Author: Frank

Joint Commission Snubbed

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This past week, for this health care provider, the unthinkable happened: a hospital rebelled,  and refused further accreditation review by the long-dominant and supremely influential arbiter of hospitals and their national rankings. The Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations is, as far as I know, an independent organization that has been around since before I ever dreamed of becoming a physician. To say any more about its history, development, and evolution would reveal my ignorance unless I scurried off during the writing of this post and did some hours of Internet search engine based research…

The story line is that the state of South Dakota has taken the unprecedented stand of declining having the Joint Commission to review and help the state reinstate the accreditation for the state psychiatric hospital of South Dakota! Continue reading →

Shrink Population is Shrinking

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In a not so surprising but still distressing article in Health Affairs, Jul 2016, Vol. 35, No. 7, pp. 1271-1277 entitled: “Population Of US Practicing Psychiatrists Declined, 2003–13, Which May Help Explain Poor Access To Mental Health Care,” discussed the long-standing decrease in the population of psychiatrists in the USA. This has been one of those long predicted results of issues that started in the 1980’s that were decried by legions of psychiatrists at all levels of psychiatric “guild” organizations from the American Psychiatric Association to the Amercian Academy of Psychiatrists, the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and others. This all fell on deaf ears and in the Reagan era of deregulation, and prejudicial cutting off funding especially for the “social” professions [read the professions such as college professors, and mental health types, all viewed with varying degrees of suspicion, after all, “social” is close to “socialism” “right here in River City” to utilize the wholesome hysteria of the movie “The Music Man,” of decades ago].

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Brotherhood of the Traveling Beam

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I was reared all over the world due to my parents’ peregrinating professions, that of an international consulting mining engineer [my father] and an exploratory geologist [my mother] and learned to make friends quickly even as a preschooler. As I became a little older my mother kept gently encouraging me to really get to know people, as in her view, “everyone has a (life) story to tell.” Fortunately I was pretty social, friendly and forward for a boy and enjoyed meeting people. It helped witnessing my parents having “foreigners” over to our home constantly for dinner and wide ranging conversations exchanging life experiences. I learned very early on that all one had to do to get a more than ordinary conversation going, beyond simply saying hello or how are you, was to ask people something about themselves. Almost everyone except a CIA or NSA operative responds positively to that opening conversational gambit and I early on learn to revel in the unique and never-the-same life stories that I would hear from children my age and even adults. As one might guess, I became quickly comfortable talking with adults.

And I suppose this is one of the earliest and most telling background reasons why I became a psychiatrists. I love hearing others’ experiences even when tragic and pained and that is how I answer the perennial ordinary citizen’s constant question to me of “how do you stand hearing all those sad stories?”

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Citizen Collective Computing Power!

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I am a self declared, unabashed geek and have been since my earliest years when I was an early reader. To put some very concrete oomph behind that self description, I would offer the following story. My father was a very bright man, a poor kid from East Texas,  small place called El Mina, paradoxically enough as he put himself through college and became a  mining engineer. That little township is but a memory, has not existed for decades and is now in the midst of a Georgia Pacific commercial tree farm. He was I suppose a geek in his own right and recognized the computer revolution in the early 1950’s. His idea of  book to read to me at night for entertainment was none other than the early computer scientist, Norbert Wiener’s book originally published in 1948 [though he and I read the 1961 paperback edition] of Cybernetics, Second Edition: or Control and Communication…That was followed by books on cyber math, math systems based on base 8, etc. I was fascinated by all this and learned to keep my mouth shut about my exploding interests in this arena since if I mentioned in my primary grade school classes, classmates would haze and harass me and teachers except in parochial Catholic schools would peer at me as if I were an alien from outer space and hush me up abruptly and to stop distracting the class. I suppose most precocious geek types go through these kinds of experiences when one realizes you are so different that there will always be a chasm between you and most of your friends for years. This was only relieved when I hit more advanced grades and schools at an accelerated pace and found like minded geeks.

Well it gladdens my heart to read the now very current article in PC World, entitled, “EVE Online” players are solving real-world science problems” Meet Project Discovery by Hayden Dingman. Mr. Attila Szantner the co-founder of Massively Multiplier Online Science (MMOS, at mmos.ch) [I had never heard of him either, but with that first name….] was quoted as saying, “This is going to be the next big revolution in citizen science.”

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Economics Still Divide America

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A recent AP article, “Divided America: Rosy Economic Averages Bypass Many in US,: by Christopher S. Rugaber on June 9, 2016, utilized the typical economic stagnation found in Memphis TN to illustrate the lingering economic malaise that has dogged America’s slowest economic “recovery” in many generations. The recovery supposedly has been in effect for a couple of years now according to the economists’ indicators. But more and more these measures do not mean “squat” for the vast numbers of struggling Americans who are not wealthy, college educated and employed in professions favored by the emerging new information and technological age. Only a few weeks ago, the head of the Bank of England made a somewhat chilling speech in which he actually outlined and named broad categories of jobs that he predicted would be ELIMINATED almost entirely by robotic replacements, and automation of all sorts in the next 25 years or so. Although it was daunting to read, the kinds of jobs he enumerated were not surprised, those of the unskilled, undereducated, line production workers in all sorts of industries, customer services jobs etc. Much as this next industrial revolution might hurt the developed world, it could be truly catastrophic for the Third World economies so dependent on such modes of work and earning a living in the hundreds of millions, a demographic that dwarfs our own.

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