Wednesday, April 30, 2003

Wonder - Seeing the world through the eyes of a child It is spring here on PEI! After the long winter, the first snow fell in November and the last only two weeks ago, the full magic of the renewing wonder of spring is pounding its way into my life. The change in light, the greening of the grass, the bird song and the warmth. Sadly, for me, for many years I worked so hard that I hardly noticed the seasons. I hardly saw anything other than the work in front of me. So in honour of Spring,  I post today a few of my thoughts on life itself and how I found it again after many years in the desert. 5:58:00 PM    comment []

Coffee - Starbucks - The Future of Work? Back to the Future? As more and more of us work for ourselves, Starbucks is positioned to become the office of the future. The introduction of WiFi and the link to Kinkos is part of their strategy. As I was discussing the role of the coffee house in the FAN economy with my daughter Hope today, I was sudden;ly struck with an aha. This office of the future was in fact the office of the past. In fact the first office was a coffee house - Lloyds of London. Recall that this was a time when no one had a "job". If you wanted information you left your home and went to the coffee house, as we do in rural Canada today. The syndicates camped out in the booths as they still do.  In early days a ship owner would do the rounds of the booths laying off his shipping risk. Then as now coffee houses were where you got the gossip and where you could meet on neutral ground.Coffee houses were the centre of the Information economy of the time. Here is a Snip "What does Canopius's coffee have to do with * the concept of risk? Simply that a coffee house was the birthplace of Lloyd's of London, which for more than two centuries was the most famous of all insurance company's. * The second half of the seventeenth century was also an era of burgeoning trade. The Dutch were the predominant commercial power of the time, and England was their main rival. Ships arrived daily from colonies and suppliers around the globe to unload a profusion of products that had once been scarce or unknown luxuries-sugar and spice, coffee and tea, raw cotton and fine porcelain. * Information from remote areas of the world was now of crucial importance to the domestic economy. With the volume of shipping constantly expanding, there was a lively demand for current information with which to estimate sailing times between destinations, weather patterns, and the risks lurking in unfamiliar seas. (Blogging?) In the absence of mass media, the coffee houses emerged as the primary source of news and rumour. In 1675, Charles II, suspicious as many rulers are of places where the public trades information, shut the coffee houses down, but the uproar was so great that he had to reverse himself sixteen days later. Samuel Pepys frequented a coffee house to get news of the arrival of ships he was interested in; he deemed the news he received there to be more reliable than what he learned at his job at the Admiralty. (sounds familiar - Blogging?) The coffee house that Edward Lloyd opened in 1687 near the Thames on Tower Street was a favourite haunt of men from the ships that moored at London's docks. The house was "spacious, well built and inhabited by able tradesmen" according to a contemporary publication. It grew so popular that in 1691 Lloyd moved it to much larger and more luxurious quarters on Lombard Street. Nat Ward, a publican whom Alexander Pope accused of trading vile rhymes for tobacco, reported that the tables in the new house were "very neat and shined with rubbing." A staff of five served tea and sherbet as well as coffee." 1:48:44 PM    comment []

Diseases of Civilization - SARS, Flu, Smallpox, Syphilis, AIDS, - TB, Depression , Obesity, Diabetes and Cancer Can medicine really make a difference? The link will take you to an excellent set of articles on SARS Watch that describe how many of the infectious diseases that affect humans have originated from animals and have crossed the species boundary - Zoonosis. At one level we think about disease in terms of cure. When will we find a vaccine for SARS etc? We look to medical science to help. But maybe it is worth looking at the root causes of diseases. If we do we will find that most of them have their roots on how we live, civilization, and how we feel about ourselves Here are few examples. TB. Many of us are concerned that TB has overwhelmed antibiotics. This is true. But most of the improvement in TB rates and deaths occurred before 1950 before the introduction of antibiotics. What happened? TB is a lifestyle disease. When you improve living conditions, nutrition, crowding and social status, the disease loses its power. The issue is the immune system and the interaction between the person and their social environment. Where is TB coming back now. In Russia, especially in prisons, the US ghettos and among the aboriginal populations. How do you really improve TB rates? By working as our Victorian forefathers did on improving living conditions and social status of oppressed groups. AIDS. Why does AIDS affect the gay population and drug users more in the west and yet act as a mainstream disease affecting the entire population in the developing world? There appears to be a link between how marginalized you are and your immune system. To be gay in the west is more socially OK than it used to be but there is still a large amount of social pressure. To live in a developing nation is to feel socially second class. Social status appears to have enormous power on our immune system. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the average mortality rate in Russia has dropped by 10 years. They have lost their place in the world. Again the issue is the immune system being depressed by the interaction with the social environment. Smallpox, Flu and SARS. These diseases are species crossovers from agriculture accelerated by concentrations of people in towns and cities and by international travel. hunter gathers mainly died of accidents and wound infections. We usually work out a deal with thee diseases over time. Measles for instance is now a low risk disease as is chicken pox. But when we went to the new world that had no immunity, they killed most of the indigenous population. With SARS, we can wait for our collective immunity to develop. We can fuss all we want about finding a vaccine, we can stop travel or leave the cities or we can also look at the source in agricultural practice and work to halt the cross over. What is the highest gain strategy? It is surely to go to the source which will be agriculture in Guang Dong. Flu is the greatest threat to the human race currently. All flu's come from this region. Why do we accept that the pig/duck/fish human loop in Guangdong is acceptable to the millions or maybe billions of people that are at risk from flu. Maybe the SARS outbreak in China will give us the impetus to look here for change. Diabetes - We face a childhood epidemic of obesity in the west. This will have profound consequences for us as we all get older. heart disease, diabetes etc will cost us as a society a huge part of GDP and as individuals a lifetime of illness and suffering. The links here are also social and related to our civilization. At a simple level, culprits include TV and sugar. Our children are addicted to both. At a deeper level the issue is social. We are so busy at work that we are no longer engaged in the main purpose of living which is to raise the next generation well. Too busy to be involved, we use the TV as a baby sitter and we accept the siren song of the food industry and offer sugar as a substitute for care, true interaction and attention. Many of us as a result use food as a source of love and comfort. The drug industry cannot help us here nor can our doctors.Treating diabetes is too late. The habits and mindset have been ingrained. There is something about how we approach work and the economy in modern life that is driving a huge wave of disease.(More posts on this later) Depression and Pain. If you look at the drug plan of any large organization, you will find that the most heavily used classes of drugs are anti depressants and anti inflammatory drugs. The heaviest users? Women over 35. Why? An ever larger body of research (more in upcoming posts) tells us that our immune system is heavily compromised by a feeling of a lack of control and meaning in our lives. Many women occupy the lowest levels of work hierarchies and have the least amount of control and identity as a result. People at the bottom of work hierarchies have 4 times more illness and even death than those at the top. This includes heart disease. Rising female rates of CHD are linked to this. Compared to fat intake, smoking and cholesterol, your position in the hierarchy is the most significant factor in CHD. Yet the second highest class of drugs are those related to blood pressure and cholesterol. this information has been available for over 25 years (The Whitehall study etc) yet we choose to look to medicine for help. Traditional medicine sees all illness as social. We laugh at the idea of witch doctors coping with curses and enemies. We too have put all our faith in science and have excluded the person and their social setting as context. Our grandchildren will laugh at us too. They will find our total faith in drugs so childish. Surely the answer is a blend of both the social and the science But even more, what about the power of a public health perspective where we look at the entire social and animal world as it interconnects. The greatest improvement in population health have come from the arena of public health. The death rates of the 19th century dropped not because of drugs or doctors but because of of better diet, better living and working conditions. Clean water and better hygiene driven in-turn by the availability of soap and china plates. We have lost sight of the power and effectiveness of "public health" as a perspective for health. Maybe SARS will do us all a favour and show us how when you do this well you can have a huge impact. In the next few weeks I will explore many of the issues raised in this post and link you to the evidence. 9:43:52 AM    comment []