SerPolUS_IDES

... not quality of pt care

'Don Sergio, as people here call him, spends much of his time patiently cleaning and bandaging wounds caused by burns or diabetes. He accepts no money from his patients, because "then they can be calm and they are more motivated to heal quickly," he said. "The ability, the gift that God gave me to do this - that is what gives me results," he said. When he can gather together enough from the donations that support him and his work - including from American expatriates living in Mexico - he helps villages build schools and treat their water. Many of his patients are Mayans from the surrounding highlands, who are among Mexico's most marginalized citizens after suffering centuries of discrimination and neglect.'

'I recently explored what Google searches tell us about depression, by which I mean, loosely, dips in mood. [I used] anonymous, aggregate data from tens of millions of queries.... thanks to the incredibly large sample size, meaningful patterns emerge. According to the data, depression is highest in April. Depression is lowest in August. The state with the highest rate of depression is North Dakota; the one with the lowest, Virginia. The city with the highest rate is Presque Isle, Me.; the city with the lowest, San Francisco. Depression is, unsurprisingly, highest on Mondays and lowest on Saturdays. The date on which depression is lowest is Dec. 25, followed by a few days surrounding it. The strongest predictor by far: an area's average temperature in January. Colder places have higher rates of depression, with the correlation concentrated in the colder months. Google searches, the biggest data source we currently have, are unambiguous: when it comes to our happiness, climate matters a great deal. There is a lesson here for public health and medical researchers. Are you investigating how weather affects migraine headaches? How chemicals in water affect autism rates? I believe we are about to enter a golden age of disease research. Many of the biggest developments will come from the analysis of big data, not from traditional experiments that survey a relatively small number of people.

"In 2005, Ms. Brainard-Barnes was a 22-year-old single mother who had difficulty holding down a steady job. She never could afford her own place, staying with her sister for long stretches and occasionally with a boyfriend. As soon as she enrolled on a site called ModelMayhem.com, that, after a few clicks, turned out to mean nude modeling and sometimes working as an escort. Within a few months, Ms. Brainard-Barnes was making up to $2,000 a day on trips to New York City. Online, she could be her own boss and not share what she made with anyone - not a pimp, not an escort service, not a boyfriend. In 2010, Maureen Brainard-Barnes's body was one of four uncovered close by one another in the sand dunes of Gilgo Beach, Long Island, wrapped in burlap.... The Web enables some people to take risks they never would have imagined. In this way, the women of Gilgo Beach still have something to teach us. The Internet might have made pimps less necessary, but today's escorts are as marginalized as ever, and every bit as vulnerable. The police rarely help them when they are at risk, and they rarely take their disappearances seriously. As far as the authorities are concerned, their profession still seals their fate."

Princeton mathematician's review of history of debt & growth in US shows little to worry about in current debt load as $ of GDP (which was higher in growth period following WW2. Some letters quarrel with this, and he responds.

"... it's not just the excessive and unwise spending that offends conservative values. Prisons, for example, are harmful to prisoners and their families. Reform is therefore also an issue of compassion. The current system often turns out prisoners who are more harmful to society than when they went in, so prison and re-entry reform are issues of public safety as well."

Actually GOALS for changing medical culture

The story of a 36-year-old man on life support after losing his limbs. His family pulled the plug; he decided he was glad to be alive. by Ashwaq Masoodi Atlantic, Jul 10 2013

"...beyond the medical advances, Dr. DeBakey's story is emblematic of the difficulties that often accompany care at the end of life. It is a story of debates over how far to go in treating someone so old, ... and risky decisions that, while still being argued over, clearly saved Dr. DeBakey's life. It is also a story of Dr. DeBakey himself, a strong-willed pioneer who at one point was willing to die, concedes he was at times in denial about how sick he was and is now plowing into life with as much zest and verve as ever. But Dr. DeBakey's rescue almost never happened. He refused to be admitted to a hospital until late January. As his health deteriorated and he became unresponsive in the hospital in early February, his surgical partner of 40 years, Dr. George P. Noon, decided an operation was the only way to save his life. But the hospital's anesthesiologists refused to put Dr. DeBakey to sleep because such an operation had never been performed on someone his age and in his condition. Also, they said Dr. DeBakey had signed a directive that forbade surgery. As the hospital's ethics committee debated in a late-night emergency meeting on the 12th floor of Methodist Hospital, Dr. DeBakey's wife, Katrin, barged in to demand that the operation begin immediately.

They have been held in solitary confinement for at least 20 years, each in his own 8-by-10-foot windowless cell at the Pelican Bay supermax prison, with about a thousand others - half of whom have been there for more than a decade. A 2011 United Nations report said the practice can amount to torture and called for a ban on terms longer than 15 days. In this country, there are an estimated 25,000 prisoners in long-term solitary in supermax prisons; in California, the average stay is nearly seven years. The inmates are isolated because prison officials have determined that they pose a threat to the safety of the guards and other prisoners, despite a growing body of evidence that such use of solitary does not reduce prison violence or promote safety.

Letter 'trigger': "When we look at someone and automatically think about that person's "race," we must realize that we are not seeing "race" but instead seeing an arbitrary and harmful societal classification imposed on a continuum of physical differences. When we want to ask how someone is classified by the myth, we should always put "race" or "racial" in quotation marks (as I have done here). Such questions still need to be asked, for example, on applications for college or a job, or for the census, for the answers provide the data needed to maintain diversity in education and the workplace and to monitor and remedy the harms the myth has caused and continues to cause. The long-term goal, however, is to make these questions obsolete.

"So perhaps, it might be argued, abortion can be safely limited only when the government does more to cover women's costs in other ways - in which case Texas might still be flirting with disaster. But note that this is a better argument for liberalism than for abortion. It suggests, for instance, that liberal donors and activists should be spending more time rallying against Perry's refusal to take federal Medicaid financing than around Wendy Davis's famous filibuster. It implies that the quest to "turn Texas blue" should make economic policy rather than late-term abortion its defining issue. And it raises the possibility that a pro-life liberalism - that once-commonplace, now-mythical persuasion - would actually have a stronger argument to make than the one Texas's critics are making now.

"While extremely rare, Powassan virus is deadlier than other tick-borne illnesses - killing 30 percent.... [Unlike delay of Lyme penetration X 24h], with Powassan virus, a tick can start transmitting the virus within 15 minutes".... The number of other tick-borne illnesses reported to the CDC is on the rise, led by Lyme disease, but also including anaplasmosis, babesiosis and ehrlichiosis. The Hudson Valley had been the national epicenter of such diseases for years.... Some natural remedies - fungi, oil of rosemary, and extract from Alaska yellow cedar trees - have been proven to reduce ticks."

Notably missing is Mr. Graham's role as a bridge-builder between liberal and evangelical denominations through a captivating faith that integrates head and heart.

Need to still address MD SGR (perhaps gradual intro with gradual decr in reimbursement for some docs)

it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you're given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, "This is how things are." They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism. The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we're learning more every day. But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves. They also tell us that every single human is unique, different than every other human, and each of us keeps changing in unpredictable ways. The societies we live in also keep changing-in part because of science and technology! So in certain important ways, humans resist the kind of explanations that science gives us.

'For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box. In "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History," published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed. Mr. Hollinger's argument generated much chatter among his colleagues when he first presented it at the 2011 meeting. But his sometimes pugnacious new book, he said, is just a "punctuation mark" on the recent spate of work reconsidering the left-hand side of the American religious spectrum, which includes titles like Matthew S. Hedstrom's "Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century"; Jill K. Gill's "Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left"; and David Burns's "Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus." The surge of interest in liberal religion, many say, reflects the renewed vitality of religious history more generally, which has spread beyond its traditional redoubts in divinity schools to become one of the most popular specializations among academic historians, according to the American Historical Association.

Graphic maps showing voter participation, discrimination lawsuits, discriminatory attitudes of states

...Love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion's knowledge claims. We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection. I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines -and other believers have similar doubts. They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.

'PORTLAND, Ore. - Four summers ago, on her first day as an administrator at Roosevelt High School here, Charlene Williams heard that the Christians were coming. Some members of an evangelical church were supposed to be painting hallways, repairing bleachers, that sort of thing. The prospect of such help, in the fervently liberal and secular microclimate of Portland, did not exactly fill her with joy. In truth, the connection between SouthLake and Roosevelt very much fit into a plan. It was a plan devised by an especially odd couple - Sam Adams, the first openly gay mayor of Portland, and Kevin Palau, the scion of an evangelical association created by his father, Luis. And their plan has delivered thousands of evangelical volunteers not only to Roosevelt, but also to scores of other public schools in the area and to public agencies dealing with homelessness and foster care. Getting Christian boots on the ground was the easy part. Restraining those boots from proselytizing was the challenge. The very essence of being evangelical, after all, is spreading the good news of the Gospel. Every virtuous act is meant to glorify God. Mr. Adams pointed out to Mr. Palau that service organizations like Rotary and Kiwanis assisted in city programs with the understanding that they would not recruit new members in the process. Mr. Palau said he could abide by such a tacit policy. The mayor took the risk of trusting that promise. "The vast majority of people," Mr. Palau put it recently, "have enough common sense to know that when you're in a school serving a child, that's what you're supposed to do. Trust God that if something is meant to be, it will just emerge." '