If one person is dealing with a specific health issue, look at the person. If a large swath of a country is dealing with that same health issue, look at the system.
Steven Perez,
Stephen Mack,
Eric Logan,
Pea Bukowski,
imabonehead,
Jenny H.,
Brian Johns,
Tamara J. B.,
Just another Bubba,
Jennifer Dittrich,
Big Joe Silenced,
Steve C, Team Marina,
and
Zulema ❧ spicy cocoa tart
liked this
Yes. This is called "public health." ;-)
- Jessie
Are we talking about my green penis again?
- Steve C, Team Marina
TMI, Steve! TMI!
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
@SteVe: does that mean it's a sustainable penis?
- Big Joe Silenced
No, Steve confused it with the alligator penis cake: http://friendfeed.com/soup...
- Anne Bouey
can't see, not subbed to that private feed.
- Big Joe Silenced
You forget I'm a nurse (was head nurse on a urology unit at the VAMC years ago), Cristo, and I grew up with four brothers. Penis has been in my vocabulary for a long time. ;-P
- Anne Bouey
HB, here's the link: http://penispans.com/page2...
- Anne Bouey
Okay, I give up.
- Anne Bouey
Penis Pans. the UFO cake is awesome.
- Big Joe Silenced
Haha, Cristo. You can continue with Akiva instead. :)
- Anne Bouey
:(
- Akiva
I missed all the Cristo comments. :(
- Stephen Mack
The alligator cake and the lighthouse cake are actually really cool. The rest of them (except for the Christmas Tree, which was cut to shape) still look like penises to me.
- COMPLICATED MR. NOODLE
LOL.
- Victor Ganata
Back to the OP, though, you still have to remember you're treating individual people, even if you're implementing system-wide changes.
- Victor Ganata
I'd disagree, Victor, but it might just me being contrary, so I'll hold off for now.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
If there's an outbreak, you don't put antibiotics in the water.
- Heather
No, you quarantine the sick in New York. :D
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
If you're implementing a policy that covers the middle part of the Bell curve, that means you're missing 33% of the cases. That's probably not going to succeed in stopping the progression of a deadly epidemic.
- Victor Ganata
If I'm implementing a policy that only covers the middle part of the Bell curve (does it have to be capitalized?), I'm not being a very good tyrant am I? Hmm, you are sick? Ok, off to New York with you and everyone who lives with you or works with you!
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
How will you know someone is sick without examining them?
- Victor Ganata
Spies. Lots of spies. What could possibly go wrong?
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
In my case, you can tell because I can't shut up about it. If I have a migraine, everybody within 20 feet knows it. And probably what I just took for it, and how well it's working. I only recently learned to be discreet about taking handfuls of meds on the tennis court.
- Mary B: #TeamMonique
A 400 % increase in food allergy hospitalizations sure seems like it might be a systemic problem.
- Eric Logan
I mean, even if it's an infectious disease, but the transmission rate is only something like 1 in 100,000 cases per year, imprisoning everyone who's infected on the island of Manhattan and maintaining armed robot guards to prevent escape seems like a vast waste of resources.
- Victor Ganata
Not to say that studying the system isn't worthwhile, just that assessment is only at most half of the solution, and it's worthless if you don't have a plan, and plans pretty much have to be individualized if you want them to have a modicum of success.
- Victor Ganata
Yeah, complex problems usually need to be attacked on multiple fronts. If you have a systemic health issue, whether it be disease, smoking, automobile related fatalities, etc., there are things that need to be done at the macro level and at the individual level if you want to have success. For instance, in the infection example, a country can make sure that there's plenty of supply of antibiotics and vaccines, but at the individual level, people need to make sure that they get vaccinated and when they do get sick to properly go through the entire course of antibiotics.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble