KirstenMortensen.com

Came across this article from 2003. It’s a reprint of a piece by Kevin Hasset that was originally published in the October/November 2003 issue of The American Enterprise magazine.

Hassett compares the fiscal health of states that voted for Bush to that of states whose voters when for Gore.

Ha ha ha.

Though the total population of Bush and Gore states are almost identical, the states that voted Democratic account for fully 70% of today’s state deficits; Republican states ring up only 30% of the total. And of 10 ten states with the largest per capita budget deficits (see nearby table), every single one voted Democratic in the last presidential election.

But wait, there’s more!

. . . in the top 10 deficit states (again: all Democratic) tax revenues increased at the dramatic rate of about 5% a year over the last decade.

And more!

. . . the average tax revenue per person in today’s sickest ten states was $2,445 in the last data available–compared to only $1,923 per person in the 10 healthiest states. This blasts out of the water the idea that states get sick because they have been starved of revenue; indeed it shows the opposite.

Hassett doesn’t pick on Democrats alone, mind you. He reserves some sharp words for President Bush, who, he notes

increased spending on just about everything. Three of the five biggest increases in federal spending in U.S. history occurred during Mr. Bush’s first three years in office (the other two took place during World War II).

Something that makes me positively sick to my stomach, btw.

Because those of us who understand that government spending is a hugely, hugely inefficient way to take care of people have no party that even approximates our views. We’re forced to hold our noses and consort with fringey groups that attract only marginal political talent. Ugh.

My only hope is that people will finally wake up and look at the data. It’s right there, if you just look. Increasing taxes should NEVER be the first line solution. We have to tighten our belts. We have to stop running deficits. We have to truly cut the size of government.

Until we can show the maturity and discipline to do those things, our situation is only going to get worse. It might take a generation or two, but we will impoverish ourselves.

Like Norway.

No, that isn’t a joke. That’s a New York Times article. Click it and read for yourself.

THE received wisdom about economic life in the Nordic countries is easily summed up: people here are incomparably affluent, with all their needs met by an efficient welfare state. They believe it themselves. Yet the reality - as this Oslo-dwelling American can attest, and as some recent studies confirm - is not quite what it appears.

Even as the Scandinavian establishment peddles this dubious line, it serves up a picture of the United States as a nation divided, inequitably, among robber barons and wage slaves, not to mention armies of the homeless and unemployed. It does this to keep people believing that their social welfare system, financed by lofty income taxes, provides far more in the way of economic protections and amenities than the American system. Protections, yes -but some Norwegians might question the part about amenities.

In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list.

More:

After I moved here six years ago, I quickly noticed that Norwegians live more frugally than Americans do. They hang on to old appliances and furniture that we would throw out. And they drive around in wrecks . . .

One image in particular sticks in my mind. In a Norwegian language class, my teacher illustrated the meaning of the word matpakke - “packed lunch” - by reaching into her backpack and pulling out a hero sandwich wrapped in wax paper. It was her lunch. She held it up for all to see.

Yes, teachers are underpaid everywhere. But in Norway the matpakke is ubiquitous, from classroom to boardroom. In New York, an office worker might pop out at lunchtime to a deli; in Paris, she might enjoy quiche and a glass of wine at a brasserie. In Norway, she will sit at her desk with a sandwich from home.

So those of you who want our country to abandon our Constitution and go socialist, there’s your template.

Celebrate politicians who call for tax increases.

Call at the top of your lungs for more government “services.”

Beg for more government intervention into businesses and our private lives.

And, if things go really really well, we might one day be as well-off as Norway.

Goody goody.

Front page, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Article titled The Doomsayers Who Got It Right. The “doomsayers” being folks who had the audacity, while the rest of the world was drunk on paper wealth, to suggest that a crash was coming.

Well guess what, they’re still worried.

[They] fret that U.S. government spending on bailouts and stimulus plans that preserve failed business models could increase the likelihood of a worse calamity later.

They foresee a long season in which consumers cut their spending, and instead sharply increase the savings rate. That would be healthy for savings-anemic U.S. households, which have spent beyond their means for years, but deeply problematic for a country where consumers drive 70% of all economic activity.

They also envision higher taxes and the likelihood of further declines in U.S. stock prices as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index bottoms out as much as 30% lower than today. And while noting that “deflation” is today’s catchword, several experts say that inflation and perhaps even hyperinflation (in which prices rise at double- or triple-digit percentages) is the real issue a few years down the road as the Federal Reserve increases the money supply and relies on untested measures, such as buying home mortgages or other assets, to spur the economy.

Meanwhile, via Instapundit, this Reuters story: U.S. governors seek $1 trillion federal assistance.

Governors of five U.S. states urged the federal government to provide $1 trillion in aid to the country’s 50 states to help pay for education, welfare and infrastructure as states struggle with steep budget deficits amid a deepening recession.

The governors of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin — all Democrats — said the initiative for the two-year aid package was backed by other governors and follows a meeting in December where governors called on President-elect Barack Obama to help them maintain services in the face of slumping revenues.

There we have our leaders, America. Not the so-called “doomsayers” who actually have the tools (i.e. intellect and integrity) to make a pretty sound estimate of the effects of our fiscal choices. Oh, no. Instead we have people whose only concern is to “maintain services.”

Because heaven forbid, in the face of a worldwide fiscal meltdown, anybody has to actually do without “services.”

The medicine has been poured. It sits there in the spoon in front of our mouths, so close our noses tell us clearly how bad it’s gonna taste.

But we’re still kicking and screaming like a bunch of babies that we aren’t going to take it.

Begging our government to give us sugar instead. Make it all go away. Sugar for the auto industry, sugar for the banks, sugar for the mortgages we shouldn’t have signed in the first place. And now sugar for the state governments who have been overspending their budgets for years.

It never ends, because we’re fearful and unimaginative, and if that’s not enough we’re being led by politicians who are stupid and corrupt and whose only worry is whether their policies will buy the votes they’ll need later to get re-elected.

We’re big babies. Infantalized by our government, by the so-called socialist model that proposes government solve peoples’ financial problems for them.

Not enough money to pay off our bills? No problem! Just print more!

What could possibly go wrong if we do that?

I remember once, years ago, reading about a ferry that capsized somewhere. Near Thailand maybe. The ferry was fine. But it started to rain. Half of the deck had a canopy over it, and when the rain started, all the people on the deck of the boat rushed over to that side.

They tipped the boat over.

I feel like I’m on that boat.

:-)

Thanks to all who have stopped by this blog — and best holiday wishes to you . . .

(Ecard courtesy someecards. Check it out if you haven’t ever visited!)

I’ve gotten around, finally, to posting pics of the golf courses we played during our Arizona trip. They’re on my golf blog.

Dove Valley Ranch.

Longbow Golf Club.

Rancho Manana.

And of course, The Boulders South Course.

Lots of pics, so click through and enjoy :-)

Break in posting because I spent a few days over last weekend on a delightful golf vacation in Carefree, Arizona — a bit north of Scottsdale.

It was idyllic. We stayed at The Boulders Resort, and I’ve never felt so pampered in my life. Turns out that was no accident. I flipped through some literature about the resort in our room (excuse me, our “casita”–the guest rooms are freestanding adobe buildings linked by winding sidewalks, and accessed by golf carts rather than cars) and it described the resort’s service philosophy. They’ve got a detailed service credo and everyone who works there goes through extensive training, including role playing so they’ll know how to handle guests’ needs. It sure shows. Right from the little things, like the way all the staff greet you by name and make lots of eye contact. You really do feel like a guest, not a customer.

It was also amazingly beautiful. The resort was built in 1985 on 1300 acres and according to one of the staff we chatted with, the architect spent weeks onsite, camping in various spots, in order to figure out how to situate its buildings and facilities. The end result is divine: everything is worked into the landscape–instead of interrupting nature, the buildings and sidewalks and access roads flow with it. You feel like you’re in a different world. At least this northeasterner did :-)

Anyway, here are some pics of the resort, starting with the main lodge. This is taken from across the fairway of the 6th hole of the resort’s south course. The lodge isn’t that far from the main north/south highway to the resort (Scottsdale Road/N. Tom Darlington) but you wind all through the resort to get to it. Then you leave your car with them–it’s valet all the way after that since you can’t access the rooms with a car.

Here’s what it looked like from our room when we woke in the morning.

We had a west-facing patio so the sun would light up that mountain every a.m. We were told we might see wild pigs, coyotes, and maybe a bobcat coming up through the wash back there, but we never saw anything bigger than a quail.

Speaking of quail, they were all over the place. Calling to each other constantly from alongside the fairways when we played. I never got a really good pic of them unfortunately. Once they realized you were approaching them, they’d quick dart behind a rock or bit of brush. Aren’t they cute, though, with their little feather pompadours?

I had better luck with the jackrabbits, especially this one, who sat still for me right next to our cart on our last day. They loooove the grass on the tee boxes.

Here’s another view of one of the Boulders boulders :-)

Isn’t that pretty? I took the shot from the resort’s nature trail, which loops around from the lodge to the courses’ club house and tennis courts and back.

Like I said, it was idyllic. As I write this post, we’re getting buried in the season’s first serious snow storm. Hard to believe that a week ago I was snapping a pic of a full moon, dressed in nothing heavier than a fall coat . . .

Now, give me a day or two, and I’ll post some more pics over at my golf blog. We tried four different area courses and I shot the best round of my life! :-)

Several blogs, including Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, and JustOneMinute have picked up Nicholas Kristof’s Dec. 4 piece in the NY Times that calls attention to the problem of iodine deficiency in third world countries, such as Pakistan.

I’ve just been reading this 2006 paper by Stephen A. Hoption Cann, PhD, published by the American College of Nutrition, Hypothesis: Dietary Iodine Intake in the Etiology of Cardiovascular Disease which states that the “proportion of the US population with moderate to severe iodine deficiency (<50 µg iodine/L in urine) has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years.”

That’s right here at home, people.

I posted in August about my own experimentation with iodine supplementation. Today I typically take 25 mgs/day — thousands of times the RDA — and the results have been incredible. Now that winter’s here, for instance, I’ve noticed I don’t get cold as easily, and my skin doesn’t feel dry and itchy like always has in past winters. And of course, the fibrocystic breast tissue that was with me since my 20s is completely gone.

I’m a believer. I’ll never stop taking the stuff.

I just hope other people catch on & start taking it too.

What I find most fascinating about the whole subject is that iodine is so critical to so many of the human body’s biochemical systems that you have to wonder: how pervasive is the impact of our epidemic of iodine deficiency?

Obesity is an obvious candidate for thought. It began taking off in the United States during during the late 1980s. That corresponds pretty closely to the 20-year timeframe cited in Cann’s paper.

Some of that is probably because we no longer get any iodine from bread. The FDA “explicitly approved bromate for . . . use in bread through the standards for bread and rolls promulgated in May of 1952.” One of the flour conditioners potassium bromate displaced, with the FDA’s blessing, was potassium iodate.

Another likely factor is that we’ve been instructed to reduce salt intake. When we’re urged to cut back on salt (which the National Research Council was doing as far back as 1989, and probably further — I remember my grandfather being told not to eat salt in the 1970s) then we’re not necessarily eating enough iodized salt per day to get even the RDA for iodine.

Then there’s this: does the salt you sprinkle on your pommes frites provide as much iodine as it’s supposed to? See this e.g. (translated I think from French — but you’ll get the gist):

Iodine content of reference iodized salt was 38.53?6.92 on June 1997. After the salt was stored at room temperature with a relative humidity of 30 % -45% and in sealed paper bags for three years, iodine content changed to 18.25 ??4.72. Thus 52.63 % of was lost in approximately 3.5
years. This means that standing time and storage conditions is very effective storage of iodine in food.

Cooking conditions is very effective on the stabilization of iodine. In the case of oxidants in diet loss of iodine is more effective, 82% of iodine may lost during the high temperature cooking oxidized medium. So it is advised to consume iodide to put the food not before the cooking after the cooking. On the other hand, if consuming of iodide not advised to people who have problems with their thyroid, long term treatment at oven with an mild oxidant may loss 81% of iodine and 55% of iodine without an oxidants.

Less obvious is iodine’s role in other bodily systems that aren’t obviously linked to the thyroid.

Like heart disease, for instance.

That Cann paper I linked up top explores the correlation between low iodine levels and cardiovascular disease. Talks about selenium as well, another nutrient that’s deficient in our diets.

Here’s a taste:

Uotila et al. [18] made the observation that subjects who died from coronary sclerosis often had goitre. In order to further examine this phenomenon, 250 Finnish subjects who had died from coronary heart disease were age and sex-matched to controls who died from other causes [19]. The risk of death from coronary heart disease was found to be significantly higher in individuals with goiter (odds ratio (OR) = 3.53, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.43–4.99). It was noted that the average thyroid weight was higher in those dying from coronary disease. Moreover, among the coronary disease cases with goiter, there was a lower average age of death and a higher average heart weight. Due to the low iodine content of foods and lack of an iodization program at the time, endemic goiter was common in Finland, particularly in the east.

Well worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Good Sunday eve reading ;-)

The point Kristof tries to make in his NY Times article is that nutrient supplementation makes for boring public policy. He is referring to foreign aid/humanitarian policy, but the same is true right here at home. We’re happy to pour billions of dollars into breast cancer research, for instance (the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation alone has spent $1 billion over 25 years). And there’s nothing wrong with that. But where’s the enthusiasm for using iodine supplementation to prevent breast cancer? It’s not there — not on anything like the pink-ribbons-everywhere scale of mainstream breast cancer campaigns — because it’s such a prosaic and unpatentable approach.

But think about it.

Iodine supplementation may well be an very inexpensive way to address a whole range of very costly health issues that are faced by a huge majority of Americans.

What would become of the “healthcare crisis” if that proved to be the case?

Having watched West Side Story a few weeks ago, I came down with a severe relapse of the Shakespeare bug and so last night sat down and re-read Romeo and Juliet. I wanted to see how closely the movie followed the play.

Answer: yep, very closely. I’m sure this has all been written out before, so I won’t turn this post into an OMG!!! sophomorish comparative lit paper (at least not on that topic, heh) but suffice to say that about the only major differences were in the whole fake-my-death-in-a-doomed-ploy-to-be-reunited-with-my-lover device.

If you’re a lit nerd like me, it is kind of fun to enjoy the two side by side — to see how famous dialogue like “a rose by any other name” is handled in the musical. Try it, and do enjoy ;-)

Another thing struck me as I mulled the play, however.

This has probably been remarked before too but I’m going to work it out for myself anyway.

I published a post some time ago about how, in rereading Anna Karenina as a nominally-mature adult, I found it to be a different book than I once thought. It isn’t a starry-eyed celebration of doomed love — it’s a condemnation of weak character. Anna’s a deeply flawed individual, not a one-dimensional victim of social repression.

I had a similar reaction last night to Romeo & Juliet. The first tip-off was something I’d completely forgotten: that when we first meet Romeo, he’s a complete mess over another woman, fair Rosaline.

Huh?

The man has, apparently, been pining away for some time because Rosie doesn’t love him back — spending every night wandering around outdoors, weeping & sighing, and then shutting himself inside all day with the curtains drawn to make himself “an artificial night.”

Then, after spending an entire day insisting that he’ll never get over her, he meets Juliet — and within about a nanosecond is as smitten for her as he ever was for Rose.

I found that odd. What sort of true-hearted hero is this, Bill? Whose heart can veer so suddenly and violently (and unselfconsciously!) from one love to another?

Of course Shakespeare renders the love between Romeo and Juliet a beautiful thing. Heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Clearly he means to hold it up as a romantic ideal of sorts.

But there’s another critical layer to the story that I noticed after a bit: the consequences of the lovers’ extraordinary passion are every bit as destructive as the passionate “choler” that erupts whenever lesser members of the Montague and Capulet families run into each other in the street.

It seems to me Shakespeare creates an obvious parallel between the two. Romeo and Juliet never try to temper their passion with anything like common sense, let alone reason. They marry the day after they meet, for crying out loud — and in Act III Scene 3, after Romeo is banished from Verona by the prince for murdering Tybalt, it’s only the Friar’s scolding that stops Romeo from killing himself:

Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art –
Thy tears are wom’nish, thy wild acts denote
Th’ unreasonable fury of a beat.
Unseemly woman in a seeming man,
And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both,
Thou hast amaz’d me.

Get ahold of yourself, you ninny. The Prince has spared your life. You can bide your time and be reunited with Juliet by and by. It ain’t the end of the world.

Romeo calms down, but of course it’s only a prelude to yet another slew of rash acts that culminates with the final bloodbath.

It’s a marvelous thing, then, the way Shakespeare handles the first murder in the play. Do you remember it? There’s a street brawl, and Tybalt stabs Mercutio. But what’s interesting is that Tybalt does so by using Romeo’s body to hide from Mercutio the fatal thrust of his rapier.

Romeo he cries aloud,
‘Hold friends! Friends, part!; and swifter than his tongue
His agile arm beats down their fatal points
And ‘twixt them rushes; underneath show arm
An envious thrust from Tybalt hit the life
Of stout Mercutio . . .

This layer isn’t brought out in the same way in West Side Story. WWS is played, first of all, as a straight “star-crossed lovers” story — Tony has matured, he’s not hanging out on the streets any more, he’s got a job — but then he’s drawn back into the gangs’ fighting by his love for Maria, becoming a victim of the violent subculture he’d tried to leave behind.

And, in keeping with that trajectory, the circumstances of the first murder are subtly different: Tony holds Riff back from stabbing Bernardo, and Bernardo takes advantage of that to stab Riff.

It’s a subtle difference but a telling one. Tony is playing pacifist, physically restraining Riff. Romeo is also trying to break up a fight, but he functions as an unwitting screen behind from which comes the deadly thrust.

“Why the devil came you between us?” Mercutio asks Romeo before he dies. “I was hurt under your arm.”

Romeo’s read of the situation was naive –just as was Tony’s — and on the level of pure plot, that’s why the story turns tragic.

But in the Shakespeare, Romeo’s arm cloaks Tybalt’s — they become in that moment the same arm. So it isn’t just the street brawlers who are in the words of the Prince (Reason and Justice) “enemies to peace” . . .

Incidentally, if your library lacks a collected works of Shakespeare, I highly recommend you look for the marvelous but sadly out-of-print edition, The Yale Shakespeare

The beauty of it: it’s broken into 40 slim volumes. Here’s my Romeo and Juliet.

It’s 4X7 inches — light enough to hold open with one hand.

I have no idea if it’s considered up-to-par today from a scholarly perspective (my edition was published in 1954; the original came out in 1917) but it’s annotated to help with the more archaic bits.

And from an ease-of-use standpoint, it’s pure genius. When publishers shove Shakespeare’s complete works into a single volume, you end up with a book that is hugely unwieldy (and with paper that is thin as tissue to try to keep the weight down). Who wants to lug a 20 pound doorstopper around when all you want to do is read R&J while you’re parked in the dentist’s waiting room?

The Yale Shakespeare is kind of pricey (link above to Amazon has a couple sellers offering the complete set for $75 as of right now) but it’s well worth it, in my opinion.

Would be nice to see a re-issue. Wonder if it could be done for under $75 . . .

Let the American quality, the dream
Of a land where men shall work their destiny
Deeply as they will, give you the power
To realize with proud and reverent heart
The strange identity of man as man
And fling it up against the dark of time
Where it may loom forever as the bright
Image of godhead in the simple man
That now has risen from this American earth
And shall but with the bitter end of things
Go back again into the humble earth . . .

– Paul Engle, America Remembers

Whether or not you agree with Christian theology, you will probably admit that the 10 commandments did a pretty good job of proscribing behaviors that will otherwise disrupt the fabric of a community.

E.g. adultery. You don’t have to believe adulterers burn in hell to recognize that there’s often a big pile o’ nasty fallout when someone cheats on a spouse.

Which is why the tenth commandment addresses covetousness.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Coveting is a destructive behavior. It shifts one’s focus to the wrong things.

First, and fundamentally, it shifts one’s frame of mind to an inner state of envy and frustration.

What good can come of that?

None.

Next, from this starting point of envy and frustration, a person has only two choices. Stew and be miserable. Or act out by stealing, or cheating, or tearing down the object of his envy.

Guess where I’m going with this, yet?

When our politicians propose that we tax “the rich” in order to pay for services for “the poor,” are they not encouraging covetousness?

Are they not — in fact — institutionalizing covetousness?

Welcome to the post post modern ethical wilderness. Where behaviors once regarded as destructive are now celebrated openly by our political leaders.

Think we aren’t going to reap what we sow?

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at The Enterprise Institute, has written an article about a new study on the placebo effect.

The study, by the National Institutes of Health, surveyed practicing U.S. internists and rheumatologists about whether they prescribe placebos. It was published in the British Medical Journal. Half of the MDs surveyed say they prescribe placebos. More than two-thirds say they think prescribing placebos is an acceptable thing to do.

One way to “read” the study, of course, is that MDs are leading patients down the proverbial path. Prescribing sugar pills. But as Satel points out, the reality is a bit more complex:

[O]nly a handful of the almost 700 physicians who completed the survey claimed to use inert substances such as sugar pills or saline. The vast majority offered innocuous over-the-counter products, sometimes called “impure” placebos, such as vitamins or Tylenol, though 13% used antibiotics and another 13% used sedatives. By offering an actual pharmaceutical, doctors stand on firmer ground in telling patients that what they are prescribing is a medication whereas describing a sugar pill as medication is much harder, perhaps impossible, for most to justify as a matter of conscience.

The other important factor is that the research “targeted” internists and rheumatologists — whose patients, in Satel’s words, typically suffer from “chronic illnesses, such as fibromyalgia, that are notoriously refractory to care.”

In other words, these are docs who are unable to help a significant percentage of their patients.

So they’re “prescribing” vitamins or Tylenol or sedatives.

Satel then goes on to discuss the psychological implications of placebos: that even sugar pills bring short term relief if patients believe they’re therapeutic.

But (she notes) there’s a risk as well. If patients begin to feel they’ve been duped, their trust in their physicians, and in the medical profession itself, will be lost.

What Satel doesn’t say is that the loss of trust has already happened. Or is, at least, in the process of happening. Which is why so many people gravitate to alt medicine.

To tease it out a bit more, the most important element at play, here, is the doctor’s fallibility.

Imagine what it must be like to be an MD facing a patient you do not believe you can help.

This person wants to trust you; this person believes you are his only hope; he needs you to stop the hurting, to ward off Death, to restore him to the full and happy life he’s watched slip away.

And you can do nothing. You know you cannot help; you are stumped. There is no drug, no therapy that has shown to reliably erase this condition. Any that have shown promise, you’ve already tried, and they’ve failed. You are stumped. You know it, even if you don’t quite dare let that thought form in your mind as you sit there in the exam room, facing the poor wretch. There is nothing in your bag that will make things better, no wand you can wave.

But you can’t say it. If you say it, everything crumbles. Saying it means you admit your fallibility, it means you admit how tiny and precarious your understanding is, how close to you is the drop-off into the pitch-black gulf of your ignorance. To say it is to let your patient fall off into that gulf, both of you helpless to save him.

So instead you — the MD — reach for what is, in fact, your OWN placebo. In the lingo of the study, you reach for “[A] medicine not typically used for [your patient's] condition, but [that] might benefit.”

The placebo makes YOU, the doctor, feel better. It gives you the illusion that you do have some control, some authority; it relieves you of having to speak aloud the unmentionable.

Most likely you can also discern at least some relief in your patient. The tension in that exam room is eased.

Your relationship with your patient, and your profession, is intact.

You can continue to practice, because you have proven again that you always have at least some answer. And it might help. It might relieve the symptoms, it might make the patient feel better, and who knows. The patient might even get better, maybe for reasons out of your control, but in the meantime, you’ve done something.

The patient, meanwhile, has gained a slightly better grip on hope. It might not last very long. Maybe only until the physician leaves the room. Or until the symptoms worsen again, and it becomes clear that this “medicine not typically used for your condition” isn’t really helping you at all.

Of course, this isn’t an ideal situation, by any stretch. Our study into the mechanics, and then the biomechanics of the human body have improved our ability to patch it together — and a godsend that is in many cases. But there’s still so much we cannot do.

There’s still so much we don’t understand. By some estimates, the human body comprises 10 trillion cells; each cell comprises trillions of molecules (for instance, there are 10,000 different proteins in a single human liver cell, and millions of molecules of each of those proteins). And each cell is perpetually busy, moving molecules about, assembling them, cutting them up, generating signals for other cells, reacting to signals it receives. All this at speeds we would call “lightening” if we could perceive it.

It’s unimaginably complex. Throw out those drawings you made in high school biology — the circle with the nucleus in the center and maybe a mitochondria or some other “organelle” alongside. That was a cartoon. It wasn’t even close.

The best minds in alt medicine (many of whom are not practitioners, but lay people with an aptitude for chemistry or who have used their own “incurable” illnesses as a catalyst for studying biochemistry) have grasped the implications of this complexity, and are humbled by it. They realize what mainstream practitioners dare not admit: that the drugs we purchase from pharmacies are crude instruments at best. Big, foreign molecules that blunder about in our cells, changing things, yes, which sometimes does bring relief from our symptoms, yes — but also knocking about like the proverbial bull and inevitably, at times, disrupting cellular processes that are better left alone. Causing “side effects.”

Alt medicine, at its best, looks instead to juice the body’s own inherent healing processes. It’s such a simple and logical concept that it amazes me that people dismiss it, but they do. They do. People laugh at the notion, for example, of “detoxification.” Quackwatch, the smarmy online bastion of mainstream medical fanaticism (run, btw, by a man who is himself a quack in the truest sense of the word), calls detoxification “an elaborate, manipulative hoax,” for instance.

But who can argue that the body’s cells know how to eliminate “waste” — molecules which are of no use, and which if retained would be dead weight at best? Of course cells “know” how to do that. They do it all the time. So the question becomes, what processes do cells use to eliminate waste molecules, and are there ways to support those processes, so that cells become in effect cleaner and better able to function?

You can argue that there are effective ways to support given cellular processes, and ineffective ways, but the basic premise is unassailable. As is the premise that nutrients — those molecules our cells have used, for billions of years, as their natural building blocks — are the basis for fundamental health. Cells need nutrients to survive. Not just calories. Much more than just calories. Nutrients — all those oddball molecules that do things like make an tomato red or a piece of salmon savory. Those are the things our cells reach for when they need to patch something up or build an enzyme or produce a secretion.

Meanwhile, mainstream medicine hopes our understanding of biochemistry will eventually become so sophisticated that we’ll be able to craft molecules that deliver “cures” — meaning, molecules that alter certain cellular processes without disrupting others. So one day, a pharmaceutical sales rep will stroll into our MD’s office, open his briefcase, and hand out samples of the pill that cures fibromyalgia.

When that happens, the placebo can be tossed away for good.

And so our mainstream practitioners mark time, and wait.

And roll their eyes when people lose faith in them, leave their offices, log onto the Internet, and type “alternative cure” in the google keyword search.