Thoughts of a retired physician

This has been an extra busy week for a retired physician! I am taking a semi-break but wanted to throw out several books that will form a topic of writing for me. They all concern walking, something that most people never even think about as they do it. The first is In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration by Shane O’Mara , an Irish neuroscientist. I listened to this while doing my walks and it was delightful. Made me think and the narrator, Liam Gerrard, had the most satisfying Irish accent. The second book is one I am reading right now: Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding , by Daniel Lieberman , a professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. The third is a book whose review I read today in the New York Times . The title is First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy DeSilva, an anthropologist at Dartmouth. I admit to a conceit that this feels to me a little like taking a course. Anyway, the topic of why and how hum

  On Friday 17 April 1970, I had finished my finals as a senior at the University of Pittsburgh. Commencement was 9 days away. I was at home in Reading for the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970. I attended the celebration in Reading with several of my friends from high school and college. I do not remember much about the program. One thing is certain, it did not include anything that related to climate change. People urged each other to do something positive for the environment. I remember deciding not to use leaded gasoline, figuring out that lead was highly toxic and it was wise not to dispose of it into the air, soil, and water. A small step. The 1960s were an interesting time. My generation, the Baby Boomers, was just coming of age and we were determined to do better in the world than our parents had done. We had read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and were knowledgeable about the horrors of DDT. We had seen the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio catch fire because it was so pollute

  In early March, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a podcast on its website that questioned the idea that racism existed in medicine. The blowback was immediate and warranted . Howard Bauchner, the JAMA editor-in-chief, was placed on administrative leave on 25 March and the medical community boycotted JAMA over this and prior examples of racism in its pages.  The sad truth is that, as in America itself, racism is endemic in medicine and has been for hundreds of years. Perhaps the single best book on this subject is Harriet Washington’s award-winning Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present . I pulled out my medical school yearbook from 1974 and it provided confirmation of exactly what I remembered. My class was overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. The faculty composition was parallel; wonderful professors but almost all white males as well.  In thinking about this no

  On 23 March 2021, the Ever Given , a 400 meter-long container ship, became stuck in the Suez Canal, its bow wedged into the eastern bank and its stern wedged into the western bank of the canal. It had just entered the canal, on its way to Rotterdam, during a sandstorm. After six days, the ship was freed, with significant help from Mother Nature (a full moon and a high tide). Now, inevitably, the legal fight will begin to place blame and seek damages. The ownership and management of the vessel is a Byzantine maze, which does not help. The investigation of all factors that led to this incident includes focusing on human error. David Graham in The Atlantic notes that maritime accidents are unlike aircraft accidents -- because the lessons learned in aviation accidents are just not applied to ships.  What might the role of climate change be in such incidents? By all accounts the sandstorm and high winds would qualify for what has been called “global weirding.” Jeff Masters writes that

  I have again spent a great deal of time reading and thinking about gun violence. The recent mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder added to the pile of such events that have become too common in the past three decades. Even during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. during 2020, mass shootings continued and in fact increased . Although mass shootings account for only 1 to 2% of all firearm-related deaths, they garner media and political attention out of proportion because they illustrate that everyday acts such as going to the supermarket to buy a loaf of bread or going to school to be educated or going to the movies to relax can turn into violence, bloodshed, and death. We see the political dimensions, especially in the Senate, where the free flow of millions of NRA $$$ (almost all to Republicans) has long blocked useful efforts to address the gun problem in this country. Thus we have a nation of 330 million people with 393 million guns in civilian hands. Please do not t

  This is cheating (a little). I wrote an article for our local League of Women Voters Pasadena Area about the filibuster and it seemed reasonable to share it here. In Republican hands over the past 12 years, the filibuster has become simply an obstructionist tactic that prevents legislation from being enacted and delays or preempts presidential appointments from occurring. I firmly believe this anachronism must be euthanized now. Here is the article: The Filibuster -- Good or Bad? Filibuster - an action such as a prolonged speech that obstructs progress in a legislative assembly while not technically contravening the required procedures.  Cloture - the only procedure by which the Senate can vote to place a time limit on consideration of a bill or other matter, and therefore end a filibuster. The word filibuster does not appear in the Constitution. The word was originally from the Dutch vrijbueter (freebooter), with contributions from Spanish and French. The genesis of the filibuster

  At the end of an active life, I find two things that most shaped me as an adult. The first and most obvious was a choice of medicine as a career. Sometimes frustrating but always fulfilling and intellectually stimulating, it was always an anchor point for me. The second is also obvious to anyone who knows me. Becoming a Naval officer and spending a career in the United States Navy had the same dimensions as medicine. The fact that the two were fused for me was simply a plus. I have deep feelings for the Navy and the military and they are a part of my being -- and always will be. The military is far from a perfect place. As with all organizations, it may be described as a consensual hallucination; its members bring themselves to it, add something, and leave it either more or less enriched than they found it. What I am concerned about of late is the growing evidence of white supremacist ideas and culture in the military. Military leaders recognize this, especially after the failed insu