Let's compare this report by Shannon Pettypiece with the Scot intellectual Dr John Haldane, Catholic philosopher, in his lecture recently in Dublin, Ireland at the Iona Institute there — a lecture which turns to reflection on the demographics of future care shortages thru-out the advanced industrialized nations and the vision that haunts Catholic medicine based in Scholastic ethical nostalgia and the fetish of the "Consistent Ethics of Life" dominant wherever Cathollicism is still strong.
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We Protestants need an anti-Scholastic Open Christian ethos that can tolerate contraception, homo intimate unions, and death with dignity (to name a few) — in at least some special cases. We need to drop the Scholastic mind/matter dualism and its attendant spiritual/physical dualism based on bad physics and bad biology due to StThomasQuinas' reliance on Aristotle's Metaphysics which reduces life to a biotistic absolute, bioticism, the absolutization of the biotic mode of created reality — such as Aristotle grounded his Form/Matter dualism upon. Remember that "phusike" — "physics" derives from the Greek word for wood, which is not our concept of physical things or physico-chemical elements in the raw in nature and often needing selection of materials in terms of the Periodic Table of Elements. We need a theory and a communal ethos of Christian living that builds on Herman Dooyeweerd's explication of the distinction instead between human core open to our Creator God or some no-god (the heart, as in the Hebrew Bible, see FW von Meyenfeldt) and functional modalities of human life and action, "the functions-mantel, André Troost who worked in philosohical ethics and moral guidelines, following key insights of Dooyweerd and DHTh Vollenhoven). "Out of the heart are the issues of life" Proverbs 4:23 — and that's not the rarefied, reified and hypostazied "life" that the Scholastics, both Protestants and Catholics, read into and get out of Scripture everywhere the Hebrew language uses the word "life" and everywhere the New Testament takes up this theme. There are legitmate uses of NT Greek words, rhetorically justified, like "soul," "body," "mind," "spirit;" but that is not the terminology which a Christian philosophy needs to construct a non-dualist, non-Scholastic new reformational ethics (science of ethics) and the moral guidelines that a free and Open Christian ethos needs for living communally and societally in this very different age, in the sight of God the Creator.
— Albert Gedraitis
Boston Globe (Oct23,2k12)
Shortage of doctors spreading throughout US
by Shannon Pettypiece
NEW YORK — Mary Berg is paying the price for a shortage of US doctors that by most accounts is about to get much worse.After finding out in 2006 she had a rare and deadly gastrointestinal cancer, the 49-year-old mother of a teenage daughter found there were no doctors in Nevada who specialized in her type of tumor. Only one cancer center took her insurance. And because the tumor had spread, the need for a liver transplant was a distinct possibility, though no surgeons in the state were qualified to do the procedure. She had to give up her house and move to Arizona to get the care she needed.
Once a problem limited to rural areas, doctor shortages are now hitting large population centers such as Las Vegas and Detroit where people may have to wait weeks or months or travel hundreds of miles for care.
Nationwide, there is a shortage of more than 13,000 doctors, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that represents medical schools.That shortfall is expected to grow 10-fold to 130,000 doctors within 12 years as the US population ages and 30 million more people are added to insurance rolls under the 2010 health-care law, the medical college association said.In the Las Vegas area, with about 2 million people, patients and doctors said it can take six months to see a primary-care doctor for a simple checkup. For more serious matters, the waits are far longer — more than a year, for example, to get an appointment with a neurologist who specializes in autism.
Frustrated by years of not being able to get proper care, Berg and her husband decided this summer to walk away from their home near Las Vegas, which she says has since gone into foreclosure. They moved their family 300 miles away to Phoenix so she could be close to a specialist and a transplant center.In a bid to address the shortage, the medical community has embraced the greater use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who can prescribe medicines and diagnose and treat many illnesses.
The number of physician assistants is projected to increase 39 percent to 108,000 by 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Still, physician assistants can’t replace specialists as regional shortages of all categories of doctors persist.‘‘This is a national problem across the board, and it is going to get much worse,’’ said Christiane Mitchell, director of medical affairs for the Association of American Medical Colleges. ‘‘We have an aging population and a whole lot of doctors retiring. We need to increase the pipeline of new doctors.’’Multiple reasons are driving the shortages. As baby boomers age, their care has become more complex and time-consuming. At the same time, some baby boomers are also doctors who are expected to retire in the coming years, according to the association. One in every three doctors nationwide are older than 55, the group said.Hospitals are using video conferencing systems to reach people in remote areas.
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