Week 7

How being materialistic is harming us.

Gabor Mate shows the connection that people have with their emotions and their own physical ailments. He starts by saying that currently in medicine looks at it by separating the mind and the body and it separates the individual from the environment. In the first one Mate gives the example of women in Australia where they did a study to find if emotional stress or emotionally isolated. These women were ones who had already been found to have lumps during a breast exam. They were then given psychological tests that looked at those two possibilities. It was found that any of the women who tested for emotion stress had zero impact on if the lump was cancerous. It was the same for any woman who had been emotionally isolated, zero change. However, for women who had both suffered from emotional stress and have been emotionally isolated the risk of the lump being cancerous is nine times as likely as the average. For the second one, it is found that children living in an environment where they have stressed parents are more likely to have asthma. So, look at how we deal with asthma. It is common to give the same drugs that are used from stress management to those who have asthma. Mate shows strongly that it is not correct to think of medicine as only a physical thing or only a psychological thing. The human body is a complex system that relies on everything in the body, not just parts and pieces. I think, as someone who no real knowledge in the medical field, that this would make a lot of sense being that our body works as one system rather than a mix of multiple systems that just inhabit the same container.

The Bombing of Judi Bari

There has always been at least one conspiracy circling the US or its departments. In 1990, there was a car bomb under Bari’s car which injured her and Darryl Cheney. After this incident occurred the FBI swooped in a tried to arrest them as the bomb makers. They refuted this claim and sued the FBI back, later winning $4 million in damages. The case continued into the late 1990s to try and stop the FBI from discarding the bomb from the incident. Cheney continues to try to get the FBI to give the bomb to an independent lab for DNA testing. The FBI has continually avoided or roadblocked the attempts giving a variety of reasons, such as Cheney not being allowed to handle the bomb since it is illegal and contraband. In my opinion, this case may show how the government can do things that are considered illegal to the public but they are allowed to do it to push their ideas. This seems like a viable option because Bari was a leader of the Earth First! movement that was trying to stop timber companies from cutting down the redwood forests. This may have been an undercut to profits that the government could make from this new source of timber in the US. However, this could all be a conspiracy theory as well, but it makes it suspicious as to how the FBI has acted toward giving up the evidence for further DNA tests. In the end I think it shows that for the most part we as a community need to be able to look critically at what our government actually does and be able to speak up without fear of backlash from them.