Chuck Grimes wrote: > You've got to learn how to use google. The search always orders from > greatest ads to least on some topics. You hit on the whole medical > industry where solid information is either behind a journal firewall, or is > dominated by corporate medicine that is big pharma. Doctors in the US > consider themselves small businesses and they depend on big corporate > suppliers. Quackery is legion.
right. Alas, non-doctors and non-pharma people can get into quackery, too, such as hyperbaric chambers for treating autism. > I am presuming you are working on autism. Actually, I'm not. My concern is with health and illth in general, connecting them to needs and the serving (or non-serving) of them. > What early disability groups discovered was the best source of information > was peer to peer, and that included the words to describe, understand and > situate disabilities. The whole goal was to fight the medical model and turn > toward what amounted later to the `socially constructed' model. I know. My wife (a health educator) is very involved in fighting the medical model, specifically related to disabilities. (She got her job at a not-for-profit because she's a health educator but because our son as Asperger syndrome/high-functioning autism.) She pushes "family centered" (as opposed to top-down) therapy. The doctors and most of the nurses don't like it. > This is a very difficult fight because there appears to be nothing socially > constructed on the surface. A wheelchair is a wheelchair. However, what it > means to live in a wheelchair is almost entirely a social construction and > its central and deeper theme is the lost of productivity to earn a > living---all of which leads at the very least to an anti-capitalist > conception of life. If you can not contribute labor to the capitalist > machine (the social norm) you are dead meat. But notice your compatriots: > children, the old, those with conditions and disabilities, etc, a good third > or more of normal human societies...since the stone age. The research which I'm working on poses an alternative standard to those of capitalism. While capitalism runs on money and wants (and the use of money to change our wants, etc.), my focus is on needs. > So, you can't expect the corporate media (google et al) to provide any > meaningful hints, since at bottom you are dealing with anti-capitalist > discourse. I'm not so sure. Neither Google nor corporations have complete control. There are other sources of information on the Web. > Sorry to sound so polemical... hey, that's what pen-l is about! -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, at the very least you should know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
