Thoughts of a retired physician

And now Omicron. Skipping over nu and chi for reasons of clarity, we now have Omicron (Ο) as the latest variant of concern in the covid pandemic. Scientists, public health officials, and epidemiologists are working overtime to understand this new variant. The best to say at the moment is that we are gathering the data and have precious few real answers to the myriad of questions. Multiple nations, including the United States, closed travel from the southern countries of Africa where O likely emerged. This is of doubtful real efficacy as cases have been reported from multiple nations in Europe, as well as Asia and Australia. Locking the barn door after the horse has fled seems to be a common occurrence with this pandemic but simply shows that in an interconnected world, walls and barriers are meaningless political statements rather than real public health policy. South Africa needs support and praise, not shunning.  The origin of O is also of interest. The current thought is that an in

  The human brain is the organ that literally makes us human. A product of long evolution, it has produced all of the art, music, culture, and science that we see today. From birth, we witness the miracles of its development -- awareness, language skills, motor skills, sociability. When adolescence occurs, parents and others are often frustrated at behaviors that seem completely irrational. What is increasingly evident in studies of adolescents and their brains is that they are really immature. It is apparent now that the maturation of the brain continues through adolescence and is only completed in our mid-20s. It is clear that the limbic system and the centers for rewards are mature years before the frontal cortex; this helps explain why adolescents often engage in risky behavior which often leads to morbidity and mortality. In the United States, 71% of deaths between the ages of 10 and 24 are from four causes : motor-vehicle accidents, other unintentional trauma, homicide, and sui

  I was in college when I discovered how interesting microbiology was. I majored in it and found the courses in medical school equally interesting. I did a senior year rotation in infectious diseases at Temple under Bennett Lorber, then a new assistant professor fresh from his infectious diseases fellowship. This was in January 1974 and I was hooked. The Navy offered me a fellowship in 1981 after a tour as a general internist at Naval Hospital Guantanamo Bay; I then spent two years at Naval Hospital San Diego which was tremendous fun as well as accelerated learning. The program at San Diego was also a shaping one. The problem of sexually transmitted diseases, especially gonorrhea, drove the research part of my fellowship. Little did I know how it would affect me for the remainder of my medical career. At Naval Medical Center Portsmouth Virginia, a full decade of running an HIV Evaluation Unit with Margan certainly cemented the importance of these diseases in my psyche. Upon retirement

  Spent last week with Margan in Santa Barbara. Nice to just get away for some “our” time and see a few new things. Santa Barbara is beautiful but we could tell the pandemic had hit the downtown pretty hard. Went to the Old Mission, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the SB Zoo, and the SB Botanical Gardens. I Will get back to more serious stuff next week but here are a few photos of our trip. Old Mission Santa Barbara Panoramic View, Old Mission Santa Barbara Bronze Bust, SB Museum of Art Santa Ynez Mountains from SB Botanical Gardens

  Happy Halloween to all. This has been another ultra-busy week and my one idea for the blog was about obliviousness. All of us will often be unaware of our actions and their impact on others. One of my pet peeves is people who do things that annoy me, e.g. change lanes abruptly without turn signals, seem in a fog about their surroundings and encroach on others, etc. My wife reminds me to apply Thad’s Maxim in such cases: never attribute to malignancy that which is explained by obliviousness (yes, in some cases stupidity but let’s just use obliviousness for now). In the end, it saves a lot of Donald Duck moments (as in encounters with witches, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnvygJHFX8k ).  Enjoy Halloween -- back from Santa Barbara next weekend, more then. Photo above taken 29 October at The Huntington Gardens and Library in San Marino, California.

  As I write this, I am listening to Richard Strauss’s Horn Concerto #11 on KUSC , the Los Angeles classical music station. Today is the 75th birthday of KUSC and this made me think about how lucky I have been to have classical music available to me during my lifetime. I listened to WFLN in Philadelphia growing up but really got into them in my med school days at Temple, when I would have classical music playing while I studied. They ceased broadcasting classical music in 1997. The station’s classic recordings were donated to Temple’s music station WRTI 90.1 and in that sense, WFLN lives on. I accumulated classic music LP’s that sufficed for my music at home but there was a desert for classical through the airwaves from the mid-70s until 1983 for me. After entering the Navy in 1979, there was nothing on Armed Forces Radio and Television Service ( AFRTS , pronounced a-farts) in Guantanamo Bay that could be termed classical (Casey Kasem and AT40 and Wolfman Jack became favorites). Even

  Missed posting last weekend due to a lot of other stuff I had to do. Margan and I did a Current Events session here at MonteCedro last Tuesday on the topic of Dark Money in politics. That entailed reviewing a book I had already read but needed to review ( Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer) and a book I just read ( Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean) and making a short introduction for our group with slides. Lots of work but it really is the way to learn. I recommend both of these books. Both Mayer and MacLean detail the efforts of billionaires (the Koch brothers are front and center but there are many others) to influence our government behind the scenes. In my view, what they are doing is buying the best government for their own benefits, which are no business regulations and as little taxation of them and their corporations as possible. As I poin