Yikes. Questionable source trying to sound scientific. The author is anti-vax, disputes the connection between saturated fats and heart disease, suggests vegitabnoe oil is more dangerous than animal fat; and that vaccines in general cause most disease. Studies and stats cited do not appear to be widely accepted. Draw your own conclusions.
This corresponds with what I've read previously about brain activity following clinical death. What appears to be the case is that the brain continues to work for a period after the heart stops and a last breath is taken. So what that might mean is that if one is with a person who has just died, a relative or friend, there is still a moment, just a moment, to say good bye and I love you. And it is comforting to know that during that moment, the brain of the deceased might just be reliving all the greatest moments of that individual's life.
> the brain continues to work for a period after the heart stops
I had a sudden cardiac arrest (Ventricular Fibrillation). I felt dizzy and oriented for a few seconds (5?) after my heart stopped pumping blood and then I passed out. There was no life-flashing-before-my-eyes, no tunnels of light, just sudden dizziness and disorientation and then nothing. The next thing I remember was coming round in hospital.
Right. I used to box and I'm now painfully aware of the fragility of consciousness.
If you get hit right, the ~0.25-0.5 seconds prior and after to that hit do not exist for you. They are gone. You'll never know how you were hit or what you were doing, your eyes will just change instantly from "looking ahead" to "looking to the side/up" and you'll have to adjust very quickly to this new reality, despite the fact that the transition was instantaneous for you.
One guy used to joke that if you ever said something really dumb, you'd have about 1-2 seconds to hit the person who heard it so you could continue as though it never happened. Should tell you something about the kind of person you might find at a boxing gym.
small memory gaps after head trauma are relatively well documented - I'm recalling from ~15 years ago, but iirc the belief is that while the person is conscious at the time (before the head trauma) there's a disruption of the storage processes and those moments are forgotten. And then similarly, following a head trauma it takes a while for normal processing & storage to return. However, there's still some kind of conscious experience happening during those times. So there's a more philosophical question of like, "if you comfort someone and they forget it, was there any value in the comfort you provided?" but i felt like the paper was trying to argue, "yes" -- per the gp
> there is still a moment, just a moment, to say good bye and I love you
and why not? Maybe sometimes there is. and maybe the value of that is more for the living than the dead, but imo the point was that there's an argument they can still hear you. Will they remember it later? That's kind of a non-sequitor question if they're in the midst of dying.
An interesting thought, but in my mind it also raises the question of the meaning behind a sequence of memories that you don't remember remembering, there's simply no reason to assume it happened at all since without memories there is no other evidence of the event.
A dying person will not revisit their final moments if they were saved as memories. Giving comfort in passing is a kindness and a dignity to both the dying and the bereaved.
It's an interesting point that rapidly becomes philosophical in a "if a tree falls in the woods" sense. I recently read a paper that suggested that sedating anaesthesia used with the promise of making a patient unaware of a procedure may actually do no such thing - instead they prevent the patient remembering the procedure afterwards. Which as a potential patient one day.. is a little terrifying, because even if I don't remember any trauma the next day, do I really want to experience it nonetheless?
Feeling of being cut alive consists not only of your perception, but also of biochemical reactions, that’s why falling from the stairs dead-drunk doesn’t feel much horrible, and when you or your relatives are in danger, you don’t feel your fingers and muscles applying enormous force on things, which would be very painful otherwise. When you’re on a table, doctors don’t usually see (afaik) any of your blood pressure, hormones, etc raise too much. No reaction is no pain, which itself is a complex of sensations and thoughts, not a single signal. This state is not conscious, but yeah it may induce philosophical thinking.
When you're taken out of a minor surgery, you're usually awake as you're wheeled from the operating theatre back to your ward. If I think though about the one time I had surgery, I remember being told to think of something relaxing, falling asleep, and then waking up back in the ward. It's really interesting to think about how there was a brief period where I was awake, yet making no memories.
True, forming memories at that time might simply be unnecessary overhead since you're not likely to turn back without significant medical help. Memories that will never be accessed are just pointless.
Near death experiences do not happen to everyone who dies and is resuscitated. Supposedly, according to Wikipedia [1], it only happens to 10-20% of people. If someone is critically ill, it happens to 17% of those people.
But, it does happen to some people who go in to cardiac arrest.
I'm rewatching Midnight Mass on Netflix with my wife. They have some very powerful monologues on death. This is one that occurred to me just now, when two characters are discussing what they believe happens after death:
"When I die, my body stops functioning. Five minutes later, my brain cells start dying. But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT – the psychedelic drug released when we dream – so I dream. I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it. Just the last dump of DMT all at once, and my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this firework display of memories and imagination.
My mind’s rifling through the memories, long and short term, and the dreams mix with the memories. And it’s a curtain call. One last great dream as my mind empties the fuckin’ missile silos, and then I stop.
My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me.
No pain, no memory, no awareness that I ever was.
That I ever hurt someone.
That I ever killed someone.
Everything is as it was before me.
All of the other little things that make me up – the microbes and bacterium and the billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and in my hair and in my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living and eating. And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life and I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled and I’m billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.”
Thanks for mentioning this show, I sought it out and watched it on Netflix on the basis of your mentioning this depth of dialogue. And it was fantastic. I tend to skip past the "horror" genre because I've generally found it quite singularly un-cerebral. Midnight Mass was great, and it was primarily the quality of the dialogue that made it so, which, ironically, many reviews have deducted stars for.
The delivery of the dialogue by Hamish Linklater is also something to behold.
I also find comfort in the idea of becoming food after we die. I remember reading somewhere how a beached whale in the arctic can be a life-saving windfall for the scavengers there. Helped me see the positive in something I’d always seen as purely tragic.
Same here. It's helpful insofar as any story can be helpful in the face of what we have to go through.
Interestingly enough, although my wife shares the same beliefs as me in terms of religion and God, the stories that resonate most with her from that show were the evocative ones about God and heaven. She told me that the science-based ones barely register to her at all, and almost not at all on an emotional level. As I heard the other character describe her idea of heaven, I too feel the pull of those descriptions. There's a part of me that agrees with the character when he says, after listening to her speech, wiping away tears, "I really hope you're right."
Most people think of heaven when it comes to the Bible's view of life after death, but it speaks more about a resurrection from the dead for the vast majority of people who die, to live forever on a paradise Earth.
There is something in us that makes us yearn for more than the short lives we have now (hardly anybody would choose to die if they had good health under normal circumstances), so these do resonate with us more than a purely materialistic world view, which has ostensibly left people with lack of contentment and sense of purpose.
It's a real danger that we'll have to deal with on a sociological level soon. Atheism is on the rise. I'm not versed in atheism as it occurs in countries other than in the US, but it seems like we'll see new types of problems that are not immediately apparent. That's the double-edged sword of rationalism. Truth and reason above all... But it's vital to remember that we're squishy and mushy and spiritual and emotional beings. It seems like it will be a lot of fun to be involved in media as it comes to deal with that shift more and more. What stories make the most sense, while still holding truth at the center? What do people need?
I'm reminded of the prototypical Alan Watts lectures. He might be out of fashion at the moment, but maybe his work will one day again be a little flicker in the cave for us to reach for, down the line.
I find little comfort in it. By the time your 120-200 imperial pounds becomes food, you will have shat another 25,000 pounds that has gone into a sewer or elsewhere and fed some bacteria down the line.
> So what that might mean is that if one is with a person who has just died, a relative or friend, there is still a moment, just a moment, to say good bye and I love you.
Just because there is brain activity doesn't mean there is consciousness. A 10 week old fetus has brain activity. But it is not anything we'd call conscious. If your heart stops or you've stopped breathing, then it's highly unlikely you are conscious. But if it helps one cope with a loved one's death, perhaps there is no harm in letting them believe the deceased could hear your final goodbyes.
The brain might very well be in a weird state at that moment. In that case, it would be best if it is unconscious. Comfort is not high on nature's agenda.
Agree. Comfort's not high, but "survival" is. So it could be a really chaotic intermix of things still working and others not, and still others working in previously impossible states. Pain and possibly torture sound likely.
I wonder if there’s truth to the reports of people after being Guillotined still being able to blink and make facial expressions even though their head has just been severed.
I though everyone knew this? The brain wouldn't just immediately stop working because a heart stopped pumping, there would be some sort of delay effect there.
If they listen and notice they experience something right then and there and maybe at that point it's nice to feel loved... a sweet moment for a dying person briefly supercedes the metaphysical confusion of the living.
this assumes that death is binary: you're either dead or not. this is not how things work. you don't know the precise time duration and what happens unless you are there to experience it.
i think the best time to say goodbye and i love you is at any point in time
Of course they do, and this is why medicare for all is a great idea. It strikes me as rather perverse that health care is largely a for-profit business and that even non-profits (like systems associated with religions) are all about cutting corners and maximizing revenues. It seems logicl to me that health care be a right.
I don't think the language of "rights" makes sense here. It conflates things like free speech or religion, which are self-serve rights, with something someone else must provide.
Rights as in the Bill of Rights can be sued over endlessly in the courts. But the courts aren't a good place to sort out resource allocations, like doctor with patient.
Imagine one person suing to be a pateint of a particular doctor (perhaps a specialist with uncommonly-good outcomes). Or someone suing for frequent helicopter ambulence rides from their remote cabin in the woods.
These may be interesting questions to settle, but the language of "rights" is unhelpful.
A right to vote has to be provided. Right to an attorney is something that might haveto to be provided. Right to a jury by one's peers has to be provided. Right to appeal has to be provided. Even protests generally require permits, which have to be provided. You have the right to be treated equally based on your gender or race, which, if it is provided to one, has to be provided to all.
There are many rights which create the burden of work not only for the government but also for things like public businesses.
All of the things you mentioned are in the spirit of "if this thing is available, everyone must have fair access to it".
If there is to be a vote, everyone (of age) must be able to participate. If you are to be tried, you must have representation, a jury of peers, and possibility of appeals (alternative being that case against you is dropped). If protest permitting is instituted, they must be provided fairly and expeditiously.
Equal treatment is another type of right and even more different than a hypothetical "right to health care".
The issue with health care is that it might not be available (depending on if you are in a remote area, public health circumstances e.g. strains due to a pandemic, limited specialized equipment, etc.). So a "right" to utilize it is unrealistic. At best you can posit a "right to non-discrimination of access to health care on the basis of X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z can be such things as "gender, race, age, etc." or more politically contentiously "preexisting conditions, enrollment in insurance, ability to pay, etc".
To be clear I also favor public universal health insurance of some kind. But I also think that considering that health care is or could be a "right" is kind of ridiculous.
> "if this thing is available, everyone must have fair access to it"
Ok sounds. Good. Medical treatment is an available service. Everyone should have fair access, no?
> The issue with health care is that it might not be available (depending on if you are in a remote area, public health circumstances e.g. strains due to a pandemic, limited specialized equipment, etc.). So a "right" to utilize it is unrealistic. At best you can posit a "right to non-discrimination of access to health care on the basis of X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z can be such things as "gender, race, age, etc." or more politically contentiously "preexisting conditions, enrollment in insurance, ability to pay, etc".
To me this reads like pretty creative mental gymnastics to try to exclude universal health care from the original premise. If you're in a remote area, your access to treatment may be of a different quality/difficulty to obtain but everyone in your area will have the same difficulty.
> At best you can posit a "right to non-discrimination of access to health care on the basis of X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z can be such things as "gender, race, age, etc." or more politically contentiously "preexisting conditions, enrollment in insurance, ability to pay, etc".
That's kind of how voting rights are today but they certainly weren't always. We don't argue as much about the poll tax or various "poll exams" anymore, but banning them at the time was "politically contentious". Something being "politically contentious" is not a good argument for or against doing something as it's really easy to generate controversy (look at the modern news landscape).
> Ok sounds. Good. Medical treatment is an available service.
Which treatment? When? How often? Does "the right to healthcare" include yearly check-ups, for instance? People died from COVID in many different countries, not because they can't afford treatment, but because they need care urgently when we don't have hospital capacity. An emergency room being full is not a situation unique to pandemics, it happens more often than you think.
The comparison with the right to an attorney, while interesting, may not be completely accurate. This right is more about preventing you from being punished without a chance to defend yourself.
> To me this reads like pretty creative mental gymnastics
On the contrary, comparing healthcare to other rights is actually more of a mental gymnastics exercise. As far as I'm aware, no country defined healthcare as a right in their constitution.
Universal healthcare and Medicare for All are already popular ideas in the US. "Healthcare as a right" is not a winning message in my opinion, since it can be attacked from a philosophical and legal standpoint.
To be clear I'm not saying I think it's a bad idea to have universal health coverage because it's politically contentious. In fact I'm not saying it's a bad idea at all; I think it's a good idea. I just think framing it as a "right" is bad. In my opinion, doing so diminishes things that are actual (and hard-fought) rights, such as non-discrimination and freedom of speech, religion, etc.
> If you're in a remote area, your access to treatment may be of a different quality/difficulty to obtain but everyone in your area will have the same difficulty.
It might be almost or entirely nonexistent (e.g. you live in an extremely remote area, you've hiked on foot into uninhabited terrain, you might have a rare difficult-to-treat disease that would require so many specialists as to deprive others of care, etc.). If there are situations where one might not realistically be able to get health care, why would we frame health care as a "right"? In my opinion it's a fantasy and diminishes the meaning of the word. That's why I was trying to more narrowly pin it down to "non-discrimination of access to health care" in my comment.
It's not infinitely available and not all service is equal.
> Everyone should have fair access, no?
If people want to spend their money to buy more of it, what they perceive to be higher quality of it, or to get it sooner, they should be allowed to do so.
Universal health care means everyone gets health care, it doesn't need to mean everyone gets the same health care.
Personally I’m with you- generally speaking “positive rights” do not carry the same weight as negative rights and need a different term (I propose “really good ideas”) but people with our viewpoint have been losing that battle for a long time.
My conception of fundamental human rights is based upon “what would I agree justifies a forceful intervention/war.” Without spilling far more ink then I have time for here, I’ll just say that is a very short list and guaranteed health care doesn’t meet the criteria.
Doesn’t mean I don’t society should try to provide that service, but I’m not going to support intervention in another state if they don’t.
The way I look at it is some rights are good ideas, some are bad ideas, and some are nonsensical and unworkable ideas (regardless of whether they would be good or bad in an idealized world). Health care as a right is the last of those.
You can’t guarantee access to a limited resource so it isn’t a reality anywhere. At best they redefined the meaning of the word “right” which I am also strongly against.
Rights aren't made up is a founding principle of America, every immigrant who naturalizes has to agree and uphold this principle of rights being natural.
That can be seen as just part of the burden of charging you with a crime: the state needs to provide you with a judge, jury, and counsel.
Amd it's not the greatest example of rights-in-action if you ask me. Often such counsel is overloaded and just tries to negotiate a plea deal rather than provide a robust defense.
The solution to that is acting positively to create a system that we think is strong enough to withstand challenges in the courts.
You don't have to wait until the courts strike down your public-defender system for being wholly inadequate, for example, you can properly fund the system in the first place and then the courts won't be legislating it.
"standard of care" is the term that comes to mind. And yes, like all human systems there will be disagreements about what that standard should be, and some system for resolving those, and in a handful of cases people will receive unfavorable outcomes. The point is to act to minimize those outcomes and provide high-quality care to as many people as possible.
The alternative is having those arguments with your insurance company, and you will lose. The death panels exist, they always have, and they are held in a building with "Aetna" on the side.
If "acting positively" means "work it out in the legislature", then we agree. But the language of rights starts to push this responsibility into the courts (at least in the US).
I am not saying there will be no arguments. I'm just saying we shouldn't hammer out the details of a medical system in the courts.
If you are trying to convince people to have the government gatekeep their healthcare, then I don't thinkt he attorney's provided by the "right to an attorney" are something you should mention.
every human has a right to be healthy. However it is provided is fine. We, as a society, have the means to provide this.
Just because we've set up a system that profits off of people being sick should not invalidate people's right to be healthy. That's our doing.
I also find claiming some things are "self-serve rights," to be hilarious. People going to court over constituional violations. Is that self serve? Rights, especially the ones you mention are only "free," or "self-serve," as long as all parties agree to provide them for free. If someone decides that they want to discriminate against your religion, they can do so, and it is up to you to seek remedy.
So how is that self-serve? It isn't. No right is. Things are being provided for you which we, as a society, have agreed are essential. How health is not apart of that is beyond me.
This is the really insidious part: They don't have to cut corners. The government covers the majority of the sickest people. The average US citizen pays into the private pool for the majority of their healthy life and then gets handed off to the government to cover them when they get expensive. It's literally a ripoff.
If something is a “right”, it doesn’t imply the government should just take care of everything and it should be totally socialized. One might consider “clothing” a right, but I don’t think we’d want the government to control what we wear.
I agree that government should ensure universal healthcare, and maybe a single payer system would be the correct model (though other countries have had better results with partially market driven approaches). But my belief there is based on the fact that humans aren’t currently able to make good decisions about their own health care, and government panels probably would be able to make better decisions regarding public health.
> One might consider “clothing” a right, but I don’t think we’d want the government to control what we wear.
I think it would be _pretty awesome_ if freely available durable (and warm) clothing were made available to people that needed it (homeless, foster kids, etc), much the way my taxes help subsidize peoples' food costs.
There's a big difference between saying, "You have to wear this", and "We'll all pay so that people who need it can get shoes/socks/pants/jacket X times per year if needed".
I don’t think that would be awesome at all. Could you imagine a committee trying do decide what clothes are acceptable. All sorts of “buy American” clauses thrown in. Each Congressional district would have to have its own factory to produce one part of the outfit.
How about we have the Gov set up a negative income tax so that if you can afford clothes, you can go buy some. Or if you don’t need new clothes, you can spend that money somewhere else.
Healthcare isn’t driven by want or choice. Government committees can look at data to figure out how to distribute resources. And we don’t want more healthcare like we want more clothes.
Can you imagine? A box full of useful clothes and supplies, decided by government committee, being handed out at the hospital, free of charge, so mother can relax and care for baby! What a nightmare!
I don’t think is right to analogise between clothing and healthcare. Everyone needs clothes; specific needs are highly correlated with climate. While this is also true of some basic functions of healthcare (dental care being the most obvious example) most of the very expensive parts of healthcare (surgery, cancer, etc) are not similarly predictable and therefore fit the insurance model better.
And the way to make insurance model work best is to make it universal, mandatory and governed by cost efficiency rather than shareholder profit. Better still, a universal system becomes a monopsony buyer, able to assess value with domain expertise then demand and receive lower prices for drugs and medical equipment.
Clothing as a "right" is as ridiculous as health care as a "right", in my opinion. Though I also believe that governments should make efforts to provide both to those lacking them.
In the US, its more like a mafia racket; Your money or your life.
One of my favorite things about Thailand was that the hospital lobby had these pamphlets with actual prices for procedures.
The US healthcare industry is filled with criminals. They have blood on their hands and are raking in cash at a massive cost to US society.
Resource allocation is hard. Profit isn’t the problem. Access is. We should be spending more on healthcare as a country, not less. Guaranteed health care for everyone regardless of income level can still happen in a regulated for-profit system.
USA federal government is just in general shitty at execution. I didn’t get any stimulus checks. My unemployment I was supposed to get went to some other address I never inputted into the arcane-af website I had to use to register for unemployment. A traffic ticket that should’ve only cost me $29 ended up costing $468 because the government messed up and I didn’t want to risk getting covid going to court to protest and there was no way to appeal online. I would dread these same people in charge of my health care without at least the option of switching providers.
All that happened in the past 6 months.
If our government could start getting the basics right I’d trust them with my healthcare. Maybe MfA is a great idea but it should be expanded slowly, the way Biden has suggested.
The president od my small local hospital is paid $985,000 per year. I looked it up.
My local hospital also cuts lots of corners to save a buck. I know some nurses who work there. They understaff while they overcharge patients and play absurd games with billing.
I think this is pretty normal in the US. The ratio of hospital beds to population is unusually small for a developed country.
As soon as my kids are a little older, I am getting out of this country. I am healthy now but as I get older I get more concerned about getting caught in the US healthcare system.
> The president od my small local hospital is paid $985,000 per year. I looked it up.
The CEO of a small local tech company is paid $10m per year. I looked it up.
> “my local hospital doesn’t allocate resources right”
Not surprising. Resource allocation is a difficult problem. Perhaps the hospital would be better off with limits on what they are allowed to pay people like you seem to be suggesting, but I doubt it.
To me this is all fundamentally a sign the USA doesn’t spend enough on health care. I don’t have confidence price controls and nationalization will improve matters.
The unspoken thing is that current Medicare is only sustainable because the hospitals are allowed to recover the costs by charging whatever they can get away with to uncovered people.
If everyone is covered, quite a lot of money will have to come from elsewhere and it's not like seriously raising taxes to source it would get very popular.
US healthcare spending is already far higher than anywhere else in the world. It's not a "quantity" problem, it's an "allocation" problem. Too much is allocated to various middlemen for profit, and generally too much is wasted on care that does not produce good returns in terms of quality-adjusted years-of-life. For example, too much is spent on the elderly and sick, and not enough on maintaining the healthy.
US healthcare is totally overpriced. I don’t believe for a single second that they are losing money on Medicare. Maybe in some areas but not on average.
If only the democrats had had a little courage and ran a candidate that embraced Medicare for All. I think with Biden not embracing it they have lost a great opportunity for many years. It would be the most straightforward way to universal health care. The systems are all there, it has shown that it works and people want it. Now Biden is talking about a nebulous “public option” which won’t go anywhere. What a waste.
Odd? I don't think so. Just like the Fibonacci sequence appears all over nature, so do other architectures. Evolution has, apparently, standardized on architectural infrastructure - and replicates it across a broad variety of environments.
In actual fact, though the new network is experiencing record downloads of new titles like Mulan, it's daily user numbers are abysmal, only 3% of the available market. So their older content is evidently just not appealing, which is a problem going forward.
My wife and I are looking into living in Mexico, if we sold our home in the US, we could afford a small place in Mazatlan for the winter, and in one of the mountain villages for the summer.
Recently inherited a condo in Mazatlan. We're not sure if it's a good place to escape to - at this point we're planning on selling it. What's your case for escaping to Mexico other than much lower cost?
Unpopular opinion: Remembering with great fondness Quarterdeck's DESQview/X, the open systems, off-the-shelf windowing environment that could have won the windowing war. How life would have been different if it had...
I made a national organization (AARP) change course and issue corrections regarding their Coronavirus volunteer program with a single blog post on Medium. (They had been sending members to an open, Google spreadsheet where their info was public). https://medium.com/@doncarlitos/maintaining-privacy-while-vo...
This reads a lot like quackery to this former RN & nursing educator. Good nutrition is, of course, a great way to stay healthy, but this article isn't really helpful in that regard.
