Cultural narcissism

Appears to a trend towards viewing things in the narrowist of definitions was applied to any situation based on unselective criteria without investigation and producing evidence. This mythos of perception equals truth is not unlike the days of the "witch-hunt" or "inquisition" whereby suggestion and suspicion ruled based on religious grounds.

Part of this narcissism is educated people trying to protect their jobs and/or corner their market be it real or percieved. The result is that shortest path thinking and quick trials are taken based more on the principles of greed and political expediency than evidence based decision making. Any evidence derived is klept and based on presumption, illusion, and fact finders bias with the criteria of truth being secular, but hostage to polico-economic principles that are often distorted and lacking the scientific principles of enquiry and investigation.

The result is that authentic truth and solutions to problems is in short supply and so are the skills to obtain such truth. Truth is few of us in the digital age have the patience to be truth seekers and entry costs in form of debt, money, and time are prohibitive of people's initiative towards entering into investigative professions such as scientist, doctor, or professor, where such factors limit entry into information markets.

Once you are inside, the pressures mount to "produce" something, often appointments, articles, and implementable knowledge without funding and support from those people instituting your pay-check under the guise of evidence based decision making. This fact is why there are so many political entagglements when things go wrong in areas like scientific research, medicine, and engineering. Products produced with public money for the public welfare, at least in theory.

In practice there is a corporate welfare system undergirding these professions, which includes benefits to shareholders who invest in the technology peddled by these professions. These shareholders are often the investigators themselves and so there is more public-private entanglement. The result is that often these investigators will cut corners to take a piece of the pie, build their resources and so the result is we have an antisocial program of public service based on lower standards, wait times, or costs. You can see this trend when you visit the doctors office, where the doctor often spends about 10 minutes treating you and often you end up with a script in your hand. The result is that there is mounting skepticism about the doctor being there for "you" and not for the shareholders he is representing in the form of public finances, healthcare bureaucracy, drug companies, social services and politicians. This does not pre-clude the doctors personal investments in the above entities.

It is for this reason we should be asking for a new debate on healthcare and a re-evaluation of the methods, costs, and abilities of doctors to do their work including interference from the doctors personal holdings including investments in drug companies. Further, we should educate people including healthare practitioners in the value of investigative and collaborative medicine, where patients are invited into assisting the doctor, nurse, social worker, and specialist in resolving the larger issue of health. Also, we should look at a means of distancing the supplies from the suppliers including further restrictions on drug advertising and limitations on the ability of doctors to prescribe certain categories of medication, especially psychiatric medications. Right now, if you walk into a doctor's office and complain of psychological problems you are likely to walk out with a prescription for an SSRI, be these problems of signficant concern to warrent it, not the doc's concern.

Liberalization of the doctor's practice is one of the reasons why we are experiencing poorer healthcare outcomes and why there is a growing antagonism towards patients in the healthcare system. This antagonism is contructed out of a privatization model whereby increased visits in a compressed timeframe with large numbers of prescriptions equal a public sponcership private profits. Profit taking is often what is happening and this is resulting in less service to match reality that expected MD incomes are resulting in an extreme inflation of cost relative to increasing demand.

Part of this growing ratio is a real shortage of practioners, but some of it is the maintenance of the flat percentage increases to healthcare and a growing management class in the health authorities. This is happening to avoid loss of practitioners to other jurisdictions or as a matter of political appeasement.

No doubt this is squeezing resources, but so are the practices of the healthcare practitioners by cutting corners, lacking interest in patients, or simply throwing scripts at people for scripts sake. All of this is "efficiency behavior" lacks authenticity and investigative power. A user pays system would not fix this, as we still have challenges obtaining and maintaining physicians likely due to political and economic pressures in this largely agricultural province that is frozen, landlocked and stressed by flooding. Further, we are in a declining global and national economy with a high consumer debt load and relative to taxes. Further pinching the system is tax evasion by large companies who refuse to invest in healthcare benefits as a matter of maintaining and retaining employees and reducing long term disability claims. All of this is putting a squeeze on everyone except those with access to private care. The result is that we are hearing increased news of bad outcomes in the medical system.