From: morris@zodiac.rutgers.edu
Newsgroups: sci.med
Subject: Re: A Question/Proposal for "Health Care Consumers"
Date: 21 Jul 92 17:52:25 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Rutgers University Computing Services

In article <1992Jul17.190304.10063@highlite.uucp>, yarvin@highlite.uucp (Curtis Yarvin) writes:
 
> And the shoeshine lobby is all for daily bootblacking lessons.  No offense,
> Joyce, but people like you are part of the precipitate.
Intended offense taken
> 
> If I could have _my_ way, we wouldn't excite the latent educrat in
> elementary teachers by making them take empty courses in mindless subjects
> like "education."  If you're good with children and know of what you
> teach, you're a good teacher - no matter how many academic bureaucracies
> you've mastered.  If you're not, you shouldn't be allowed within a mile
> of them anyway.
I wish this were true.  I had a number of teachers who had emergency
certification (back in the days when there was a severe shortage of
teachers) who knew their subject incredibly well and who liked kids.
They got emergency certification because they had degrees in the fields
in which they were going to teach - math, chemistry, etc.
However their teaching was ineffective because they did not know how
to teach.  It is the problem with most college professors - they are
experts in their field but they have never been taught to teach.
> 
> But let's face it, Joyce, you're a lot closer to having your way than I am
> to mine.
I wish.  Unfortunately there are too many vocal ignorant people out there.
> 
> Would that they were also trained to avoid tautology.  The question we're
> trying to ask, which I guess you consider unthinkable, is whether or
> not "comprehensive health education" is something that's worth wasting
> our time on.  You don't offer a drowning man a sip of Scotch, not
> even single-malt; with our schools turned into moron factories, it's
> just plain silly to talk of spending more time on "comprehensive health
> education" and suchlike watered-down pap.
I am sorry that you think that health is watered-down pap.  As many of the
ignorant questions (not necessarily from stupid people) and our wasted
productivity because of sick days show, most people do not know how to
take care of themselves.  Our children are unable to learn because of
poor health.  Unlike you I believe in prevention - I would rather teach
the man to swim so he does not drown rather than to build an elaborate
system to save him after he does drown.
 
> Although it might make sense for someone with a Ph.D in health education;
> you won't exactly raise your funding by letting on that your specialty is
> useless as tits on a boar hog, will you?
Actually my specialty has been proven to be efficacious and to return far
more money than it costs.  When trained health educators are used rather
than persons untrained in health education, health education works -
people live longer and have fewer sick days. Large companies such as
Johnson & Johnson and AT&T have found that health education pays.
Unfortunately their programs have to teach their employees what they 
should have learned as children in schooll. 
 
> "Family life."   Gosh, you folks sure are clever.  Maybe, if we gave
> you a few years and a real big grant, you could come up with enough
> "content areas" that a student could spend all twelve years of grade
> school doing nothing but comprehensive health education?  That'd be
> a major academic achievement, Joyce.  I think you should give it a shot.
Actually that is not a bad idea and one which has been shown to work.
Health topics are very amenable to integration in other subjects such
as math, chemistry and social studies.  When health topics are used,
students show a greater interest in learning the math, chemistry, social
studies, etc. because they can see it's relevance. 
 
> And it's a nice definition too, Joyce.  Plenty of budgetary room left
> for teachers, managers, staff, and last but not least academic planners
> like your truly.  Of course, you don't bother to tell us why such a 
I am not an academic planner.  My field is public health education.  I
came to value school health because of the incredible ignorance I found
people had about their own bodies and how to control them.  These were
bright, intelligent people who simply had never been taught in a
competent manner.
> "comprehensive school health instructional program" is a good thing,
> but that must be a real technical issue and we probably wouldn't
> understand it anyway.
It is not very technical.  Comprehensive school health has been shown
to produce adults who understand their own bodies and how to take care
of their health.  This in turn results in lower morbidity and mortality
and greater productivity.
> I admire your honesty with the quotation marks.  I've long been amused by
> the unabashed irredentism of public health academics, who believe that
> calling an issue a "disease" will empower them to proselytize on it with
> the same infallibility they're normally granted in genuine medical issues.
> It's a good plan, but they don't go far enough; it takes more effort to get
> to where the really juicy funding grows. ...
I used quotation marks because these are maladaptive behaviors rather than
diseases but most persons outside of the health field label them as diseases.
They are however genuine medical issues.
 
> No, Joyce.  You're going to have to excuse me for raising my voice here,
> but the crisis of our children is that they're GROWING UP MORONS.
It is genetic - inherited from parents like you.
 
> From where you stand, Joyce, you're bigger than the Statue of Liberty.  If
> you expect people to take you seriously, though, you'll have to develop a
> little objectivity.  Children have better things to do with their youth
> than learning about "family life" from people too prudish to pronounce
> the s-word.  Teachers have better things to teach than the "emotional and
> societal dimensions of health issues."  If you don't agree with these
> statements, take a Valium and a sabbatical, and go check out the real
> world.
I have checked out the real world.  I spent 10 years as a practicing public
health educator before going to graduate school.  All of my research is real
world research - you cannot do health education research in a laboratory.
It may be purely coincidence but the mortality rate from accidents went
down signifcantly in the villages in which I instituted an injury prevention
program while those which did not get the program that year stayed the same
or increases.  This was not a research project - this was real life.  Only
some of the villages got the program because I could not do all 32 in my
region (40,000 square miles of Alaska) in one year.  The following year
the mortality rate came down in the additional villages I worked with. 

> Curtis Yarvin, certified heckler and irreverence artist.