An Ounce of Prevention, a Pound of Nanny-State

Just got back from a WDMS meeting in which the idea of medical errors was expressed commonly as a "can't-happen-to-me" type of problem; the kind of willful ignorance of statistics that so many people use when speeding, when driving unrestrained, unhelmeted...

Trauma really hurts those libertarian notions of freedom uber alles. I choose to speed now, but it's getting harder as the patients keep rolling in. They made the same mistake I do, but statistics caught up with them. Freedom, rah, rah. Risk the family. Risk the insurance. Risk the lifetime of living in a persistent vegetative state.

Bottom line: I could never, ever do it to my family. Getting in an unrestrained accident would pretty much invalidate my parents' existance, rip a hole from here to Sparta, and pretty much guilt-trip any of my surviving brain tissue into ischemia.

Dr. P notes our society is comfortable with a Vietnam-level of trauma casualties EVERY YEAR (50k deaths). Either stop grousing about the youths lost 30 years ago, or start grousing about the lives claimed by the highway lifestyle.

Nader makes so many people crazy because he actually wallows in these numbers and tries to change them. And remember the old pearl that, if you really want to help people, get into preventative medicine... Once you really immerse yourself in that field, can you view the mall, McDonalds, and the roads in between as anything but a toxic affront to your life's mission? Wouldn't you get to be as loopy as Nader?