Sometimes the furry critters are your best friends. (I know many don't understand.)

No matter what you do or think of yourself, they see the real you.

Your family and friends may not be liking you.

The world in which you move may be hateful and unyielding.

You may find that you are swimming upstream or running into walls.

It doesn't matter. Your furry friend is always there for you and waiting for you. Mine was my savior these last two years. These last two years have been the roughest in my life on many levels and he was the one constant I had who held no judgments. (I know many have worse.)

Despite enjoying NECC with my son and delivering a good poster session, I just wanted to hug my furry friend but he is no longer here. I miss him terribly. (Too many emotions buried deep just keep surfacing.)

I can't believe I leave in about 4 days (spending a little time with my SIL before heading to the conference.) My session description can be found here.

Accomplished:

1. Printed my NECC planner. If I could clone myself, I could actually be in all the places at the same time.
2. Printed all hotel info.
3. Added all other events that I have to my planner.
   
4. Decided where I could carve out some free time in the planner for sanity.
5. Added more information and a discussion to my NECC ning page.

Still to finish:

1. Finishing touches on the powerpoint for the session.
2. Tweaks to the background for bulletin board.
3. Packing up all the assorted materials (handouts, business cards, clips to hang up the background...)
4. Creating a packing list (while I am thinking about it all...)

After the training last week on the ITSI portal from the Concord Consortium, I feel a little rushed. The training however was great and worth the time. Met some great people and had fun and laughs.

Looking forward to meeting up with other educators and sharing!

Tags: ITSI, concord consortium, NECC, wiki, wikicentral

I think I’ve figured it out. There’s something in public health called the “prevention paradox”: measures of disease prevention that offer great benefits to populations at large (such as fluoridation of water sources, wearing seatbelts, lifestyle changes, smallpox vaccinations, etc) offer little benefit or personal incentive to individuals.

But research shows that health education geared toward individuals (counseling on reducing salt intake for hypertension, exercise for diabetes, etc) are less effective when geared only toward individuals and/or used in a short-term approach. People are motivated to act for immediate gain and substantial personal benefits, but “the medical motivation for health education is inherently weak. Their health next year is not likely to be much better if they accept our advice or if they reject it. Much more powerful as motivators for health education are the social rewards of enhanced self-esteem and social approval.” (Geoffrey Rose, Sick Individuals and Sick Populations.)

Physicians also prefer individualized health education because with population interventions (such as anti-smoking campaigns), their success rates are low and results take a long time to achieve.

The US is such an individual-centric society that people have no cultural reason to care about population health as a whole. Most Americans do not see that universal access to healthcare means that problems are detected and treated early (which is less costly), and that sometimes preventive medicine can encourage life-saving behavior change. That the person going into the ER for stomach pain because s/he does not have health insurance is costing the taxpayer literally thousands more dollars than s/he would if s/he’d gone to a primary care physician.

Nor do they understand the concept of herd immunity- if a large proportion of a population is immune to or vaccinated against a particular disease, the likelihood that one individual will get that disease is far less.

The focus on the individual and the apathy toward the well-being of communities and populations is by no means restricted to health alone. The same can be said about the current financial crisis. Individuals who borrowed more than they could pay back, and their unscrupulous lenders have created a global downward spiral of hundreds of economies, with the bottom billion hit the hardest.

I find it ironic and deeply saddening that 30 million more people have been pushed into starvation thus far due to the financial crisis while bankers are taking hefty bonuses and governments are bailing out businesses that were failing even before the crash (GM, Chrysler, etc…)