Health Care

Twenty-one months ago, my brain stopped working. Something might have been amiss for some time before then, but in January, 2008, I first knew beyond any doubt that I was broken. Before the month was out, I had seen a neurologist to rule out the possibility of multiple sclerosis or a brain tumor. Nearly two years later, I am not yet sure what I am fighting, and, at times, why I am fighting.

After two years of cycling between ten percent and fifty percent of my former cognitive and physical capacity, I have progressed little but learned much. I have acquired more knowledge than I can currently process about my own health, the myriad families of medical conditions that can cause neurological complications, and the problems that plague the healthcare industry itself. In this article, I will elaborate on some of the horrifying discoveries that I have made on my medical odyssey.

As my twitter feed has already suggested, my confidence in the Obama administration has been shaken, perhaps beyond repair. Given the wide range of reasons, more often illegitimate than justifiable for shaky faith in Barack Obama, I feel compelled to elaborate on my specific sources of concern.

Often, when systems are automated, adapted to great scale, one necessary trade-off for the efficiency gained is a gross oversimplification of the information being captured. Email is archivable, searchable, easily stored in less than 10kb of memory and easily transmitted to any number of recipients. The downside of this miraculously efficient representation of a human letter is that it lacks all of the nuance that can't be represented with ASCII symbols. Handwriting, sketches, personal stylistic choices of layout that once characterized the written exchange are lost. Similarly, the healthcare industry has oversimplified human health in way that leaves unacceptable gaps.