SerPolUS_IDES

Hudson River valley's culture+nature attracts NYC emigres

Justifying economic beliefs by religion. Does Christianity require special care for poor?

Contributions of GWB policies, & 2 recessions, to deficit

Hilarious 3-D cartoon of PHARMA's efforts to force Mass. legislature to repeal ban on drug reps "free lunches" for docs, to push brand-name drugs - in the name of "helping restaurants during the recession."

by Paul Moses - Newsday - 6/29/2001 DR. FREDERICK SMITH has the usual textbooks on ambulatory care, surgery and prescription drugs in his office. But the shelves also hold D.T.Suzuki's "Essays in Zen Buddhism," a volume of Cardinal John Henry Newman's writings, books on Confucianism and Judaism, the Quran and alarge-type, 69-year-old Bible a patient gave him, so worn that its cover has fallen off. These, too, are tools of Smith's trade. As associate chief of internal medicine at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, the gray-bearded, 56-year-old physician has found that religious faith can help his patients,and he's trying to teach that to a generation of up-and-coming doctors. His 2-year-old course, Religion and Medicine, is part of a growing move to sensitize doctors to the role faith plays in their patients' lives. It gives residents at North Shore who've completed medical school but are still receiving some training a chance to learn about their patients' religious traditions....

So for nursing home residents with advanced dementia, sons and daughters often opt to return the favor - even though the medical consensus is that it's not a favor. Most dementia patients will eventually develop problems with eating and swallowing as the disease progresses, but feeding them through surgically implanted tubes has not been shown to improve their survival, to prevent pneumonia or heal bedsores, or to improve their quality of life. Nevertheless, about a third of nursing home residents with advanced dementia do receive feeding tubes, usually during a hospitalization.

During a roadside breakdown, who didn't stop, and who did (by Justin Horner, graphic designer in Oregon) - a pretty close parallel to the Good Samaritan parable.

An oncologist at MSKCC recounts his own experience when his wife was diagnosed & began treatment for cancer.

The problem with teaching Physical Diagnosis in medical school without first teaching Communication Skills.

Brokers say small moves can alter the ultimate sales price of an apartment by 5 to 10 percent. The calculations are irrational, and buyers are usually unaware they are doing it. But chipped plaster or broken bathroom tiles can knock $500 to $5,000 off an offer, $1,500 floating walls can add $50,000 to $70,000, and a $10,000 paint job easily adds $50,000 to the price, according to an informal survey of city brokers.

'The recent historic open letter signed by 138 leading Muslim scholars ... from around the world - "A Common Word Between Us and You" - identifies some core common ground between Christianity and Islam, as well as Judaism. 'What is common between us lies in something absolutely central to both [and Judaism]: love of God and love of neighbor. 'The future of the world depends on our ability as Christians and Muslims to live together in peace. If we fail to make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony you correctly remind us that "our eternal souls" are at stake as well. 'We are persuaded that our next step should be for our leaders at every level to meet together and begin the earnest work of determining how God would have us fulfill the requirement that we love God and one another.'

"I have never before written about Glenn Beck, [who] I think of as a hugely skilled political entertainer who ... has made his rise on skillfully inflammatory rhetoric that has hooked the emotions of millions. But this time he hooked the Bible and the God of the Bible.... "He has united and offended all Christians who know that our God is a God of justice, and that advancing justice is central to our mission as a people and to the kingdom of God for which we work and wait."

America incarcerates five times as many people per capita as Canada and 7 times as many as most European democracies. In the early 70s, there were about 200,000 people locked up in the U.S. In 2004 the prison population of 1.8 million represented a growth of over 800% in the past 30 years. Nearly 7 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole -- 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.

"America is great in many ways, but on a whole host of measures America is great in many ways, but on a whole host of measures - some of which are shown in the accompanying chart - ...not only are we not No.1, we are among the worst of the worst. These include the worst income inequality in the developed world except for Hong Kong and Singapore; and the world's highest per capita prison population at 1 out of every 15 people (which is greater than Russia's).

Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children's welfare. They can't be "pro-life" when the "child" is in the womb but indifferent when it's in the world. The good news is that last year the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the rate of premature births fell in 2008, representing the first two-year decline in the last 30 years. The bad news is that, according to the March of Dimes, the Republican budget the House just passed could do great damage to this progress, including: $50 million in cuts to the state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs; and nearly $1 billion in cuts to CDC's preventive health programs, including its preterm birth studies.

Derek Diedricksen - Stoughton, Massachusetts

Nature study - urban women w/ chronic illness (but not men). "Heavily traumatized civilian women with two copies of a specific single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the ADCYAP1R1 gene were more likely to show PTSD with an odds ratio of 1.66 (95% CI 1.32 to 2.09) relative to similar women without the condition, Kessler and colleagues found."

Kugel uses his encounter with death to investigate and report on a state of mind notoriously resistant to literary exploration: the state of mind in which you intuit something on the order of God. . . . To the religious - or at least to Kugel and his sources - religion is an experience more than a cosmology. "It is not God's sovereignty over the entire universe that is at issue so much as his sovereignty over the cubic centimeter of space that sits just in front of our own noses," he writes. "That is to say, religion is first of all about fitting into the world and fitting into one's borders. There may indeed be something 'mythic' about it, but it pales before the mythic quality of our own clumsy, modern selves."

Catholic theologian Tim Muldoon: when "social contract" theory fails as a source of social ethics, then - said Martin Luther King Jr. (in "Letter from a Birmingham prison") - the appeal must be to some kind of transcendant "natural law." (I would only add that new views of "natural law" evolve with history and social circumstances - the incompatibility of slavery wasn't clearly seen till the 19thC, of segregation till the 20th, of discrimination against homosexuals in all the rights & privileges of civil society until the 21st.)