Opinion of a Guy Living By The WLA VA Soldiers Home
Tags: Los Angeles, Research, UCLA, Homeless Veterans, Corruption

This is the opinion of a guy living by the West Los Angeles VA (WLA VA) Soldiers Home. It’s here on Medium because I’ll be over 280 characters by the end of this paragraph and these words could vanish moments after appearing on Nextdoor or Facebook instead.

It’s about what seems to be a research marketing thinktank packaging “news stories” for major press publications' science sections.

https://www.spectrumnews.org/about/

Their latest story seems about a group of students who, one way or another, are in the pharmacological research biz; and their Tweets about how cool a new study is.

I think the study claims that, if you use electrodes on living things’ brains a certain way, you’ll see what parts of them do as the lives hosting them allegedly think about themselves.

It seems none of the doctors mentioned in the article are medical doctors.

Here’s an excerpt of the published study…

“We recruited sixteen human subjects who had electrocorticography (ECoG) electrodes neurosurgically implanted onto the cortical surface for epilepsy monitoring and treatment. Our behavioral task consisted of true/false text prompts for three experimental conditions of interest: self-mentalizing (e.g. “I am honest”), other-mentalizing (e.g. “my neighbor is honest”), and a control cognitive task involving simple arithmetic (e.g. ECoG was recorded from all 2125 electrode sites in our subject cohort. Sites showing epileptic activity were excluded from primary analyses.”

… I’m inspired to wonder where one finds human test subjects willing to undergo neurosurgical implants into their brians for student research, because the published study never specifies such information. I guess the answer is related to making the best use of such implants already installed into the brains of epileptic people?

Well, back to my synopsis of a story about a study told in Tweets…

One of the UCLA students who conducted the study excitedly Tweeted that it was actually published!

His fellow UCLA student told his freinds on Twitter how cool that is.

One of his friends’ friends Tweeted back the study’s also cool ‘cause it uses animals.

Another friend who’s both a UCLA student-researcher and West Los Angeles VA Soldiers Home health specialist, enthusiastically Tweeted he can’t wait for everyone in his lab to check out the cool new study!

That same UCLA researcher seems [to others] to be skilled at using electrodes on recently homeless disabled Veterans brains; purportedly in ways that may one day reveal why they’re (allegedly) emotionally deficient.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jonathan-Wynn-3

A recent study involving the National Institute on Health reports 15% of human test subjects receiving the least invasive applications of electricity to their brains experience burning, pain and / or fatigue; by which they conclude such activity is not harmful.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3270148/

In the context of studies mentioned herein, the human test subjects are often disabled, homeless Veterans with severe mental disabilities; who are often subjected to such student research at the West Los Angeles VA Soldiers Home.

Why promote contrived hype over a study’s essentially pointless results as newsworthy? I doubt such experiments will ever help disabled Veterans and animals enough to remotely improve the odds of developing any drug to safely and effectively treat broad sets of behaviors allegedly qualifying as autism.

Why is macabre research still underway at the WLA VA Soldiers Home after all these years; amid bearing no fruit beyond grants to keep doing more of it on taxpayers dimes?

Why is medical school research like the study mentioned herein, proliferating over the remaining 400 acres of the WLA VA Soldiers Home, while its resident population of disabled Veterans nears 100; when around 4,300 other disabled Veterans try surviving the streets of Our Nation’s capital of Veteran homelessness (L.A. County)?

Are there really people out there believing the aforementioned Tweeters might unlock the solution to Veteran homelessness one day? If so, it may be more productive to understand what their brains do every time they think that.

It’s time to boot medical school pharmacology research grant-machines out of the WLA VA Soldiers Home, because they aren’t truly helping disabled Veterans… And if / when one rarely did, it’s publicly funded benefits become expensive, private intellectual property.

If someone fears the boot will impede access to live brains — maybe that’s the point… Because legitimate access to test subjects should be hard; especially for insignificant, hazardous and intrusive, electro-psychopharmacological experiments on intelligent lives.

Caveat: if I’m missing the obvious value of such experiments and the experts vetted by PR were right; then this opinion may suggest I’m autistically unable to accurately perceive their genius.

The Point more of us want to reach is ending Veteran homelessness in Los Angeles. That requires evicting what Louis Jolyon West started at the WLA VA Soldiers Home; as opposed to just suspending it again.

Here are a few peer-reviewed, provenly effective and incredibly well-funded alternatives to a college’s bleeding-edge cul-de-sac of pharmacological research programs:

Housing disabled Veterans where we’re mandated to by Law, without those disabled Veterans having to re-qualify for their entitlements by becoming test subjects.

Letting the US Government manage it’s own facilities.

Letting the US Government feed disabled Veterans the same way it still does, just moreso again.

Letting disabled Veterans receive services, advice, friendship and counseling from their peers, advocates and Veterans Service Organizations again; free of conflicts.

Disabled homeless Veterans in Los Angeles County don’t need a research campus, Olympic Village, medical school, law school, creepy studies or a congested Downtown Brentwood — they need what Federal Taxpayers keep funding for over 135 years; their Soldiers Home in West Los Angeles. The Home they rehabilitated in before founding the City of Sawtelle that was annexed and became West Los Angeles. The Home they healed at before starting the town of Westgate we now call Brentwood. The Home where on any given night; around 5,000 disabled Veterans slept before it’s adjacent neighborhoods had any significant homeless Veteran populations.

Thanks for considering the foregoing.