on Evidence Based Medicine

Medicine or drug? Western? The ideal or your ideal body temperature? Diagnosis = guesses? Below are some of my quick comments on the above.

The Key Point

In an email regarding GPF 2007 Philippines¹, M. Trombin said:

"... the key point is the same. If we, together with our partners, do not work practically and invest in changing the life and conscience of the people for the better, we will never achieve the goals proposed by Hyun Jin Nim² via the GPF. For that we need to act on short and long terms projects and becoming a real movement for change."

¹Interested people can view a video here.
²"Nim" is a for of respectful way to address somebody in Korean.

Work life balance

What is the similarity between a person having 2 full-time jobs, and a family with both husband and wife working?

Are double-income families in some way sub-ideal families?

A person normally would not want to have 2 full-time jobs. He has got other things in life to attend to.

A family normally would not need double income. They have got other family needs to attend to.

If the society is to be blamed, then it would be a sub-ideal society.

Some may think that the wife is contributing to the society. Good if that's true, and after making sure that the other family needs were attended to. However, how many of the working wives are truly doing more by working then by raising up their next generations?

Everything follow laws

Without laws, total flexibility is chaos.

Everything follow laws could be ideal, but attaining and remaining at ideal is bad (see Ideal is not ideal).

Setting down laws and rules is to paint the picture of the ideal state. The idea is to move towards the ideal, sometimes over, sometimes fall short. Having an idea of what the ideal is allow us to know how to be on the right track.

Flexibility is necessary as no set of laws can cater to all possible scenario. However, the necessity of flexibility on occassions does not imply everything don't need to follow laws. If the set of laws is lacking, it might be improved. If the scenario can be avoided in the future, then lessons be learnt to avoid such scenario.

Ideal is not ideal

Life is interesting because it is not straightforward. We want to be in the ideal state, but being in the ideal state is probably not ideal. It's like many phenomena in nature. Being in equilibrium is like being in the ideal state. When there is a pressure difference in the atmosphere, the air moves so as to reduce the pressure difference and we call this movement ‘wind’. However, if this equilibrium is maintained, then there will be no wind, which is not nice, or lifeless. If the pressure difference were allowed to build up, then the wind that is formed might be too strong and become an unfriendly wind. Thus, it is not about reaching and remaining at the ideal state but the gentle oscillations about the ideal state at comfortable amplitude of oscillations.