In theory I write code for a living.
But the “lung” from my online handle is the echo of my career in medicine. I practiced Respiratory Therapy for under 10 years but even now I look at things from that perspective.
I was reading today’s California Sun and saw that locally a man named Keith Galen Bach died at the Men’s Central Jail. People die every day, of course. But in this case Mr. Bach was awaiting a charge at the jail. He had diabetes which required insulin to control. He asked for care, and his insulin monitor beeped. And he was denied care. And what happens to a diabetic denied insulin is that their blood becomes more acidic. And more, and more. And they develop a ketoacidosis. The “keto” in that word are the byproducts of the body starving–unable to process sugar, you get ketones in the blood. “Acidosis” is nicely self-explanatory. I drew blood–arterial blood–to measure the blood gases of people in that condition many times. They hyperventilate to blow off more carbon dioxide, the body compensating for disordered sugar processing by trying to expel every bit of CO2 possible to try to make the body ok. If the condition is mild, or temporary, it probably helps. But for a diabetic known to require insulin, it’s not enough.
And so, Keith Bach died of his well-understood medical condition.
Because jailers are in the business of healthcare. They are responsible for the death of that unfortunate soul. It sounds like he was ignored. And the medical devices responsible for indicating trouble were ignored.
My caveat is that I have only one news story to go on. I can’t possibly know the totality of the circumstance. But it sure looks like system failure.
A jailer is actually in healthcare.
I wrote a related comic about it during COVID: Best Practices.
Actually, everything is healthcare. And that ought to sober us up. Healthcare is hard to do right. It gets things wrong. It can do more harm than good at times.
But the best of healthcare is to dispassionately look at mistakes and correct them. It’s to care equally for those who had a hand in their own disease with the same care as those who we deem innocent. It’s to do good for as many as we can.
Everything is healthcare.
Also in newsletters today Google’s AI Mushrooms Could Have ‘Devastating Consequences’.
People eat mushrooms. Not all mushrooms are edible. People use resources to make evaluations about what mushrooms are edible. And what mushrooms might incapacitate or even kill people.
Google is an information resource. What happens when Google, as part of its function, puts incorrect information front-and-center? To wit: making incorrectly identified mushrooms high in search results that people use as reference.
I can’t help but think everything is healthcare. I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t think that way. Maybe I can convince you to start thinking about things that way too.
