My Chronic Pain: A Comedy show is coming up–Thursday, 1/31, at 5:30, I’ll be in the Comprehensive Cancer Center Auditorium at UCD Medical in Sacramento, encouraging people to laugh with me about my pain.
(PS–It’s free.)
I did an interview today for Davisville on KDRT; it will play throughout the week on the station. Two of my students are interviewing me at 8 a.m. for the campus radio station.
So medicine is on my mind.
Coincidentally, I’m reading Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen.
When they’re discussing mercury, they talk about how the element found its way into overuse in the American medical system. The US Army Medical Corp happened to make a symbolic mistake when they chose their emblem back in 1902 (i.e., they chose the wrong symbol, which becomes symbolic). They chose the caduceus instead of the rod of asclepius. The latter was a symbol of health and healing. The former, which is still misused in America, is Hermes’s/Mercury’s staff.
Mercury the element poisons people. Mercury’s staff represents greed, avarice, and thievery (you know: capitalism).
Shouldn’t it be the insurance companies’ symbol?
