Friday, June 22, 2007

msb-0168 The Limitations of Titles

msb-0168 The Limitations of Titles

intro

Actually this show is going to be about a lot of things; not the least of which is the peculiar fascination that philology and etymology hold for me...

But there is one thing that I wish to address right now, (and that I will return to in "part deux"); "Pediatric MS". [ http://www.nationalmssociety.org/site/PageServer?pagename=HOM_LIB_insidems ]

As good a job as the article did, and it did an excellent job, I am still hung-up on the distinction, the purely artificial and arbitrary distinction that people make between adults and children; as if there was any real distinction to be made. (Wake the fuck up! Pediatric has meant everything from nine months from birth up to 16, 18, 21 and 25 years old.)

Part of the hangup with pediatrics is our own image of cherubic infants.

I'd like to flail "skin from bone" of any person who thinks that.

"Get over it!"

Given the fact that my first attack came at sixteen, "sixteen!" and threw all the nun's carefully, some might say "painfully", induced handwriting skills into the garbage bin of my personal history, combined with the same image of rotund, red faced infants, (obese and hyper-tensive, as far as I'm concerned) pediatrics needs a real "extreme" makeover: home edition.

Ty Pennington, "Move that fuckin' bus, ya ass-hole; and run over some of those ageist retards on/in the way."

----"Tonight" by: "Carlina" http://www.broadjam.com/artists/artistindex.asp?artistID=32124

Feedback comes first, so...

There is none from you.

But did you check out Herrad's latest 2 episodes.

Damn but that girl's going through a bad patch. Drop her some words of encouragement, won't you? [at http://accessdenied-livingwithms.blogspot.com/ ]

My stats are now at 15k downloads. :-)

And you can drop me an email: charles at MSBPodcast.com

---- "What Youve Done" by: "Carlina" http://www.broadjam.com/artists/artistindex.asp?artistID=32124

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop me an email: charles at MSBPodcast.com

----

Meanwhile, "She who must be obeyed", a.k.a. my wife, found a great book for me.

"Understanding Disability Inclusion, Access, Diversity, and Civil Rights" by: Paul T. Jaeger and Cynthia Ann Bowman, ISBN: 0-275-98226-2

I suspect that I will once again "wax eloquent with rage" when I get to the chapter on "Representations of Disability across Media".

What fucking representations of disability? We're in-fuckin'-visible, don'tcha'no. That's why this podcast even exists.

----

In the mean time, I found this great Limerick while reading "Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan" [ http://www.rocr.net/index.php?p=20051208 ]

On the bosom of young Abigail
Was written the price of her tail
And upon her behind
For the use of the blind
Was the same information in Braille.


The only reference I found to this on the inter-web was one I found at http://www.reality-j.com/?p=100.

The attribution may well be ... "Anon,"



---- "Soar with me " by: "Carlina" http://www.broadjam.com/artists/artistindex.asp?artistID=32124

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: charles (at) MSBPodcast.com

---- "The Most Perfect Word " by: "Carlina" http://www.broadjam.com/artists/artistindex.asp?artistID=32124

Main Topic: "The Limitations of Titles"

I love the plasticity of the English language. It is both its strength and its weakness as a medium for expression.

I love memes which morph with every absorption.

Is the title of this piece a complete sentence or is it a fragment?

What do I mean when I use the word "limitations"?

What do I mean when I use the word "titles"?

There are denotations and connotations to be considered.

Actually, I think that, apart from the hundred year old comedy of slapstlick (and I know that I will get the humor historian criticizing me that "slapstick" predated film.) and the five hundred year old comedy of errors (and I know I will get some Pre-Elizabethan historian criticizing me that puns and sit-com predated Shakespeare,) "all" humor is derived from the confusion inherent in the difference between a word's meaning in one context or another.

---- "This is your time" by: "Carlina" http://www.broadjam.com/artists/artistindex.asp?artistID=32124

Main Topic, part deux:

I loathe the image that gets projected on my "mental 'cave wall' " as I ponder the flickering mystery that is the word "pediatrics."

That of those cherubic (obese and hypertensive) infants. (Yes, I too am infected by those "Hallmarks Card" images that come from those "Currier and Ives" images that shaped the imagination of the parent of the entire planet. (Don't get me started on the cultural significance of the mass-media!)

MS can afflict anyone at any age.

That's just a fact jack.

That all depends on what we define as as an auto-immune disease that attacks myelin; but it is present at birth.

---- "how long will you be gone" by: "Carlina" http://www.broadjam.com/artists/artistindex.asp?artistID=32124

Outro

4 comments:

mdmhvonpa said...

That last part ... I was thinking the same thing. Since they do not know what causes it, perhaps it is genetic. In my family (Me, Mom, Aunt, Great-Aunt, Grandmom) ... it seems to be such.

Charles-A. Rovira said...

Not too sound overly harsh, (I'm just being a realist here,) but the medical establishment barely knows the mechanisms which lead to an exacerbation.

(Their only offering to mitigate it is to slash at my immune system with immuno-suppressants until I have all the disease resistance of an AIDS patient. [That's just dumb. A shotgun approach which insures one favorable outcome {I certainly won't get any more sclera,} by putting me at the mercy of every bug, pathogen or virus, out there.])

What actually causes sclera with some exacerbations and not with others might as well be called a fuckin' mystery, instead of multiple sclerosis.

The doctors are great at rattling tubes filled with pharmaceuticals at me (that's when the vials don't make a slooshing sound,) but I get the distinct feeling that I undoubtedly know a whole lot more about the mechanisms of MS than they do.

(To be fair, there is a whole lot more to neuro-biology than MS.)

But, by and large, we're almost no closer to understanding the causes of MS than we were before I'd got my first attack (back in high-school!)

That there is a genetic component to this disease is undeniable. (Your family-history is a case in point!)

But we are stuck with researchers who operate at the level of the obvious while this disease operates at an entirely different and more subtle level.

For all we know, my supposition that its related to a causal mechanism similar to that of rheumatoid arthritis (another autoimmune disease which attacks cartilage and synovial fluid instead of myelin,) may not be far off the mark.

Grrrr.

They don't know what causes arthritis either.

Miss Chris said...

It never ceases to amaze me that doctors know so little. How can someone make so much money when they know so little...

Charles-A. Rovira said...

What you're paid has nothing whatsoever to do with how bright you are or even how much you know.

Its got everything to do with how effectively you can negotiate a salary/fee.

Because of Roosevelt, and then because of television, doctors were in a position to negotiate themselves a pretty sweet deal. (Before then being a doctor was not a privileged position.)

In Israel, when they had a prolonged doctor's strike, the mortality rate went down for the duration of the strike.

That's because fewer people died at the hands of the doctors.

When the strike was settled, the mortality rate went back up.

I also like the Mayan answer to a health-crisis.

If the patient died, his face was the last thing the doctor saw.

They were chained together face to face to a rock at low tide. The tide came in ... problem solved.