Patient Mistakes and Patient Advocates

There is an absolutely massive literature now on the danger to your health posed by the U.S. medical industry and I am always glad to see any sign of help or even acknowledgement of the need of help in the situation. So I enjoyed finding Trisha Torrey's recent book entitled “You Bet Your Life! The 10 Mistakes Every Patient Makes.”

Trisha Torrey is a professional Patient Advocate – I didn't even know such a profession existed: people who will go to the hospital with you to fight for you. An old friend who was a professional nurse asked me when she heard that I had had a major injury in the hospital, “Didn't you have anyone to go with you to fight for you?”

Here are seven of the mistakes on Torrey's list of ten:

#1 Thinking your healthcare is focused on you, the patient.

#2. Thinking the doctors put their patients' needs first.

#3. Not confirming your diagnosis with a second or third opinion.

#4. Thinking you've been told all about your treatment options.

#5. Thinking you are safe in the hands of the healthcare system.

#6. Not understanding the reach or risk of medical records.

#7. Spending time in the hospital unless it's absolutely necessary.

My own conclusion from reading the such literature is that our chances are greater of being harmed rather than helped by the U.S. medical industry, but that we take that chance because of hope. Becoming aware of the ways it can harm us is shocking, overthrowing so much of what we have assumed or believed in the past, but I find it useful and infinitely restoring after my own recent experience in a hospital.

The Establishment Just Can Not Admit It - Yet

There is an excellent recent Salon article by Bill Curry, who once was an adviser to President Clinton, which is worth reading. There is one passage in particular about "what is wrong" with President Obama which is not easily articulated or recognized by educated people who love and appreciate Obama's good points. Curry does see it and articulates it in this article better than anyone else I've read. He writes:

"There’s a name for the bipartisan consensus of party elites: neoliberalism. It is an inconvenient name for many reasons but mostly because it seems odd that the worldview of the Republican elite would be an ideology with the root word ‘liberal’ in its name but it is true, nonetheless. and may even shed a little light on the open, bitter breach between GOP elites and the party base.

Democrats stayed loyal longer to their elites for two reasons. One is their love of two very talented politicians, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whose charm and verbal dexterity masked deep differences with the base. The other is their fear of Republicans.

I often talk to Democrats who don’t know Obama chose not to raise the minimum wage as president even though he had the votes for it; that he was willing to cut Medicare and Social Security and chose not to prosecute Wall Street crimes or pursue ethics reforms in government. They don’t know he dropped the public option or the aid he promised homeowners victimized by mortgage lenders. They don’t know and don’t want to know. Their affection for Bill and Barack — and their fear of Republicans — run too deep."

There is this problem is that educated, articulate, well-meaning, informed, enlightened USA citizens just can not admit that their position, their pay checks, their social self-confidence, their social presentment and self-imagery - that all this is now, and has been for a long time, a falsity, a mask, a pretense.

It isn't just that the public is sycophantic, naive, much less knowledgeable and sophisticated than they themselves believe.

There are now many more people than ever who do see through Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and what is in general called “the establishment.”

I think now just of the experience I've had during this past week with well-paid dentists, medical insurance people, and similar professionals. I am assured that my experience is not unique. These are well-paid people, but they have been able to hide their true incompetence and falsity through diction, tradition, the ignorance and acceptance and collusion of their victims. They have had a lot at stake in not seeing, not articulating, the true reality because they have families to support and other stakes. Further, to discern the falsity of it - Clinton, Obama, the establishment presentment of competence and superiority, the professionals, the experts - requires such deep suffering and disillusionment that it's actually astonishing that it has now developed as far as it has.

It is surprizing how many people now "get it." They see now how many others "get" Elizabeth Warren, who was almost inconceivable ten years ago. Donald Trump recently said that he and Bernie Sanders are the only two candidates who "get" this. My own sense is that this is the reality and that the public at large "gets" that this is the reality but hasn't been adequately able to articulate it or its causes. They blame "the Democrats" which is correct, but they have not understood their own blindness, which is actually the same blindness as the Democrats' blindness, only to a much greater degree. Their belief in the establishment - in "America," for example - has been absolutely visceral. "USA! USA! USA!" - a blood-curdling chant. If you tried telling the public and the elite at the time of the invasion of Iraq that the USA might be wrong, they might even kill you. But now, even Trump can come right out and tell the truth about the invasion of Iraq. It's as if the establishment has now been discredited, rightly, in many more ways that just its wars, but they themselves just can't admit it yet.

That Imagery of Thoth, Ma'at, and the Unconscious

The imagery of the Ibis is particularly important and delightful for me right now because I am deeply engrossed in reading Henri Ellenberger's classic,“The Discovery of the Unconscious.”

The bird obviously, easily, and naturally digs beneath the surface to get life-sustaining nourishment from the muck at the bottom.

So it fits that the ancient Egyptians would consider it to be sacred and it's heartwarming and delightful to think of them imaging Thoth (Hermes-Mercury) with the head of an Ibis! It gives me a feeling of immediate kinship with people thousands of years ago, as if they were right here now, in this room.

I've thought for many years about the image of Thoth's wife, Ma'at, as being Truth, symbolized by a feather. You often see an image in the Egyptian hieroglyphic writings of a person with a feather for a head and a person with an Ibis for a head.

Ma'at and Thoth

Here are two very simple images – an Ibis and a feather – that are yet profound, ancient and helpful symbols - truth is built up from very small strands like those of a feather, and discovering truth requires plunging beneath the surface into the hidden depths of the unconscious to retrieve nourishment.

People wear feathers on the head even today, even if it be only a very small one stuck into a hat band – a ancient symbol.

And there is that imagery of the Last Judgment with the Feather in one side of the scale and your soul in the other side, with this Ibis-headed Thoth standing right there taking note.

At the Great Hall of Judgement

I think being acquainted directly with the animals that are used as symbols gave old-time people a greater power to understand these symbols than we are able to possess, having little direct experience with those animals. Having some real life experience with sheep and goats, for example, makes their use as symbols in the Bible much more readiily accessible. Still, videos like the one of an Ibis' flight below are now easily available on the Internet at sites like YouTube, and I think that's a good thing.

Finally, the thought keeps coming up to me of how great it would have been if something was said to me during my long, difficult, expensive education about the meaning of just the Ibis and the Feather. I remember now the psychology course I took at university – it was filled with all kinds of “scientific” words about experiments and statistics and neurons and synapses and rats – none of it being of the slightest use in real life.

Michael Moore "Where to Invade Next"

I saw Michael Moore's new film, “Where to Invade Next,” this past week and was so excited about it that I decided to wait a few days to calm down before I wrote about it. I felt as I walked out of the theater that this must be the greatest movie of all time, maybe even the greatest art of all time.

Better than Bach or Michaelangelo? -  I thought: Maybe I need to get a little perspective on this! Maybe it seems so great because I am more able to see, and to appreciate, than I have ever been due to the lengthened and deepened reflection of my old age, or maybe due to my increasing “child-like” perception and rejuvenation.

Perhaps the film is just incomparable, but there remains a part of me that still thinks and feels that it doesn't get any better than this.

There is a relatively long segment in the film devoted to education in Finland and one of the split-second images now in my mind forever is the fleeting look of pity on the face of a Finnish teacher when she learns of what we do to U.S. school children.

The general idea of the film is that Michael visits nine countries outside the U.S. to find and to appropriate ways for the U.S. to deal with issues such as education, food, crime, maltreatment of women, banking, health care, and crippling views of human nature as unsocial.

It's anthropology, sociology, psychology, and art, and religion, and fun.

There is a scene at the end in Berlin with Moore and a friend looking at remains of the Wall. He notes how people just started taking hammers and chisels and chipped away at the Wall. He says that it's really very simple: “Hammer,” “Chisel.” Keep at it.

If you have seen “Where to Invade Next” or are thinking of seeing it, the following video is also worth seeing. It is of an interview in which he discusses the making of the film and its meaning.

Wall Street: “Their business model is fraud.”

Bernie Sanders said those words this last week about Wall Street when he was in Durham, New Hampshire: “Their business model is fraud.”

I recently saw the film, “The Big Short,” based on Michael Lewis' book, and came away from it with the same feelings as I had about Bernie's statement: “How can anyone not see it?”

Elizabeth Warren said not long ago that people do see it, very clearly. She said it directly, and simply, as is her way.

I hope and think that her observation is correct, but I also understand Mark Twain's observation of our remarkable ability to stumble over the truth and then to get up and to keep on running as if nothing had happened.

Truth vs. the Establishment and the Professional Punditry

It seems to me that what is missing from the viewpoint of the establishment in the current intense discussion of the USA presidential candidates is the understanding that it has been shown to be false.

I mean by “establishment” the existing group of people who consider their money and their self-esteem and power to be real, true, legitimate, benign.

They haven't quite realized the validity and extent of our perception of the establishment's falsity in every walk of life - in the academy, politics, the USA's wars, medicine, law, business, law enforcement, prisons, drug laws, police, finance, education, entertainment, sports, TV, radio, newspapers, the military.

It is like the fairy tale in which an emperor and his dependents are experiencing a child point out what every body else can see - but they themselves have not yet registered it, have not yet been able to see what everyone else can now see very clearly. They have an inkling, but they haven't yet grasped the fact of their own destitution.

"I'm Dying"

A friend said to me recently “I'm dying.” She's ninety years old and in precarious health, so it's likely that she will die any day now. She said it in that sober way of people who have done a lot of thinking in preparation for the event. I recognized what she was saying immediately because dying has been the central question of my own life for over fifty years now.

What surprized me was how good her statement felt. It was true, and she was sharing it with me, and it was helping us both to hear it said, to acknowledge it, to deal with it. We would help each other with dying, help each other out at the end, like God's spies, a phrase that she has used with me. It felt good to hear her say “I'm dying.”

Conversely, I now see what a down, what a drag, what a frustration, it is to be with people who don't believe they will die.