Thoughts of a retired physician

  On 24 February 2022 Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded its neighbor, Ukraine, under wicked and false pretenses. After Russian forces surrounded Ukraine on three sides, including its long border with Belarus to the north, Russian armed forces began assaults from air, land, and sea. As I write, now almost 72 hours on (Saturday), the Russian Army is trying to take Kyiv and Kharkiv but meeting determined resistance from the Ukrainian Army – and the Ukrainian people. What will the outcome of this be? Certainly a lot of death and suffering. The Russians claim not to be targeting civilians but there are too many reports of schools, residential areas, and hospitals being struck by a variety of munitions to give much credence to the Russian claims. There have been civilian deaths but no one has released any figures to date. There are videos of Ukrainian troops fighting Russians with antitank weapons from the UK. It appears now that the prime target is Kyiv but despite the force applied by Russia

  A short housekeeping note. I have disabled comments for the moment as they are being spammed for offers for cryptocurrency and casinos from parts unknown. I hope to re-enable them at some point. Last week I opened the subject of how the growing population of humans represents a threat to the survivability of our species because of the increasing degradation of the environment. I will get back to that but today there are two other things at the top of my mind. The first is the crisis in Ukraine brought about by Vladimir Putin. Putin has clearly evolved into the same sort of dangerous autocrat that the world saw too much of in the last century. Russia is now toying with war as a means to extend its influence to the states that separated from Russia when the USSR collapsed. As David Ignatius writes, Putin's rage at NATO is long-standing and his military has improved dramatically over the past two decades. The coziness between Xi Jinping and Putin has also created a powerful bloc

Short post today, lots of other stuff to do. MonteCedro showed a Netflix documentary yesterday called Seaspiracy . Pretty scary in its own way and brings the climate change crisis into focus in a new way. I thought of a book I read a month or so ago, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century by John Higgs. In the penultimate chapter, Higgs makes note of what he believes is the least understood of the events of the 20th century. In 1900, the world population stood at 1.6 billion. By the close of the century, it had quadrupled to 6 billion. As I type this, the world population in 2022 stands at over 7.9 billion people. As Higgs points out, our civilization is predicated on increasing consumption. But there is a limit to growth because Earth, the only home our species knows and likely will ever know, is finite. Many years ago in Microbiology 101, we learned what an ever-increasing population of bacteria will do on an agar slant. It looks like this: We are at lea

  This week our LWV-PA Healthcare Committee put on a session focused on the new medical school in Pasadena, the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine . Margan, as the Chair of our committee, worked extremely hard to bring this to fruition. It had to be delayed several times, not least because of the covid pandemic, but it finally occurred this past Thursday. It sparked conversations between M and me because of how the concept of undergraduate medical education has changed since we went to med school. The paradigm that Temple and Maryland, as well as all other medical schools in the 60s and 70s operated under, was a result of the Flexner Report in 1910. Medical education in America at the turn of the 20th century was a hodge-podge. There were a few excellent schools (Johns Hopkins) and many plain lousy diploma mills. Flexner helped reform medical education so that the Hopkins model (and its German roots) became the norm. This resulted in a standardized curriculum that d

  As a child, I was taught that books are wonderful things that could take you to different places and expose you to many ideas – thanks, Mom and Dad. I was taken to the public library in Reading by my Dad who wanted me to take out books and find pleasure and education in them as he did. When I saw movies of Nazis burning books I couldn’t understand why anyone would do that.  We are in the midst of a frenzy to ban books these days. As the article notes, this has been politicized as everything is now to divide our nation further. The ostensible reasons are not to harm children by exposing them to ideas that parents believe they should not be exposed to –  sexuality, curse words, gender issues, race. I still have to ask Why?  I think that I see some answers but they are excuses to me rather than answers. I believe first that a main driver is fear. As Viet Thanh Nguyen notes, “ Book banning doesn’t fit neatly into the rubrics of left and right politics. ” While this is true, the overwhel

  The deluge is finally coming. In an excellent piece this morning, Jennifer Rubin notes that “ Defeated former president Donald Trump just had a really bad week .” In New York, the state attorney general, Letitia James, has compiled evidence that Trump and his adult children conspired to revalue his assets to meet the needs of who was asking for the valuation – always in Trump’s favor, of course. This is not a criminal case but the financial liability for Trump could be enormous. At the same time the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has kept two attorneys who are working a criminal case against Trump and his organization. In Georgia, the Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis has requested a special grand jury in her investigation of criminal misconduct by Trump in the 2020 Georgia election, and Brian Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State has indicated he will cooperate with such a grand jury. This is also a criminal investigation with the possibility of prison time for Trum

  A short post this week because I am working on a presentation for our residents on covid (Margan and I had no idea when we moved to MonteCedro that this would become our ongoing thing) as well as some other stuff in the to-do pile. This was a bad week with SCOTUS deciding that vaccine mandates under OSHA were not to be for large employers but were fine for HCW in places receiving federal funds (poor application of the law as well as ridiculous as the covid pandemic rages on IMHO); Manchin and Sinema declared their fealty to the filibuster instead of voting rights and the Constitution (no interest in democracy from these two); Putin, Trump’s puppet master, threatens a new Cuban missile crisis ; and a volcano in Tonga erupted with violent fury with tsunami waves across the Pacific and the fate of Tongans still unclear. But there was some good news too. We are at last seeing real movement by the Department of Justice on the January 6th coup attempt with a group of the Oath Keepers (a