Storms of Spring

It is springtime in the South, and that means big storm systems. In good years (for agriculture, not city life) we get two weeks of more or less solid rain in the spring, causing flooding of waterways. We may get the same in the fall, some years. This shortens an otherwise very long growing season.

The tree in this picture died last year. We left it as a convenient place to park the bird feeder, but it blew over in the most recent storms. It hit the fence and did nothing more than cosmetic damage. I cut it up with a hand saw today, to be hauled off later.

The storms are being especially destructive this year, probably because we have chosen to take up agricultural/forested land with concentrated population centers. The destruction is awful to contemplate. There are reasons why this continent was not as densely populated as Europe when the Europeans arrived. It simply has large sections that are not very hospitable to large groups of people- too wet, too dry, too hot, too swampy, too stormy or unstable geologically, etc.

Here in Memphis homes and businesses are being flooded as the Mississippi backs up into its tributaries. A lot of people decided that the older parts of the city (on higher ground) were not desirable anymore, so they wanted to move out. "Out" has a lot of low ground in the regions surrounding the city. We should either build enough levees to protect the whole thing or bring the population back to high ground. Selling people houses in"100-year flood plain" should be outlawed, plain and simple. More storms are coming in the next few days. I pray they don't bring more destruction. We've had enough to last a while.

Patient or consumer? How about fellow human?

Paul Krugman recently wrote a post in the New York Times about not liking the fact that Republicans sully the sacred relationship between doctors and patients by calling the patients, "consumers". Sorry to break it to him, but the doctors did that a long time ago. From what I have seen, "patient" does not even mean "fellow human" to many doctors anymore. It means "profit machine". Many of the most commonly prescribed drugs (statins and anti-depressants, anyone?) have been shown to be of limited to no benefit for most of the patients taking them. Likewise for invasive procedures like mastectomy for DCIS (which has a death rate of 0.7%, and is classified with the non-lethal skin cancers by the CDC in terms of mortality), stents and bypasses for asymptomatic coronary blockages, and cancer treatments for screen-detected "incidentalomas". One of my grandmothers was treated for years for diabetes when she did not have it, simply because she was obese and fit the profile. She was a Medicare cash cow for the doctors, who treated her for a disease she did not have AND all the attendant side effects of the drugs. She was reduced to a "health care consumer", obediently taking 11 drugs a day, by the doctors. I'm afraid our health care system needs a total rebuild, not just reform. When you hear med students choosing residencies on the basis of how soon they'll be able to retire, and doctors recommending tests for you and your loved ones when recent medical lit shows such tests to do more harm than good, simply because they will find SOMETHING "wrong" if they test hard enough, then they can steal all your retirement money in the name of "saving your life" with procedures that show little survival benefit, something has to change. The entire moral outlook is wrong. It does not MATTER whether private insurance or pubic tax-payer dollars fund this sinking ship. There aren't enough funds. Both political parties are looking to patch the Titanic, when water is already over the decks. We need to man the lifeboats and start teaching true prevention (simple diet and exercise) instead. Let her sink and build a health CARE system in which humans treat humans as they would be treated, not a money-extraction, disease-mongering system.