Duty to Warn

By Gary G. Kohls, MD

Definition of an “iatrogenic” disorder: A disorderinadvertently induced by a health caregiver because of a surgical, medical, drug or vaccine treatment or by a diagnostic procedure.

In last week’s column I wrote that iatrogenic disorders (a doctor-, drug-, vaccine-, surgery- or other medical treatment-caused disorder) were the third leading cause of death in the US. That revelation may have ruffled the feathers of some readers, particularly if they were employed in the medical professions, so I am enlarging on that statement in this week’s column.

In 2000, a commentary article was written by Dr Barbara Stanfield, MD, MPH. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, July 26, 2000—Vol 284, No. 4).

Below are two articles that nicely illustrate the cunning methods that ALL multinational mining, exploration, drilling, energy extractive or oil transporting corporations use to try to sanitize what in reality are greedy designs to enrich corporate stakeholders by raping, stealing, exploiting and permanently polluting the land, water and air that really has always belonged to the indigenous people and who simply want to protect what has always been theirs.

The first article illustrates how an otherwise respected major educational institution like Duke University (of Durham, North Carolina) could be easily bamboozled by financial enticements from an exploitive corporation. (Duke University was, incidentally, founded and funded by robber baron James Buchanan Duke,an exploitive tobacco and electric power industrialist that at one time acquired a monopoly on cigarettes and thus gained enormous wealth by marketing a highly addictive and deadly product.)

He was “a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” – Ted Kennedy, eulogizing his assassinated brother Bobby in 1968
“The problem with a mass delusion is that, by definition, only the heretics know when we are living through one.” – Michael Scott Fontaine
One of the most meaningful Christmas stories that I have ever read came from my friend from Vancouver, Canada, Reverend Kevin Annett. His story is titled “Nativity” and is printed further below. “Nativity” has as much meaning to me as have the classic Christmas movies “It’s a Wonderful Life”, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, and “Joyeux Noel” (the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914). (Archived at:  http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_W.)

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has inspired a wave of corporate largesse. When Congress passed the tax bill on December 20, AT&T announced that it would give $1,000 bonuses over the holidays to 200,000 of its U.S. employees. The largest telecommunications company in the world by revenue, AT&T was a vocal supporter of the tax bill, which lowers the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.

Other companies were quick to jump on the PR bandwagon. Comcast gave $1,000 bonuses to over 100,000 employees. Fifth Third announced a $15 minimum hourly wage across the company and gave out $1,000 bonuses to more than 13,500 of its employees.

The Doomsday Clock has been moved closer to midnight than it’s been since 1953. The U.S. has shot down a Syrian plane. Russia has threatened to shoot down U.S. planes. There is no way to overstate the importance of avoiding telling hostile lies about Russia right now.

Dan Kovalik’s book, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia, is a good place to start if you watch a lot of television, don’t read much about politics, and simply can’t imagine the CIA doing anything inappropriate. This is a great primer. Framed around the current Russiagate madness, the book is a catalog of U.S. government sins over the past many decades.

hen was the last time we had a sitting president and a former FBI director calling each other liars? And something like 100 per cent of the population seems to believe that at least one of the accused liars is a real liar. That’s the new American normal.

The Comey circus produced a holiday atmosphere in DC, with bars open for business before the live hearings came on. And the TV audience for the Comey show was an apparently impressive 19 million-plus viewers. But that’s pallid next to the presidential inauguration’s 30 million-plus, or the Super Bowl’s typical 110 million-plus in the US. Here you may insert the appropriate comment about how these numbers reflect American priorities, with football being five times more engaging than a game where the republic is an underdog. 

Laughter is a wonderful thing. It’s hard to get too much of it. But there may be something even more valuable — something that you may be better able to grasp than some of your elders.

When you’re able to see a failure in others, it can be an opportunity to spot other similar failures — even those that you may be, in some measure, sharing in.

Why do climate deniers deny? No two are identical, but a major factor for many of them seems to be, not an analysis of evidence but loyalty to a worldview. In this worldview it simply cannot be the case that people are destroying the earth. That’s not in the sacred texts. There’s no place for it in many careers or lifestyles designed around extraction, consumption, destruction, and “development” of the world. Accepting the obvious would be harder than denying it. So it is denied, or — by far preferable — simply ignored and avoided.

As I was heading off to visit Russia, a friend told me of a friend who knew a Russian school teacher. I asked if I could visit the school, and I brought along a couple of American friends.

A footnote to the City of Charlottesville's courageous passing of a resolution this week asking Congress to move money from the military to human and environmental needs, rather than the reverse, was the cowardly abstention of Mayor Mike Signer from the vote.

I don't always agree with the other four city council members on everything, or even know enough to have an opinion on much of what they do, but they have all repeatedly been willing to stick their necks out for things they apparently care about for moral reasons. Even Council Member Kathy Galvin, who in my view marred Monday's resolution by adding to it some nonsense about U.S. troops fighting to protect you and your rights (even as we're poorer and have fewer rights with every new war started and never ended) believed things had gotten so bad she would vote aye.

(The Council would have passed the resolution 3-0 without the rah-rah-troops bit that garnered Galvin's vote. I asked Council Member Kristin Szakos whether she herself believed that bit, and she said she imagined most of the troops did. By that logic, the City Council should also declare climate change to be a myth and angels to be real.)

A recent report from Equality Now titled 'The World's Shame: The Global Rape Epidemic' http://www.equalitynow.org/campaigns/rape-laws-report offered a series of recommendations for strengthened laws to deter and punish sexual violence against women and girls.