The Healthcare "System"

Healthcare has become a "system", requiring huge investments, driven by profits and obsessed with metrics which are used to drive the doctors to perform. 

The focus is on the Doctors' careers, money, and return on capital. 

The doctors are armed with knowledge gained from a highly corrupt scientific establishment which is driven by evil Pharma companies with motives that do not align with the health of the patient who lies at the end of the value chain, helpless in his hospital bed, with the tentacles of every stakeholder in the system embedded into him, sucking his blood. 

Neither the patient nor the doctors have any power in the giant blood sucking machine called the medical establishment. They interact with each other in a role play that could be a tragi comical charade, except that it is for real. 

The way to deal with the system is for us the patients to reclaim the power to decide for ourselves what is good for us, but for that we need to be well informed and have courage of conviction, which is very difficult when you are attached to the system in so many different ways. 

You cannot expect your doctor to give you good advice for they know very little about what constitutes good health, and are, with or without their knowledge, driven by incentives that have nothing to do with the patients' health or wellness. 

You certainly cannot expect your hospital to care about your well being. 

There is nothing surprising about what the doctor is outlining in his book, but the establishment is acting surprised. The establishment has to do that, what choice does it have? Those who know about its evils and profit from them, have to pretend that they never knew and they are cursing the bloody doctor who wrote the book. Those who didn't know about the evils of the system and are truly surprised are the naive trusting aam janta, who don't have a choice. They have to trust the system since it exists for their benefit, right? 

Right. The medical system, education system, civic amenities system, food system, government system, everything exists for their benefit. 

Right, sure, of course!

Meanwhile, I have some rules that I follow to deal with this evil machine called the medical establishment. 

Never go for "preventive" medical checkups. Never, ever, go for preventive medical checkups. 

If you are walking on the road and passing a hospital, cross to the other side so that even the shadow of the hospital does not fall on you. 

Just because you are insured does not mean you go in for treatment. Remember, the more you get into the system, and the more you spend, the more you get fucked. 

Retain the right to decide which medicine to take, and which to avoid. Remember, the doctor is merely a consultant, you are paying him for his services, and you have the right to decide which part of his advice to follow. In the rare occasion that I happen to visit a doctor, I am fully attired in an armour of scepticism, it has helped me immensely. 

Never ever get trapped into taking life long medication for any illness. The moment that happens, you are doomed. 

There are a thousand illnesses with several  thousand symptoms with millions of drug combinations. It's all very confusing. 

But the rules for good health are very few. Very very few. Focus on health and not on illness, and you will never go wrong.

Why do you need to study Maths?

Why do you need to study Maths? Random thoughts on a Thursday morning... 

Calculators can do all that stuff... True, AI can do more advanced stuff too. We actually don't need to learn anything in the brave new world.

Meanwhile, there is something called "reasoning" which distinguishes man from other animals. Maths is the language of reasoning, of helping you think more clearly. 

We need "tools" for systematising our thought process. Maths offers us those tools and helps us think far beyond what mere conventional language would limit us to. 

Maths insists on precision. Most people nowadays get by with wishy washy thinking, and language consisting of word salads. A person trained in Maths is incapable of talking like a Kamala maami of US election fame or like pappu the redoubtable scion!

Maths expresses grand ideas in elegant form. In that sense, it is like music. Losing oneself in a maths problem is the same feeling as getting carried away by a sublime piece of music! 

Like music or karate, Maths involves dedication and discipline to learn; has graded levels for judging incremental progress; and there is no end to the learning. Maths is a combination of science and art - it is all science  in its formation, but it is like art in its application. 

Maths is at the same time: grandeur and brevity; precision and breadth; logic and beauty. 

Maths is a language but it is unlike a normal natural language. Like any language, it helps in communication, expression  and expansion of  ideas. 

The difference between a literate and illiterate person? It's not IQ, I know servant maids who are smarter than many of us. It's not wisdom, most less educated  rural folk  are wiser than many of the educated folks we see around; it is basically the ability to structure thought logically, and form "chunks" of knowledge to build upon. Knowledge of maths helps considerably in doing that. 

We are not talking "advanced" maths here, we are talking of basic school level stuff. 

Whatever the advancements in technology, maths will still be relevant. 

And yes, it requires a bit of hard work. Which is good. 

Whatever happens, don't let your kid drop maths as a subject at least till tenth standard. 

The proverbial three Rs, Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic, are still the basic skills every person needs to learn to call themselves educated!

The MBA is dead

The MBA is no longer so great an option. About a quarter of the class of elite MBA colleges in the US have not found placements in the last couple of years. 

Actually, MBA stopped being a great option quite a while ago. Let's look at it from the point of view of (a) placement, and (b) skills. 

When it comes to placement, the conventional wisdom is that recruiting from a better college will guarantee you a better outcome. That was always a lazy person's option, what prevented the companies from casting the net wider? But that involves two things. (1) Doing a lot of work identifying the right candidates. Since when have you seen any HR person who does real work? I have yet to see one. (2) It's a risk. If you recruit from IIT or IIM, no one will blame you. Which person in corporate wants to take risk? In my experience, no one. Only entrepreneurs take risks. 

Many parallel developments are combining to make the MBA obsolete. Especially the full time ones. Some of these factors do not apply to part time MBAs which may still retain some value. 

1. Just like the Civil Services Babu was a go between, from British times,  between the masters and the larger population, the MBA served as a buffer between the capitalist class and the other educated labour. With democratisation of information, free access to resources, internet, mobile, etc., all kinds of dalals or in betweens are losing out. 

2. What skills does the MBA bring to the table? Nothing that the same person in the same position without the MBA degree could not have done. 

3. Demand for all "general" skills will die out. I still need the barber for my haircut, but why do I need an MBA? Just think, if you are an entrepreneur, why would you want to recruit an MBA? Cobbler, barber, cook, driver - I understand what skill they have, that they have trained for. What skill does an MBA have? The MBA course in any college is an artificially assembled hodge podge of impressive looking curricula, after all the colleges have to survive. They never taught anyone much. 

The MBA never had a right to exist. I mean, what exactly is "management" and how do you "teach" it? It's just babudom in a different guise, and in the new world, all kinds of babudom are under threat. 

Forget MBA. If you are a youngster thinking about what to do in life, think about this. The gourmet cook is always sought after. The world values her skills and she actually does something useful. What skill do you bring to the table, and in what way can you add value?

Stuck in escapism

The modern world has accustomed us to the idea that we keep needing to make money.  Make money to do what? To do things that will make us happy, things that don't involve work!

Now this puts us in an unenviable trap. While working, we are all the time fantasizing about our time off. We don't enjoy the work as a consequence. While taking our time off, we want to "maximise" that limited window, so we try to pack more and more things in it, go to better and better "destinations", and have better and better insta pictures in order to make our friends more and more envious. 

Our friends when they look at our insta pictures of our road trip in our newly acquired Tesla, are not thinking about us - they are thinking about themselves in that situation and having FOMO. The time we don't spend on actually doing something is the time spent on FOMO. 

So we are all the time doing something that we want to escape out of, that thing called work, in order to earn money to do high octane things to impress others who don't give a shit but which cost a lot of money, and at the same time envying those who are somewhere else! 

There is something drastically wrong in this whole construct. 

It is both sad and hilarious at the same time. Like most tragedies in life are.

Thoughts on food processing

Raw fruits and vegetables are good, human beings have the ability to digest it. 

Once humans shifted to agriculture, we started making denser foods like grains. Grains were initially used only to feed cattle, and not for human consumption. It entered the human diet only about 6000 years back. Due to population pressure, grains then became a large part of our diet. 

For optimal health, reduce grains in the diet. There is a huge amount of time spent on debating why Ragi or Quinoa is better than rice or wheat. These kinds of debates are needless if you anyway decide to reduce grains in your diet. 

If you anyway  have grains, then remember the following. In case you have a lot of inexplicable health problems or allergies, IBS, etc the first thing to drop from the diet is wheat.  Wheat has undergone so much modification in the last two thousand years that the modern version has become a problem. You can try "emmer wheat / jave godi" , that may work for you. 

Milk is in general not required for the human body. Eliminating milk is a healthy option. However, the vegans have it all wrong. Butter, ghee, curd and buttermilk are good for health, extremely good in fact. The vegans, in avoiding these, are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. 

Naturopathy is generally in favour of raw foods. Ayurveda however typically recommends light cooking. When it comes to cooking, heating in the presence of water or steam is better than dry heat, since the yang of fire is balanced with the yin of water. 

Rava, Poha, Sabudana, noodles, pasta,  are all "processed" foods. They are made from rice or wheat after boiling, heating, dunking, rolling, flattening, etc, processes. In today's parlance, this is not what we refer to when we say "processed" foods. 

The rice that is milled in the rice mill is processed in a manner of speaking. The more the "polish" the less the nutrients that remain. However, this is not a major concern for two reasons. (1) I do not depend on rice for my main nutritional needs, for that I have vegetables, fruits and spices. (2) In any case, rice or any kind of grains are not great for health.

Best not to worry about how much processing the rice has undergone, and try to keep progressively reducing the amount of all grains in your diet.

With all these caveats in place, now remember that processed foods are extremely, extremely bad for health. When we say processed food, a short and sweet definition is: any food that is made in a factory. As to the reasons why processed foods are bad for health, those can fill a book. 

Rather than getting into huge debates on what constitutes "processing", to what extent is processed food ok, which processed foods are ok, or into semantical arguments on the definition of processing, it is best to understand the spirit of what is being said, the broad contours of what foods are good, and to maintain an eighty twenty principle. So long as eighty percent of the food you eat is "good", the body can handle the other twenty percent. 

On second thoughts, make it ninety ten.