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starushka's comments:
on The "P" Word and Climate Change
The first guest sounded very reasonable until he said that the fact that people all over the world, including in Oregon, are hungry proves that there are too many people. The world produces enough food to feed all the people who are here. The rich countries hoard and waste much of it, especially the U.S. Throughout many decades, the rich countries, through the IMF and the World Bank, have enforced economic structures on the developing world in order to have them raise crops for the rich people, rather than food crops to feed their own families. This has created poverty and hunger where it didn't exist before. So-called "free trade" has exacerbated this effect. Many people in the U.S. are completely ignorant of this practice.This ignorance leads to rich white people thinking that poverty, hunger and gobal warming can be solved if only poor colored people would stop having too many babies. Our insane over-consumption is the biggest problem.
-Christina Sever, Corvallis
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Reading the Northwest Weather
Emily, You asked your guest one of my favorite questions, and he completely blew it. It makes me question his qualifications. You asked him to tell the difference between fog and clouds. He said there's no difference, that fog is just a low cloud. You correctly noted that sometimes the fog is high, but he ignored that. The huge difference is that fog occurs during high pressure, what would otherwise be what we call "good" weather. When it burns off, the sun is there, waiting to shine. Clouds occur during periods of low pressure, which usually lead to precipitation of some kind. Virtually opposite weather phenomena, which often look the same at first glance--at the very least an interesting discussion of a Northwest phenomenon that is often misunderstood. -Christina, Corvallis
posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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on Natural Medicine?
To TommyKPdx: If the UK does not license naturopaths, then I wonder where the Queen of England and her family get their homeopathic medicine recommendations--I guess from open-minded allopaths!
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on Natural Medicine?
If your "scientific" medicine is so good, then why is the U.S. 37th in the industrialized world in all measures of healthiness (e.g., infant mortality, life expectancy, etc.)? And calling our society healthy and disease-free is a joke with our epidemics of obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease. If the MD is so well trained in pharmacology, then why do they mostly reach for the latest, most expensive drug that the pharmaceutical companies have bribed them to prescribe and the TV ads have told their patients to demand? It's about time that holistic physicians are given the right to help their patients wean off these dangerous chemicals and get well.
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on Natural Medicine?
One of your guests said that MDs were much more open-minded toward naturopathy now. I haven't seen that at all here in Oregon. My biggest problem is finding a way to coordinate care between the two.
Another guest said that MDs receive much more training in pharmacology. Then why do many just reach for the latest, most expensive drug that the pharmaceutical companies have been pushing, without regard for safety, and especially without regard to the patient's whole body and mind. This is why it will be a good thing for naturopaths to be given the right to prescribe these medicines because their practice and philosophy is built on holistic care.
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on Measure 65: Open Primary
posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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on Got Health Care?
1. One of the discussion starters was ?What are you, the consumer, willing to give up so more people can have health care?? This perpetrates the falsehood put out by insurance companies that it?s obvious that we can?t afford to cover everyone, so health care consumers obviously have to give something up for a universal system to work. The result was that no one brought up the trade offs from the insurance and medical provider side, such as bloated CEO salaries and the TV advertising paid for by the pharmaceutical companies. The only exception to this was a comment by one of the tables in Newport about building a new system rather than starting from where we are to make changes. The table spokesperson did not say to abolish the pharmaceutical companies, but their statement was deliberately misquoted by your guest, and the host agreed that no, we can?t give up the wonderful benefits we?ve gotten from medicines. There are millions of dollars of waste on the provider/insurance side that can be brought in to the discussion and be part of the solution.
2. There was no mention of the fact that this board is starting from scratch to redo what John Kitzhaber has spent the last several years doing, all over the state. Are the results of his extensive polling of public opinion going to be ignored?
3. It was several times assumed that since we have a for-profit system, that that?s what we have to stick with. First, we don?t have a completely for-profit health care system. It has been going in that direction in the last 10-20 years, but there are still many community, non-profit health care providers, one very large one here in Corvallis.
If the hosts are going to facilitate these kinds of discussions, they need to be much more educated about the issues they lead discussions about, and also, they need to reject narrowing the discussion by starting out with erroneous assumptions.
posted 5 years ago
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