do no harm

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All compassion is self-pity 

- D.H. Lawrence

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The lady in the public health lecture mentions something about 'case-finding' and how it's different from normal population screening. The idea is, she explains, that by using factors like smoking and body mass index and previous hospital admissions, you can identify asymptomatic people who are at high risk of developing a serious illness. GPs would then phone them up at home and construct a 'virtual ward' to take care of them in the community, in theory pre-empting hospital admissions by picking up and treating illnesses early. My first reaction to that is 'whoa hold on... you mean to say we're having enough trouble treating the present sick and dying population adequately, and yet you now want doctors to invade people's homes and look after the healthy? Maybe we're going about this the wrong way.'

Maybe the reason the NHS is stretched so thin is because we are trying so hard - maybe unrealistically - to cure everyone and keep everyone healthy. Endlessly optimizing. We're trying to export franchises while our flagship branch is going bankrupt. Buying assets with money we don't have. The idea is that prevention will help save money in the long run, but we spend so much money on trying to save money. It feels a bit like those promotions where you buy 10 more items to qualify for a 10% discount. Are we really saving, or just spending more? The costs of living in a too-health-conscious society. It's obviouslyh better to prevent hospital admissions and to treat patients in the community - to preempt the disease, but there is a cost as well to both patient and doctor by effectively having a patient take up residence in the practice, just in case he/she catches a cold. Is that what the NHS is doing right now? Inspecting every nook and cranny for potential maladies and bringing to a 10 minute consultation a laundry list of benign lumps, problems and worries.

Our resources are being stretched thin, reducing our pay to provide more services and facilities. Telling a starving man to eat less to save money to buy more food. We are looking to expand our kingdoms while our castles are crumbling. Why don't we focus on what we already are trying to do. Why don't we focus on doing that properly first. You learn 3 chords on the guitar and decide to pick up the harmonica. Just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean you should. Maybe we get greedy and overlook the risks of treatment, the harms of over-diagnosis, Sometimes doing nothing is the lesser of two evils. Maybe we forget. You can't learn everything. You can't save everyone.

social media will tear us apart

Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of 'Nature' in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or live animal in a dissecting room. These objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety.The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture.
[...]
It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost. 

- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

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Then Jesus told them this parable: "Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.' I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

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- why don't people seem to like me?

- do you really want to know

- what do you mean

- why people don't like you


- why

- most people don't want to be changed - and all you do is try to change people



- you're a real dick sometimes

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"Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.' In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

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Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now. 

- Jack Kerouac

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- and then I started wondering if it works the other way as well

... how do you mean

- like maybe every time you sin you lose something precious

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what is humanity? what does it mean to be human, anyway? how do we lose it - or more importantly, how do we hold on to it? it's something to do with choice - the kinds of choices we make determine what sort of creature we become. Which choices are human. Maybe hell is losing your humanity, and living with others who have similarly lost theirs. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Difference between heaven and hell: the key is how we treat other people and ourselves.