"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
So, this artwork illustrating the idea of snake oil treatment via an IV would have been excellent if I hadn’t been reading about mambaglins today. But now, with that context, I immediately see pain therapy treatment rather than snake oil.
There’s probably an interesting semiotic lesson in there somewhere. (I am way too lungs-trying-to-kill-me, post-debate foggy to even attempt it, though.)
Over at The Atlantic yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf explained why he refuses to vote for Barack Obama this election season. His argument boils down to Obama having a dismal human rights record:
Obama has done things that, while not comparable to a historic evil like chattel slavery, go far beyond my moral comfort zone. … Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn’t “precise” or “surgical” as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels.
This, I do not disagree with. Obama has done a lot of things that make me uncomfortable to flat out unhappy. I don’t agree with many of his policy decisions – and frankly, I also don’t expect to. While it would be nice if I was Queen of the World, realistically, that’s never going to happen (and equally realistically, we should all be happy about that). Obama has been a disaster on several issues of international human rights and morality – but taking a look at their positions, it’s not clear to me that Mitt Romney would be any better. Friedersdorf, however, thinks that the moral thing to do would be to vote for Gary Johnson, even though he won’t win.
No. In fact, I’d say that Friedersdorf’s argument clearly shows why it would be immoral for someone to vote for anyone other than Obama – at least, if someone can manage to remove themselves from a biased white male privilege position long enough to stop navel-gazing outward and take a look at our home front for a minute. Friedersdorf says
I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers.
Really? He doesn’t see how a woman can enthusiastically support the person who has created a program of healthcare equality? Friedersdorf can’t understand how a woman may support someone who has been trying to get the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passed? Or how a woman might feel more kindly inclined towards someone who is strongly pro-choice and advocates for and supports a woman’s right to control her own reproductive decisions?
There are more to civil liberties than those overseas. There are the ones right here at home, and allowing your outrage over foreign issues to cloud the domestic issues is something that you can have if you are holding that invisible privilege knapsack. But charging that I am somehow acting immorally because I am advocating for, campaigning for, and voting for Obama? That’s the kind of position you can take if your rights and your abilities to equality aren’t being threatened on the home front – and that, more than anything else, is a clear sign of the benefit of privilege of gender and race.
I am not, of course, saying that Obama should be left off the hook for his dismal foreign policy record. It is bad, and the human rights issues – held over from previous administrations or otherwise – need to be dealt with, and swiftly. Drone strikes need to end, the military needs to pull back from where it is not wanted or recognized by the local populations, and we need a serious re-evaluation of our entire interaction with the Middle East.
But that doesn’t mean someone should charge that supporting Obama is an immoral act and that moral voters should throw away their vote in protest, giving the chance for a split vote to allow Romney in to office. Not seeing the threat Romney offers – from his hawkish positions on international policy (really, you think he’s going to be better than Obama) to his attacks on women, minorities, and the middle class (the real middle class, not his idea of middle class) – is something you can do if you’re not in the group he’s targeting.
Yes, I realize that Friedersdorf laid out his argument on the immorality of voting for Obama with philosophical language, falling back on various traditions to justify his argument. I could do that; I know my Kant, my Mill. I could loop in virtue ethics.
So don’t listen to people who want to argue philosophical positions with you
Take a look at both candidates and look at the entire picture. Yes, voting is often a lesser-of-two-evils prospect, but in this case, if you’re going to fall back somewhere, fall back on the needs of the many, and remember the many that live around you as much as you remember the many worldwide.
Well, won’t you lend your lungs to me?
Mine are collapsing
Plant my feet and bitterly breathe
Up the time that’s passing.
Breath I’ll take and breath I’ll give
Pray the day ain’t poison
My lungs are actively trying to kill me right now, rather than their more typical passive-aggressive approach. This isn’t a terribly uncommon occurrence, and it’s generally the same round of drugs in an effort to remind my lungs that it’s in their best interest to keep me oxygenated.
Not so common is that I’m finishing Carl Elliott’s book White Coat Black Hat, which is full of all kinds of horror stories about medicine and pharma and bringing drugs to market. Seriously, it’s a great read – just not necessarily so great when you are getting a handful of new prescriptions.
It’s not that I haven’t read prescription warnings, precautions and side effects before. It’s just that I haven’t read them with quite so cynical an eye. And oh, let’s just go over the list of reasons to be cynical.
Let’s start with my maintenance inhaler, Flovent (fluticasone proprionate) HFA 110 mcg. In theory, this works to prevent the wheezing and shortness of breath that comes with asthma, by reducing the inflammation in the lungs. Sounds good. Sounds legit. Sounds – wait a minute. Most common adverse reactions are inflammation and upper respiratory infection, cough and bronchitis? Uhm. And thanks for the warning that I should discontinue Flovent HFA if I suffer an anaphylactic reaction. I’m not sure I would have figured that out on my own.
“Remember that your doctor has prescribed this medication because he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects.” Thanks, Rite Aid. Now can you tell me if my doctor has made that decision based on accurate clinical research and data, or biased drug studies where any negative results have been buried in the deep vaults of pharmaceutical companies?
Surely the prednisone can’t be as bad, right? Oh. Nevermind.
Earlier today, my Twitter buddy Tauriq Moosa retweeted a link to Martin Pribble’s lastest blog post, titled What’s the Harm in Religion? I find a lot of the atheist blogger output to be interesting, and trust that anything Tauriq retweets will at least be thought-provoking, so I clicked and read.
And sure enough, thought-provoking is one way to put it. Right in the first paragraph is one of those things that has me gritting my teeth and rolling my eyes, hard:
And herein lies the problem with religions; they, by their nature, encroach upon the non-religious areas of life and influence decisions on a social and political level.
Uhm. Okay. And from there, Pribble goes on to make some pretty gross generalizations about religions, period, which of course, by virtue of being gross generalizations, are wrong. And being irritated and pre-coffee and armed with Twitter, I fired off a quick and admittedly snide reply, figuring that if nothing else, another day spent doing very little in order to not aggravate my exceedingly unhappy lungs would be brightened by a brief fiery debate with a respected atheist voice.
And while I did engage with Mr. Pribble, I should note that he was at all times exceedingly respectful, open to my criticism, and conceded points. (I was, to say the least, surprised. Clearly Mr. Pribble doesn’t know that you are supposed to attack internet opponents with pitchforks and fire.) But there was one deviation that just stuck in my craw, as it were, because it’s something that I hear a lot: Buddhism isn’t a religion, it’s a philosophy.
For all the things out there that irritate me – and you don’t need to be the most eagle-eyed reader to realize it’s a relatively long list – one of the ones that gets under my skin faster than about anything else is the insistence that Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion. This is, as I noted to Mr. Pribble, obnoxious. Why? Because it’s a way of invalidating a data point that doesn’t agree with the point or argument that the person – generally of an anti-religion bent – is trying to make. And if you can’t support your position without ignoring the deviations that invalidate the position being argued, then you need to consider coming up with a new argument for that position.
As for whether or not Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy, I was in a philosophy program for a couple of years. I still regularly talk to philosophers. And while some might be forgiven for thinking wine is our sacrament, philosophers as a whole don’t have ritualized ceremonies, meditations, or any great need to burn incense while talking shop – no, not even us odd Continental philosophers. Buddhism, on the other hand, can have almost as much pomp, circumstance and flash to it as Catholicism, which, when you think about it, is saying something.
Being religious is not synonymous with theism. It’s understandable that atheists would be most vocal against the Abrahamic, theistic religions because those are the dominant religions in the world. But this is still positioning in opposition to a specific subset of religion, rather than all religions. And if atheists mean truly being a-theistic, then they need to leave room to embrace those who are religious and atheistic, as well. And if the atheism movement’s problem is with all religions, rather than the theistic ones, then they need to come up with a better word to express that concept.
And any which way, people need to stop attempting to negate the fact that, uncomfortable as it may be to some people’s world views, it is entirely possible to be atheistic, non-proselytizing – and religious.
I knew there were going to be a lot of hard things about losing Mom to cancer: holidays and birthdays and events like my sister graduating from medical school. This was almost a given, in those panicked moments after hearing the diagnosis and knowing what it meant, that it was a matter of when and not if. I didn’t realize quite how pervasive it was going to be, though, or that it would create such a strange position to be in every time I read about a new treatment for lung cancer, or I read through clinicaltrials.gov for work and see something being tested, or hear about new drug approvals. Each time, I have that brief flash: this existed five years ago. This may have saved Mom.
Early on in treatment, a couple of colleagues pulled me aside and I got one of those lectures. The one that offered whatever help was possible, but – because they were bioethicists – the one that said we should go with established treatment protocols and avoid the clinical trials, especially if it would mean moving Mom out of her home and to somewhere strange. Comfort and palliation were a huge focus, and it’s something I still appreciate, because it did give me a bit of an external rock to lean on when we started getting the “helpful” suggestions. You know, the ones that ranged from legit clinical trials in another state to peach pit essence therapy in Mexico.
And when your mother is dying, you want hope. You will claw desperately for hope, even if it’s in a coffee bean or weed.
So I understand. I understand better than a lot of people when there are complaints about how slowly regulatory agencies move, and that requirements of animal testing slows things down. And I have the education to know that just because a drug works in one animal model doesn’t mean it will be successful in humans. But those regulations are also put in place to protect people, and hearing that researchers in Canada are complaining about stem cell trial regulations does not generate a patient response. In fact, I think my exact words were “you would assume someone who had made it through medical school and become a trial PI would have more patience than a toddler.”
But what really stood out to me was this:
It probably would have delayed the field by another 10 years,said the neurosurgeon. When you think about a condition as serious and life-threatening and damaging as spinal cord injury, is that a reasonable bar, or is that setting the bar at a level that is not appropriate?
Well, personally? I want that bar set high. I want to know that every possible precaution has been taken to make sure that what is being given to the public is safe. Yes, my mother died in part because the bar is set so high on testing novel drug therapies, and she didn’t have access to drugs that are certainly out there and potentially could have saved her life. But I also know that she died from cancer, and not from greed.
And I think that appeal to emotion made by that neurosurgeon is really what irritates me.1 Because that’s getting dangerously close to what the fraud-y stem cell clinics do, and the alternatural therapies – they offer hope and appeal to that emotional “let us skip all the things necessary to prove this is both safe and effective, and instead just jump right to miracles!” When someone advocates stepping outside an established scientific process, it needs to be for a reason that is stronger than “I don’t want to wait.”