Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

Country Is So Tender

Zoe Elpern took a motorcycle ride in the high Rockies above Aspen, Colorado on Saturday, September 21, 2013.  She sent us a few pictures taken on her iPhone.  The last picture was taken in late April, 2013. These photos reminded us of a memorable poem:

Binsey Poplars: felled 1879
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
for pdf: Download Aspens

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;

Of a fresh and following folded rank
                Not spared, not one
                That dandled a sandalled
              Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding
                   bank.

O if we but knew what we do
          When we delve or hew--
  Hack and rack the growing green!

  Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean
             To mend her we end her,
        When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

 Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
      Strokes of havoc únselve
          The sweet especial scene,
  Rural scene, a rural scene,
  Sweet especial rural scene.

9.21.13

The trill of crickets

Wooly bears on paths en masse 

The smells of autumn

The Most Dangerous Place

Our Hilo correspondent, Rob Shapiro, brought an important NPR story to our attention.  Reading it may save a loved one's, or your own, life!

It seems that every time researchers estimate how often a medical mistake contributes to a hospital patient's death, the numbers come out worse.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published the famous "To Err Is Human" report, which dropped a bombshell on the medical community by reporting that up to 98,000 people a year die because of mistakes in hospitals. The number was initially disputed, but is now widely accepted by doctors and hospital officials — and quoted ubiquitously in the media.

In 2010, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services said that bad hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 patients in Medicare alone in a given year.

Now comes a of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death.

Read full article:
How Many Die from Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals

Who among us does not know at least one person who died unnecessarily in hospitals?

 

Boston Flash Mob for Music & Health

Cell2Soul Member Lisa Wong wrote us:

"We’d like to invite you to join us and be a part of an extraordinary event on Sunday, September 29, 2013 at 3:00pm to celebrate Music and Wellness throughout our great city. 

In celebration of its 75^th anniversary, Celebrity Series of Boston will be presenting “Play me, I’m Yours,” bringing 75 painted pianos to 75 locations on the streets of Boston, Cambridge and Somerville.

In recognition of the unique strength of Boston’s healthcare and cultural communities, we’re thrilled to announce that Sunday, September 29 will be designated “Music and Wellness Day,” with a city wide “flash mob for health” at 3:00 p.m."

Details: Download Music and Healing

Stone Hill 9.15.2013

Early Autumn Morn --
A palette of green and blue
Hills, field and sky
                                                

after Basho

 

Garden of Chinese Lanterns

bright sunshine, clear sky
a field of scattered lanterns
autumnal prologue

(haiku and photos by Yoon Cohen)

Down Green River Road, in Williamstown, there's a small public park, River's Edge Park, that is rarely frequented.  In the late summer and fall a large portion of the ground is covered by Chinese lanterns.  Over the years, I have watched this ornamental weed spread over the grounds. Its orange flowers are down-hanging bells of arresting beauty.

Wayne Winterrowd wrote to us about Chinese Lanterns a few years back: Download Chinese Lanterns - C2S

Photos taken September 5, 2013

 Yoon photographing lanterns at River's Edge Park

 

 

Medical Nemesis

Medical Nemesis: 
The Expropriation of Health  (1976)
by Ivan Illich  

(I read this book in 1994 and it has resonated with me ever since.  Here is an excerpt from the introduction.  My full notes are in the pdf at the end of this post.)

The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.  The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic.

Thoughtful public discussion of the iatrogenic [“physician caused”, iatros=physician & genus=birth] pandemic, beginning with an insistence upon demystification of all medical matters, will not be dangerous to the commonweal.  Indeed, what is dangerous is a passive public that has come to rely on superficial medical housecleaning.

My argument is that the layman and not the physician has the potential perspective and effective power to stop the current iatrogenic pandemic.

During the last generations the medical monopoly over health care has expanded without checks and has encroached on our liberty with regard to our own bodies.  Society has transferred to physicians the exclusive right to determine what constitutes sickness, who is or might become sick, and what shall be done to such people...The social commitment to provide to all citizens with almost unlimited outputs from the medical system threatens to destroy the environmental and cultural conditions needed by people to live a life of constant autonomous healing.

Fairly extensive notes from Medical Nemesis can be found here:  Download Medical Nemesis Illich   Illich was a visionary.  Few acknowledge his influence; indeed most are not even aware of it.

 

Seamus Heaney: A Memento

Seamus Heaney:
Poet of ‘the Silent Things’
By The Editorial Board (NY Times)
Published: August 30, 2013

Seamus Heaney was sipping bourbon during a Boston snowstorm 30 years ago, trying to explain his poetry as an escape from a terrible fear of silence that always haunted him. “What is the source of our first suffering?” he asked, quoting the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. “It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.”

The poet, who died Friday at the age of 74, mastered that fear magnificently in five decades of lyrical composition that earned him a Nobel Prize. But that night in Boston he kept it front and center as a dark but “wonderfully resonant” prod, topping off our glasses while fielding questions for a newspaper profile. “If I could make poetry that could touch into that kind of thing, that is what I would like to do,” he said, stoking his resolve to pursue “the silent things within us.”

Friendly and open, Mr. Heaney did not talk down from a poet’s perch. In his workaday searching for “images and symbols adequate to our predicament” he included all of life, not just the Troubles of his Irish homeland. He was anxious that his lyrical gift not cushion hard truth. He exulted in his origins as a farm boy who savored the ring of the BBC weather forecast towns (“Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland...”) as much as the family’s recitation of the Blessed Virgin’s litany (“Health of the Sick, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted...”). He sipped and smiled at “summoning the energies of words.” He described “the actual pleasure of feeling something under your hand and growing,” a new poem “full of voices, full of people.”

Decades after that snowy night, Mr. Heaney is remembered for the power of his joy in working the language, and in the spirit of his elegiacal salute to his friend Robert Lowell: “The way we are living,/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life.” FRANCIS X. CLINES