Post 9400 - Wellness

I haven't decided what it is yet.  But it's another milestone.  I haven't done ABBA for a while.  No meerkats, and certainly no flamingos for the longest of times.

It won't be about Trump or Biden, I feel confident.

Here we are, from my notes last week!  My health-provider network has posters up that say that their goals are to Inspire Wellness, Heal Patients, and Serve With Compassion. This seems unfocused. How about just that second one? The other two look like they would draw energy away from that.  I think compassion is great, certainly, and expecting people to be polite and at least look like they care should be a requirement.  But I did this for a living for my whole career, and frankly, you don't always feel compassion - you can go years with only occasional compassion - but you show up in the morning and focus on your real job and do what you can.

But wellness really sends me over the edge. It is a vague idea, which always means energy dissipating all over the parking lot. A lot of hand-waving is involved, with people patiently explaining to you as if you were a seventh, fifth, third grader that if we could get people to just care about their health more and pay more attention to it, then they wouldn't have all these diseases, you know?  You know?

Well sure.  If we can get drunks to stop drinking their health would improve. Dr. Dolcino used to say that to my patients in the 1970s when they would get admitted for the nineteenth time: "If you don't stop this it will kill you.  I say this for your own good." Measuring how well that works is tricky,but I am not sanguine about such things. Maybe.  It doesn't hurt to spend a minute or two on it, I suppose.  But what that means now is that they want to ask "Are there any guns in the home?" or "Do you feel safe with all of your family members?" or "Are you always able to get the food you need?" These sound nice, I suppose, and fit with both wellness and compassion, but the effectiveness numbers are invisible, last I checked.  Stick with heart disease.