On his deathbed Bertolt Brecht wrote: When in my white room at the Charité I woke towards morning And heard the blackbird, I understood Better. Already for some time I had lost all fear of death. For nothing Can be wrong with me if I myself Am nothing. Now I managed to enjoy The song of every blackbird after me too.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Natural Causes

A summary of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Natural Causes

Health

Sérgio Cavalcanti

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Things I had been taught to believe are inert, passive, or merely insignificant—like individual cells—are in fact capable of making choices, including very bad ones.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

I present the emerging scientific case for a dystopian view of the body—not as a well-ordered machine, but as a site of ongoing conflict at the cellular level, which ends, at least in all the cases we know of, in death.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

I didn’t want more tests; I wanted a doctor who could protect me from unnecessary procedures.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Overdiagnosis is beginning to be recognized as a public health problem, and is sometimes referred to as an “epidemic.”

Sérgio Cavalcanti

It’s not only a profit-hungry medical system that drives overtesting and overdiagnosis.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

A few physicians are more decisively proactive, and have themselves tattooed “NO CODE” or “DNR,” meaning “do not resuscitate.”

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Being old enough to die is an achievement, not a defeat, and the freedom it brings is worth celebrating argued social critic Ivan Illich in his 1975 book Medical Nemesis,

Sérgio Cavalcanti

which documented the negative effects of medical care on both sexes, in particular the toll of iatrogenic illnesses, that is, those induced by pharmaceuticals and the medical procedures themselves.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Furthermore, he stated that medical institutions represent a vast system of social control, ruled by an “educated elite”:

Sérgio Cavalcanti

The medical profession won its monopoly over the business of healing by invoking its scientific basis, and maintained that monopoly by diligently patrolling its borders against the alternatives

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Disturbingly enough, breast biopsies are themselves a risk factor for cancer and can “seed” adjacent tissue with cancer cells. been found to be no more accurate than much cheaper, noninvasive tests such as examination of the feces for traces of blood.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

As for colonoscopies, they may detect potentially cancerous polyps, but they are excessively costly in the United States—up to $10,000—and have

Sérgio Cavalcanti

As it turns out, though, size is not a reliable indicator of the threat level. A small tumor may be highly aggressive, just as a large one may be “indolent,” meaning that a lot of people are being treated for tumors that will likely never pose any problem.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

One recent study found that almost half the men over sixty-six being treated for prostate cancer are unlikely to live long enough to get the disease anyway.10 They will, however, live long enough to suffer from the adverse consequences of their treatment.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

The physical part of the annual physical is largely determined by the individual physician and of course the insurance company or other institution underwriting the exam.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

What’s the ROI [Return on Investment]?” answers its own question with what amounts to a firm “not much”—and for all the reasons I have given here: the frequency of false positives, the dangers of the tests themselves (such as radiation), and the unlikelihood of finding a problem in a still-treatable stage.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

The doctor’s detachment is not a defense against excessive empathy, but a “downright negative” emotional stance, Konner suggests.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Fixx wrote in The Complete Book of Running, “Having lost faith in much of society, government, business, marriage, the church and so on—we seem to have turned to ourselves, putting what faith we can muster in our own minds and bodies.”

Sérgio Cavalcanti

It was the existence of widespread health insurance that turned fitness into a moral imperative. Something seems to be going very wrong with the human mind, not in its emotional responses to the world, which have always been a bit unreliable, but in its ability to perceive and understand that world.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Evgeny Morozov terms it, “‘solutionism’: an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.”

Sérgio Cavalcanti

“Theodicy”: If God is perfectly good, how can he let bad things happen?

Sérgio Cavalcanti

“junk food” is chemically engineered to provide an addictive combination of salt, sugar, and fat.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

A more informative foundation for macrophage classification should be based on the fundamental macrophage functions that are involved in maintaining homeostasis [a state of balance supposedly necessary for the health of the organism]. We propose three such functions: host defence, wound healing and immune regulation.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Agency, she goes on, is “simply an intrinsic capacity to act in the world, to do things in a way that is neither predetermined nor random.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Riskin’s point is that the mission of science—the determinist science that arose in the middle of the seventeenth century—has been the elimination of the last vestiges of agency from the natural world.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

We have become what the cognitive scientists call “hyperactive agency detection devices”: We see faces in clouds, hear denunciations in thunder, and sense conscious beings all around us even when there is nothing there.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

The price of survival is endless toil. The price we’re paying for extended life spans is a high rate of late-life disability.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

The survival of an older person is of no evolutionary consequence since that person can no longer reproduce—unless one wants to argue for the role of grandparents in prolonging the lives of their descendants. “old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”

Sérgio Cavalcanti

We do not look into mirrors, for example, to see our “true” selves, but to see what others are seeing, and what passes for inner reflection is often an agonizing assessment of how others are judging us.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

This is the inescapable paradox of self-reflection: How can the self be both the knower and the content of what is known, both the subject and the object, the lover and that which is loved?

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Many historians have argued that the rise of self-awareness starting in roughly the seventeenth century was associated with the outbreak of an epidemic of “melancholy” in Europe at about the same time, and subjective accounts of that disorder correspond very closely with what we now call “depression.”

Sérgio Cavalcanti

As Jessica Riskin explains, it initially gave him a lot more work to do. If nature is devoid of agency, then everything depends on a “Prime Mover” to breathe life into the world.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

The question I started with has to do with human health and the possibility of our controlling it. ========== God really does play dice.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

The immunologist Alfred Tauber wrote of the self as a metaphor for the immune system, but that can be turned around;the immune system is a metaphor for the self. Its ostensible job is the defense of the organism, but it is potentially a treacherous defender, like the Praetorian guard that turns against the emperor.

Sérgio Cavalcanti

Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes.

Charles Dickens

They fought the enemy we fight fat living and self pity. Shine o shine unfalsifying sun on this sick scene.

Marianne Moore

In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart, so that you had serious fiction and genre fiction.

Ruth Glick

There are lots of people in the Silicon Valley who are interested in working at a fast-moving, dynamic company like Google. Not just my family members.

Susan Wojcicki

New York is the best food city in the world.

Joe Bastianich

In the end, we will never, ever be able to guarantee that there will not be an Edward Snowden or another Chelsea Manning because this is a large enterprise composed of human beings with all their idiosyncrasies.

James R. Clapper

I write on big yellow legal pads - ideas in outline form when I'm doing stand-up and stuff. It's vivid that way. I can't type it into an iPad - I think that would put a filter into the process.

Robin Williams

Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.

Catherine O'Hara

We Americans love our Constitution so much that we can't bear to change even the stupid parts.

Timothy Noah

So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there.

Frank Lowy

I didn't know my mother had it. I think a lot of women don't know their mothers had it; that's the sad thing about depression. You know, you don't function anymore. You shut down. You feel like you are in a void.

Marie Osmond