Tag Archives: Stress

Experience, Health, Learning, Personal Development, Time Management

Nurturing insight

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I want to try something, and I am hoping some of you readers will participate.

In a nutshell, the idea is that we spend a little bit of time during a week (even if it is just 20 minutes) in a situation that nurtures insight.

It is possible for ideas to deeply change our world. How can we nurture the development of the ideas that might be game-changers in the coming months/years/decades?

My approach has two parts:

  1. Learn deeply and broadly about the world, including the major problems and proposed solutions. Useful insights generally require that they be based on accurate perceptions of reality.
  2. For some period of time, create the conditions under which deep insight into issues becomes more likely.

The central thrust of this ‘experiment’ has to do with what constitutes the conditions in part 2).

I imagine that there is a fair bit of individual variation on this front, but I am going to throw out some broad statements that I believe are reasonable based on what I know about human attention and education.

  • Our culture is becoming increasingly dominated by subject changes. Our attention is being chopped up into smaller bits as we interact with increasingly fast and engaging social media. I claim that deeper insights are not likely to come about through spreading our attention more thinly or by multitasking more. Whatever advantages this culture change offers, we are hopefully already taking advantage of them.
  • Teachers often complain about the quality of students in schools today. A central concern is the student’s ability to concentrate on one thing and to demonstrate the fact that they are capable of insight into the material at hand. Psychology has shown that our attention span is getting shorter. I believe these facts are all closely related. I believe the lack of insight in current students is due in part to the fact that they are not used to simply rolling an idea around in their heads for many minutes at a time. In short, I believe that the shortening of our attention spans is connected with reduced abilities to garner deep insight.
  • Distraction seem to have a complicated relationship with insight. While distractions do represent a fragmentation of attention, they can also be the foundation for connective insights – where we put different ideas together in new ways. These connections can help us understand the ideas and the relationship(s) between them.

I propose that each of us spends some amount of time this week (I suggest at least 20 minutes) in a situation that is well-suited to the development of our personal insight. For me this might be walking through Parc Mont-Royal, sitting at a desk with a blank piece of paper in front of me, or even meditating. I suggest that people do what they are comfortable with, but again I have some specific ideas that might help:

  • Get comfortable.
  • If you have a burning desire to interact with something else like friends, the Internet, a book, social media, etc, write down what you want to do on a piece of paper, tell yourself that you will do it later, and continue with your efforts to gain insight. In light of this, it can be helpful to have somewhere to write nearby.
  • Be content. Getting upset probably won’t help.
  • Be your own person. Don’t bother thinking about what other people might think of what you are thinking.
  • Embrace the fact that your thoughts may be mostly about your own mundane concerns. Let them go where they will. Your thoughts will eventually turn to the things you care about most.
  • Follow your trains of thought wherever they may lead. Don’t be afraid of thinking anything. We might like some thoughts more than others, but any one of them might hold the key to a deepening of our understanding of ourselves and our world.

I would like to hear from all of you about what your insights were and in what circumstances you achieved them.

Experience, Health, Learning, Money, Personal Development, Reading, Studying, Time Management

Forgetting who we are

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Our identity exists at the core of everything that we do in life. Our sense of self, as hard as it is to discuss in language and science, is fundamental to everything we experience.

How is it possible then, to forget who we are? You might be thinking about the various forms of amnesia present in studies of psychology and sensationalized in our fiction. Anyone with personal experience with the loss of a friend or family member to any form of amnesia or dementia understands how deeply painful it can be.

Here I am talking about the everyday experience of forgetting who we are. I am talking about the sense of losing touch with our innermost desires and dreams. I am talking about how the external demands of the world can drag us further and further from a state in which our wishes and hopes for our lives are being realized by our actions.

Who are we?

If you ask someone who they are, they might tell you their name and what they do for a living. Pressed further, they might tell you about their family situation and hobbies.

Who are we really?

This question has nagged me for years. It was in the writings about humanistic psychology that I found the answer that has satisfied me the most (so far). The self is not a thing to be identified and scrutinized. The self is an evolving experience.

So you and I, or at least our sense of our selves, is a set of continually transforming experiences. We experience our innermost self – and the outside world – simultaneously. For most experiences, these two worlds are inseparable.

How can you forget an evolving experience?

You might ask, “Well, if I accept your claim that my ‘self’ is an experience, how is it possible for me to forget who I am?

You are happening every day. Every time you make a choice or think a thought, you are happening. Every time you feel happiness, pain, or sadness, you are happening. Every one of these experiences resonates with your being to greater or lesser extent.

We all have activities that we prefer over others. Broadly speaking, each of us will have a set of experiences that we identify as pleasurable, and a (mostly distinct) set that are painful. We generally organize our lives around the idea of maximizing our well-being in whatever manner seems right to us.

Our dreams and aspirations are often deeply connected with those things that we like to do or states of being that we would like to enjoy.

We forget who we are by forgetting to experience those things that resonate deeply with us.

Acting towards our dreams

Our choices shape our experiences. With every experience, we are becoming something new. Some experiences are deeply connected with our dreams and aspirations while others are not.  If our actions are aligned towards the achievement of one of our dreams, then our experiences will be filled with some of the pleasure that pursuing our dream gives us. This experience reinforces our choice if it is pleasurable, but can cast doubt on our path if it is painful.

A painful process can cause us to give up on a dream – for good reason! If our best assessment of the situation is that the pleasure we might attain in the future is not worth the pain we feel and foresee, it is a very sane choice to allocate our efforts elsewhere.

This can be particularly painful if we are chasing a prerequisite to a dream. Perhaps we think we need a degree in order to work in a field that we love. Perhaps we feel that we need to save up a lot of money so that we can be safe. Perhaps we don’t want to go hiking before we get in better shape. The list of prerequisites can sometimes seem endless.

Attaining prerequisites can be painful, as many of us know from our own experience. This pain often brings with it feelings about the meaninglessness of our pursuit. It may be that we don’t actually want the degree or the knowledge, we just want the job. Perhaps we don’t actually want money, we just want to feel safe. The pain involved in attaining our prerequisites can be enough to cause us to give up on the dream itself.

Again this can be a completely sane choice to make. What we have to guard against is the feeling of disconnection from our dream that we experience because we are preoccupied with the present moment. The process of attaining a prerequisite might feel very different than the experience of the dream itself. Being a student during your achievement of a degree often feels very different from the experience of working in the field you have chosen.

If we aren’t experiencing a facet of our dream, we are slowly losing connection with it. Dreams can be tenacious, holding on for years or decades without substantial attention. I believe however that it is in our personal best interest to keep our deepest dreams alive and happy with experiences oriented towards them.

If you are getting a degree, remember to save some time for reading about, or volunteering in, your field of preference. Find media that inspires you, and create a stash of it that you can use to bring back the feelings that galvanize your passions. Stay in touch with the dream so that you can remember who you are.

Forgetting

When our experiences are consistently not oriented towards the attainment of our dreams, we begin to forget what that taste of our dream feels like. We begin to forget what it feels like to be in the process of becoming who we want to be.

How does this happen?

These answers will not be surprising. Tales of the soul-deadening 9-5 job are rampant. University professors continue to express the sentiment that more and more students are simply doing the minimum they can to get by and finish their degree. Almost everyone knows a person who is so caught up in the concept of money that they cannot enjoy what they have – or would have – if they would loosen their death grip on their life a bit and learn to spread their wings.

Rigid, or unyielding, demands on our time can slowly erode our ability to be ourselves (as we knew ourselves to be). We forget a lot of who we were if we consistently do things that are not congruent with the dreams and passions that we held.

Realizing that you have forgotten

Have you ever had a very intensive section of your life – perhaps final exams, deadlines at work, or a crisis among family or friends – after which you found that you did not know what you wanted to do with your time?

Have you ever worked a very hard day, or week, and returned home to unwind, only to find yourself unable to muster the energy to do anything but watch TV or movies?

Individual occurrences are not indicative of a problem. If you are truly burnt out and want to just zone out, who is to argue with you? In these cases we tend to placate ourselves with those things that take very little energy. This in part explains the enormous appeal of all forms of passive entertainment we have access to in the modern era.

The problem is that habits quickly form to fill the gaps in your time. Many of us work jobs that we aren’t particularly passionate about. We then have to use our limited free time to pursue those things that make us genuinely happy. Instead of watching TV you might really actually want to be writing a play, painting a canvas, studying physics, or doing yoga.

If you want to spend your time in ways that you believe serve your long-term happiness more, then pay attention to those little twinges that you feel deep down. Grab hold of the twinges and genuinely examine them. Do you really want to practice your dance steps? Yes? Well, fire up some music and get to it. Do you really want to read more? Yes? Grab that book that you are two thirds of the way through and make a sprint for the ending.

I have often felt guilty when I feel those twinges, but guilt is not something we need to hold on to. Learn what you can from your past, and let go of the guilt. If you are genuinely trying to pursue the things that you care the most about, I can guarantee that you will be able to minimize the intrinsic guilt you feel about your actions or inactions.

One of the best pieces of advice I have heard regarding guilt of this sort is: think of it as a success. If you are feeling guilty, it means that you have successfully remembered that you wanted to do something differently. Try to use this as an encouraging thought. Next time you will be able to remember earlier, and perhaps feel more strongly that you want to make a different choice.

I have forgotten

What is the problem with forgetting? Can’t we just dig through our memories and remember what we were passionate about before?

To some extent this is true. You will likely be able to remember what you were passionate about in the past. You may even be able to recollect a bit of what it felt like. However, it is most likely that these remembered passions will feel hollow compared to what you feel they should feel like.

Why? Because you have fallen out of practice in experiencing your passions. Our experience tends to be very emotional and transformative, while our recollections of the past tend to be inexact and fleeting. It can be very difficult to recapture a passion that you have ignored for some length of time.

Passion is hard to muster on demand. If you have been slaving away at other aspects of your life for a long time, your previous passions can feel dessicated and empty. Be patient. Give yourself some time to take it easy and explore what you are feeling. If you enjoy yoga or any form of meditation, those can be a great tool for letting your experience of yourself come into sharp focus. If you remember what you liked before, try to tiptoe back into those activities. Patience is key because unreasonably high expectations tend to directly lead to negative self-evaluations that damage one’s self-esteem and cast doubt on what might be a deeply-held passion. So your first golf tee shot flies off into the shrubbery? That’s life, and you know it. Try to hold off negative self-evaluations as you explore, or re-explore, your experience.

Stay in touch or reconnect

I believe that in order to truly live the life we want to, we need to actively follow at least some of our passions. The best case is that in which we can stay in touch with them throughout our lives. In this case we are in no serious danger of forgetting what it feels like to pursue our dreams.

However, life happens. Whether we like it or not, many of us have had the experience of losing touch with those activities that we used to love, and the dreams that we used to chase. If we don’t make efforts to stay in touch with our passions and remain open to new ones, we may end up living a life that we honestly think is pretty empty and unsatisfying.

If you are headed down this path, I implore you: Take some of your time and put it towards rediscovering yourself. You may find oceans of buried passions that can help you fill your life with meaning. You may find that you have grown and changed. The ideas that once inspired you may have faded, and unexpected thoughts may have replaced them. You may have lived half your life since you last really gazed within, so it may not be surprising to find that you have grown into someone new. You will, however, still be the authority on who you were, and who you are. Your choices dictate much of how you will grow from this moment forward.

You might like to create a list for yourself. What are some concrete activities that you can do this week that will reignite your passion? Post that list right on your TV screen or computer so that next time you sit down for some passive entertainment you are reminded of your other options – options that will be more invigorating and remind you of who you are, and perhaps help you glimpse who you want to be.

Now

Experience yourself as you are. The past is useful for understanding, but experience always exists in the present moment. All of us experience at least mild amnesia. No one’s memory is completely perfect. To some extent, our past is hazy to us all. While the future tends to be even more inscrutable than the past, it is the future over which we have some control.

Knowing ourselves can only take place in the present. So what are you doing right now?

Experience, Learning, Money, Studying

Getting Into Graduate School

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Interested in getting into graduate school? So was I. My problem was that I was rejected from three graduate schools the first time I applied.

I have since been accepted into one of the schools that originally rejected me. During this process, I have learned a lot about how grad student selection tends to take place. I do not claim to be an expert on this topic, but I do feel that my experience and knowledge may be helpful to some people considering this life choice.

Graduate school is a definite goal for many of us who are passionate about knowledge and study. It is important to keep in mind that the competition for admission can be stiff, as there are usually more applicants than available positions.

How students are selected

The process of applying to grad school can be complicated and demanding. It is important to know what type of selection process is typical for your field and/or school.

Selection by committee

This approach to selection is common in non-thesis programs where you do not have a direct supervisor. These programs will often have a committee go through all the applications received. This group of people will analyze each applicant, rank them, and offer positions to the highest ranked people.

In this case it is often impractical or impossible to get to know any of the people who will be selecting you. This relatively common process bears a lot of similarity to applying for a high-end job. As such, you may want to approach this application process much as you approach applying for a job. Your qualifications, volunteer experience and how you present yourself through words are of primary importance.

Selection by supervisor

Now I will talk about what I think of as the more traditional approach to graduate studies. This selection process is typical if your program has you being supervised directly by one or more professors. The professors are the people who are primarily responsible for helping direct you in your academic and research path. To a great extent you work for them and with them. Good supervisors seem to be a mix of peer and boss.

The department might receive several hundred applications. They sort them into piles according to the sub-fields that are present in their subject area. For example, physics has experimental and theoretical sub sections, but it also has sub-sub-sections that are much more specific. A big department will end up with a number of distinct piles.

For example, a professor in experimental condensed matter physics might directly receive only those applications that cite her/him as the proposed supervisor. Alternatively, they might be presented with, or have access to, the pile of applications that are for experimental condensed matter physics, maybe with the applications that cite her/him as the proposed supervisor on top of the pile.

Professors choose who they want as grad students

One of the key things to understand here is that a professor will only even look at applications if they are looking for a new grad student. It is possible that a professor might have funding available, but might feel up to the challenge of digging through a huge pile of applications. They have to keep in mind that they are essentially agreeing to pay someone a salary for a couple years. From just an application it is pretty hard to be sure that you will like a person, an important factor for supervisors to consider as well as students. Their quality of life also depends on the quality of their interactions with their grad students.

As early as possible, talk to any professors that are doing research that interests you. If possible, talk in person. You might be working with them for years, and it is ideal if you can talk to them in person to see if they jive with you. This is a great opportunity to ask any questions that concern you with regards to the possible graduate work you might be doing.

Professors direct funding instead of departments

This is one fact that wasn’t actually that clear to me as an undergrad. At least in the Canadian universities that I have been in, professors are given direct grants for their research that they allocate at their discretion. If you are a student in such a department, your financial support is primarily through your supervisor’s research grants.

How do I talk to professors?

How to get it started? This is what I did at McGill in Montreal, Canada.

My method was to walk up to offices that had their doors open and knock as I stood in the doorway. When the professor asks what I want, I would ask if they have a moment to talk to me about grad studies. At this point most profs either perk up and invite me in, or tell me that they are busy. When they are busy, I found most profs would usually give me a time that I might drop by when they are less busy.

I found the professors at McGill to be very friendly. They were also very willing to talk about what work they and their group do. These people are generally doing what they do because they are passionate about it at some level. I also found that professors will be very up front with you about whether they have any open positions in their groups.

Email and phone if you have no recourse

If you can’t physically go to the graduate schools you are interested in, all is not lost. While email and phone aren’t as good as a face to face meeting, they are infinitely better than nothing. If you are dedicated with your efforts to contact people who you are interested in working with, then at the very least when they look through the applications directed at their department, your name might catch their eye a bit.

A very likely result however is that by dint of your efforts to contact and communicate, you will rouse their interest in you as a potential graduate student. Even without face-to-face meetings it is possible to cultivate a relationship through which you can acquire a graduate position. The more technically savvy professors may also be convinced to give you some time via a Skype video conference as well. While even Skype isn’t as good as a face to face meeting, it does have a lot of advantages over email and phone, at least as far as actually getting to know your supervisor is concerned.

I think this is crucial

As far as I can tell, this is the single most important facet for getting into graduate school under a particular supervisor. The most important thing is to start and pursue a genuine conversation who are doing things that interest you.

Don’t be too timid, don’t be too overbearing, just talk to them. While the details of how you conduct yourself depend a lot on which medium you are using (in person, email, phone, Skype), I do have a couple tips.

Do your homework on who they are and what they do. I’d highly recommend knowing at least a bit about what their research focus is before bothering them with a conversation and/or questions. You should be able to tell them why you are interested in working with them. What aspect of what they do interests you?

Most professors have a personal webpage on which they list their research interests and/or publications. If nothing else works, you can look up their work on a academic search engine like Google Scholar.

Feel free to introduce yourself in a way that seems to make sense to you with regards to your field. For me, this included telling professors that I had recently finished studies in Regina where I acquired four undergraduate degrees and am now interested in pursuing graduate studies in physics.

Feel free to ask questions. Perhaps you are interested in hearing more about some aspect(s) of their research. Perhaps you want to learn more about what it is like to be a graduate student. Perhaps you want to know who their favourite musical artist(s) are.

Ask whatever questions occur to you as being important enough to warrant them spending the time to answer them. This is your judgement call. The questions you choose to ask will say a lot about who you are and how you will approach your possible graduate studies with this professor.

Start early. If you are planning to apply in a couple months, get going on this. It is woefully easy to procrastinate on, but it is the single most important factor for getting your foot in the door. If you want to do graduate work that excites and challenges you, start emailing professors today.

Experience, Health, Learning, Money, Personal Development, Reading, Studying, Time Management

Life Changing Book on Time and Life

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I recently finished a fascinating read. The Time Paradox is a book by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd about how our personal perspectives of time have a tremendous effect on how we live our lives.

You have have heard of Zimbardo before, he is one of the more famous social scientists in the world thanks mostly to his fame for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment. He has written a major work on the subject of “Understanding how good people turn evil”. On the first page of my copy, he says that writing this book, The Lucifer Effect, was not a labour of love. I find this understandable; investigating the ways in which human beings can be turned evil is an extremely dark subject. I think the world owes Zimbardo thanks for pushing through the mire to discover how we can reorient our institutions towards bringing out the good in all of us rather than the evil.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Zimbardo briefly during his visit to Regina in November 2009. While I was pretty sure that his presentations would be good, I didn’t expect to be blown away by how caring and conscientious of a person he was. I observed him in person-to-person interactions far from the stage in which he was extremely kind, caring and patient with every person who asked him a question or for advice. I thought to myself, here is a man whose time is very valuable, giving it away to people because…well I hesitate to speculate…but I think he really just wants to help people. Even after a five-decade teaching career in prestigious universities, he still cares about people he meets on the street. I was profoundly moved by this experience.

Now, back to The Time Paradox.

Overall, this book was transformative and challenging. It lead me to understandings about my life, and the lives of those around me, that are profound and clear. I originally thought that I probably would not learn very much from the book, being a reasonably thoughtful metacognitive person. I turned out to be wrong, and this book fundamentally changed the way I look at the world.

What perspective did I gain from this book?

Time perspectives are important. A significant part of the book is dedicated to making clear just how important they are. What also comes along with that knowledge is a firm understanding of how far reaching the consequences of ignorance about time perspectives can be.

Time orientation is a fundamental life perspective. Anyone reading this article of mine will have no trouble understanding the different ways of looking at time presented in the book. The perspectives in the book are roughly based on positive and negative views of the past, present, and future.

The question for each of us is: Which time perspectives do you live, and how do they affect your life?

Respect for differences

Throughout the book there is a genuine respect for the fact that while social science can collect general data about the results of habits that people have, it cannot predict the outcomes for any one individual. The wisdom of this book must be applied by each person to their own personal context.

Time therapy (applying the ideas from this book in the field of clinical psychology) seems to be incredibly powerful. However, for me the most important aspects of this book are those that have to do with each of us as individuals. Each of us lives our own journey through time, and this book is a good step towards understanding ourselves a bit better.

Balance is the key

There is no cookie-cutter solution to perspectives of life. The best answer is not any particular time perspective, but a combination of all. The authors espouse a very balanced time perspective based on the best data that they have.

What does a ‘balanced time perspective’ mean? Well first of all it means that there is more than one time perspective present, because fixation on any single time perspective tends to lead to large problems in life. Fixation on only one perspective means you are missing out on a lot of your own experience and potential.

I would summarize the balanced time perspective as follows. It is a mental and emotional state in which you:

  1. Regard your future filled with quite a bit of hope, though tempered with the knowledge that you have to spend effort (and thought) now to create a better life for yourself later.
  2. Keep in mind your happy memories because they help you stay happy and live in a hopeful present, but keep enough realism about the past to learn from mistakes and hardships.
  3. Live today well, and be happy with the moments you have. Be aware of the central importance of the present moment. Everything happens now and no other time really exists except within our minds. We must live now, but we can also choose to shape our future and call to mind our happiness and lessons from the past.

What about you?

I scored the following on the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory.
Past-negative: 2.00

Past-positive:  4.89

Present-hedonistic:  3.80

Present-fatalistic: 1.22

Future: 4.00

Transcendental-future: 3.00

What are you? Take the test here.

Well worth your time

I needed to read this book. The insights I have gained from reading have helped me towards a more balanced and happy life. I firmly believe that this book has the potential to help others do the same.

You can find The Time Paradox for a pretty decent price (and in several different formats such as Hardcover, Softcover, and Kindle Edition) on Amazon.

Health, Money

An Introduction to the Canada Health Act

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In 1984 Canada and the provinces agreed to five principles as part of the Health Act. Originally it was agreed that the budget would be split 50 – 50 (federal funds – provincial funds), but this has since changed with more money being provided by the provincial governments.

These five principles, as you will see, are open to interpretation – and actually opened to formal discussion as of December 14th, 2010.

Health Act Principles (1984)

  1. Public Administration
    The government will control the operation of the health care system on a not-for-profit basis.
  2. Comprehensiveness
    This depends on the province. For example, in some places physiotherapy is covered. Provinces can also have different criteria for allowing patients into nursing homes.
    Truly comprehensive services across the country include the following, however criteria leading to these services may differ:

    • Physician Visits,
    • Hospital Stays; and
    • Hospital Dental Services.
  3. Universality
    All Canadians have access to health care – 100%.
  4. Portability
    Canadians can move around and still get health care, even out of country. However, if payment is required then the province will adequately reimburse the resident/patient at the rate of the home province, NOT the rate where health care was received.
  5. Accessibility
    There should be no barriers to health care.

The two principles that are most often multi-interpreted are Comprehensiveness and Accessibility. It is imperative that we take a closer look at these.

Comprehensiveness

As stated above, the truly comprehensive services that are available for every Canadian citizen are Physician Visits, Hospital Stays and Hospital Dental Services. Let us look at each of these in a little more detail.

Physician Visits

Physicians are paid on a fee-for-service basis (i.e. they get paid per medical act). These fees are negotiated between the government and the medical association (the act is called Physician Remuneration…and yes, there is a lot of paperwork). For a visit to the General Practitioner (GP) that occurs in his/her office (i.e. the patient is an ‘outpatient’), the fee is $37.00. For a visit that occurs in a hospital (i.e. the patient is an ‘inpatient’), the fee is $17.00. This difference exists to help physicians cover the overhead costs of running an office. Keep in mind that being ‘seen’ by a doctor could involve a five minute conversation or a simple sweep of your chart and vitals.

Hospital Stays

Hospitals are expensive. They involve the costs of personnel, pharmaceuticals, food, building expenses, etc. It is averaged that a single day at the hospital costs $1000.00. This is why hospitals are constantly trying to reduce the length of hospital stay required before and after procedures. For example, new mothers without complications are sometimes out the next day.

Hospital Dental Services

Dentistry in general does not fall under health care (although if we consider cost-effectiveness it really ought to). However, dental services can be part of emergency procedures at which point they would be covered through the Canada Health Act.

Accessibility

Oh, this is so complicated. Here, you take a look:

12.1.a. In order to satisfy the criterion respecting accessibility, the health care insurance plan of a province must provide for insured health services on uniform terms and conditions and a basis that does not impede or preclude, either directly or indirectly whether by charges made to insured persons or otherwise, reasonable access to those services by insured persons.

Or, insured persons (i.e. tax payers) should not have barriers to health care. One barrier is finances, therefore patients should not be met with user fees or administration fees (direct charges) in order to access health care.

I know you’re wondering why some services (e.g. Québec walk-in clinics) are allowed to charge money. The answer is simple, you don’t NEED to go to that clinic. There exists a clinic that will not charge you fees (even if it IS the emergency room where you will wait 6 hours to be seen, where your condition will potentially worsen, and which will decrease your economic productivity – sigh). In Québec clinics charge $95.00 a visit. Compare that to the $37.00 physician remuneration I mention above. That is a ‘user fee’ or ‘facility fee’ or ‘service fee’ of $58.00.

So, if you have money you can visit a faster user-fee-charging clinic and get back to making money. If not, then either you live with being ill or cram into a free clinic with other sick people and wait – one of the reasons that socio-economic status is an excellent indicator of health. These two speeds, called a two-tiered system, are just the beginning of provincial rule bending in regards to the Canada Health Act.

Personal Note:

I would like to propose that finances are NOT the only issue of accessibility. Consider rural areas. Where I come from the closest ‘hospital’ is over 30 minutes away – and that is only if it is open. If a physician is not available I may need to continue ANOTHER 30 minutes (that’s a hour if you’re adding) to reach the next hospital. The act of getting to a doctor suddenly becomes difficult, so there are three choices:

  1. Call an ambulance
    The ambulance (expensive) must travel the same 30 minutes to get to you (20 minutes if they are heavy-footed) and then turn around and go back. Remember that irreparable brain damage occurs after four minutes.
  2. Travel
    Elderly, handicapped or poor patients would see travel as a infringement to the accessibility of their health care. Without a car, gas, a licence and the physical ability, these distances cannot be traversed (especially since there is no local transportation in this area).
  3. Avoid
    Ignoring a small health concern will likely lead to it escalating (see option #1).

This personal note is corroborated by the Canadian government’s September 2006 Report “How Healthy are Rural Canadians?”:

The reality of living in rural and remote areas is that there are fewer health care services. Geographic isolation and problems with access to and shortage of providers and services are multidimensional problems. For instance, poor road quality combined with greater periods spent on the road not only contribute directly to higher incidence of injury, but also compromise access to health services. Moreover, difficult economic circumstances, travelling time to the city and the lack of car ownership can affect access to and demand for health services.

Health, Studying

Global Health, Well-Being, and Conflict

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According to the WHO (World Health Organization), “Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.

In Global Health terms, health has a lot to do with conflict. Today, 90% of deaths in wars are civilians. Conflict used to be confined to inter-state wars (consider the world wars), but increasingly regular are intra-state conflicts (feuds within political boundaries).

The United Nations (UN) has always had the mandate to take care of Refugees (those who leave their country’s borders). However, just recently has the UN finally been mandated to take care of Internally Displaced peoples (those who don’t leave their country’s borders). This means that the numbers have increase substantially, considering that Refugees number somewhere around 9 million, while Internally Displaced peoples amount to over 22 million.

Also important to consider are the causes of conflicts. Sources of conflict include race, religion and natural disasters. Consider these images of Lake Chad which indicate the physical source of strife that has escalated to the Darfur conflict.

The shrinking of Lake Chad

(Image found at A Town Square)

The impact that a source (such as drought) can have is a direct result of susceptibility. Impact includes things like:

  1. Increase in morbidity and mortality
  2. Forced migration
  3. Disease
  4. Increasing competition for resources

Number Four is best exemplified by this image:

Haiti - Dominican Republic Border

(Image found at Wiley GeoDiscoveries)

This is the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic – the raging deforestation in Haiti is extremely evident.

The first section was presented by Dr. Kirsten Johnson, MPH.

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Dr. Tarek Razek (rightmost white man)

(Image from Outpost)

Dr. Tarek Razek is a medical doctor as well as the Director of the McGill Trauma Program. In his spare time, Dr. Razek is a trauma physician with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and educator with the Canadian Network for International Surgery (CNIS).

Dr. Razek notes that Canada is odd. That we really are rare in terms of our consideration of multiculturalism as normal. This facet of our society leads to Canadians being excellent members of Emergency Response Units (ERUs). This was imperative in the past when Canadians were deployed as part of ERUs of other countries. Just recently Canada has acquired its own Emergency Response Unit (including kits, pharmaceuticals, tents, teams, etc.) which has just been sent to Haiti to help fight an outbreak of cholera.

Safety is a continued issue for Dr. Razek, who has a family. The threat of death, injury and kidnapping is real. The position of trauma surgeon in a conflict area is not entered lightly. But Dr. Razek acknowledges that his work is necessary and rewarding.

Dr. Razek tells the story of his experience doing surgeries 10 hours a day for 7 days a week. Each of his surgeries required the permission of the patient (or guardian). As such, there needed to be translators present. Because the Red Cross camp was located in an area that was surrounded by multiple tribes it seemed like it would be a challenge to decipher which translator was needed. However, tribal customs differed in an interesting way in that area, so translators were able to lift the shirts of the patients and use the tribal markings on their chests to determine the correct dialect.

Trauma is an unrecognized epidemic. It is the leading cause of death, and in 2020 will become the number one cause of years of life loss. Dr. Razek has many stories and pictures to share detailing bullet wounds, bullet wounds, bullet wounds, and landmine injuries.

He shares this story. In some areas where landmines are prevalent, parents make the youngest child walk in front of the family. If that child is too light to set off the landmines then the child will be weighted down. Dr. Razek goes on to explain that the father and the mother are necessary entities in the family, without which the family would cease to operate. The older children are also necessary members because their labour abilities help bring in revenue for the entire family. The youngest child is dispensable – not yet offering tangible benefits to the family unit except for through its dispensability.

Dr. Razek’s presentation was one that offered insight into global emergency care. And more importantly he offered palpable stories and feelings to a room full of medical personnel who are also interested in working in a global context.

Next Week: Access to Essential Medicines