, as well as deterioration and dysfunction, is learning strategies that are proven failures -- and not suspecting there can be anything else, because their perpetrators brainwashed them to think so, calling it education, conventional wisdom, ideology or religion. It is the only dogma they are allowed to see.
The hope for the future therefore, are the few iconoclasts who do not see this inevitability as the only possibilities. And that is what the function of true education must be -- to produce those who are not limited in their thinking to conformity to the politically/socially correct, but those who can see beyond those limitations of prior knowledge. That is the process of the great breakthroughs whenever humankind has confronted an inescapable dilemma. Many are aware of this critical roadblock to further progress -- if the premises and assumptions remain the same, and we merely continue to do things as we always have before.
Children become more adept become we deliberately condition them to -- but older people in the same challenges of mastery of basic skills, are left on their own to deteriorate further. There is no deliberate program of encouraging and enhancing hand-eye coordination. In fact, many taught movements, close their eyes and move only in their minds, because that essential necessity of actually watching one’s own movement is unmonitored -- by the trainee certainly, but also by the trainer -- who does not regard that as an essential link. Hand-eye coordination requires both -- and not merely thought thinking that is so, which is not connected to any verifiable reality (feedback).
Eventually, one is lost entirely in this thought -- with no physical responses to indicate to themselves or anyone else, that there is still a connectedness to the physical world, which is the characteristic condition of the dementias
The mainstream people have this same problem too -- in the disconnect between what they think they are doing and what they are actually doing. Theisleads to the often observed phenomenon of people doing something that belies what they are protesting against -- exhibiting the very violence and disregard that they claim they are against. Others say they have good and noble intentions, but all their actions are to grab the money intended for the poor and disabled for themselves -- and then demanding more, evermore, as though that was some kind of public service.
Our current education/conditioning tactics are to produce this separation of thought from action, the physical from the mental, the emotional from the psychological, the left from the right, the educated from the uneducated, and every manner of division and conflict possible. In this manner, it is possible to consume much sound and fury signifying nothing -- ensuring the status quo because one force merely nullifies every other, competing force - -- that if they were aligned to accomplish anything, could change anything.
Likewise, in every single individual, as long as he is conditioned to oppose every other part of himself, the heart against the head, the left against the right, the bicep against the tricep, etc., the conditioning is for the nullification of his own being. And while people may get by in that manner when they have resources and reserves to “burn,” under critical conditions, the ability to marshal all one’s forces for maximum/optimum effect, is the ultimate survival skill -- that is the difference between life and death, in a long, successful life.
Just going through the motions without focus and clear intent of purpose and meaning, does not have the same survival value -- no matter how much of that is done. Such people cannot get their act together when it matters most -- and fail many times along the way before the final act. And that is why there is the notable failure of contemporary education to meet the needs of the present time. Those in charge, think the solution is that the times and conditions have to adapt to them-- and not that they have to adapt to the everchanging challenges of the present time.
That’s why people and institutions die; they fail to meet the challenges of change, are convinced they can never again.
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