The battles we face

I lifted this from BoingBoing.net, which is an excellent blog for random, quirky, yet important news. It's from a BBC series called "The Joy of Stats", which is kind of hilarious in itself, that the BBC would even make such a show. And that's coming from someone who is studying statistics to make a livelihood. Anyway, I'm about to go check out Joy of Stats, but in the meantime, thought this video was really interesting. The graphics really aren't that impressive. He thinks he's doing some spatial visualization, but its not spatial, its just in front of him instead of behind him. CNN has been doing this stuff for a couple years. It's more interesting just to see the changes in health over time.

My interest in this topic is related to some work I'm doing as an RA for a prof. He is about to teach a class in comparative health systems, and I'm helping him gather materials. The idea is to take certain characteristics of health systems, compare them among various countries, and see how much those characteristics act as indicators of success. We're guessing that we will find that the millions and billions the United States puts into its health system will be rendered seemingly futile, since other countries with remedial systems have similar life expectancies. (On that note, did you see that the average life expectancy in the U.S. went down one tenth last week? for the first time in 15 years. It could be the first time ever that parents are expected to live longer lives than their children.)

This got me thinking how frustrated people like my professor, who study this health system, its outcomes, and the effectiveness of changes we make, have to be at the world. Can you imagine dedicating your life's work to improving and developing measure to help as tools in that improvement, and knowing that everything you do is too small to help? That the structure of the institution is SO screwed, and having to explain that to legislators who either don't understand the issue or are too concerned with thousands of other messed up institutions as well as pleasing their constituencies to pay you any attention. If we could get people on the same page and really fix this monster of a health system, imagine what our lives could be like! But it's really disheartening to think how impossible that is. So maybe people like my prof resassure themselves that they're doing the best thing possible by chipping away at what we have now. What a monstrous task.

It brings me back to kindergarten, where they try so hard to teach you how to work together. And as we grow we are taught teamwork and eventually group work. Something about how we teach these things must be off, because it's truly rare to see a group functioning at its highest capacity, highlighting everyone's strengths, sucessfully. And when we do get groups doing that, they are often working against each other. If only we could get our country as a whole to function as a group. We really are working toward the same things, people just don't know how to voice things in a way that the other groups see as amiable. We scream at each other "I like blue" and "I like cobalt" and "I like turquoise" and "I like navy" and no one is listening to say, "hey dudes- those are all kinds of blue".

I have no idea how I got here from a global health video.