RWL #148 - military trauma system, fear setting, & psychadelics
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I had a chance to attend the UNH ROTC programs’ Veterans Day program today. It was good to touch base with my old community, to remember what it means to serve.
(picture above is from the day I stepped out of my boots for the last time in December of ‘14).
On to the links!
Read
What: US News & World Report, A Crack in the Armor: Surgeons See a Military Hospital as a Shadow of Its Past
Why: It’s Veterans Day weekend. Thank God we are not taking the flow of casualties we were during the height of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts. But that raises an important point - how do we sustain the trauma capabilities we developed during these conflicts so that when the next hot conflict arises, we can prevent unnecessary death and suffering? This article implies that it’s a choice, but I’m afraid the realistic answer is that we can’t. It isn’t that we don’t want to. To keep a trauma system in place, it needs to be fed a steady flow of broken bodies. Again, thank God we don’t have those broken bodies. But there is no way to keep that level of tactical capability in peace time any more than it is possible to sustain the level of tactical capability in an average infantry unit in peacetime. War is the sharpening stone that keeps these blades sharp - whether it is a scalpel or a bayonet. The real question that this article does not adequately address (thought it is a good article) is how we retain the lessons learned so that when the next conflict comes (and it will), we are able to ramp up our capability more quickly.
Watch
What: Tim Ferriss, Why you should define your fears instead of your goals (14 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J6jAC6XxAI
Why: I have an on-again, off-again relationship with Tim Ferriss. Like his ex-girlfriend he talks about, I find him a bit exhausting. He doesn’t know about our relationship, of course. He’s got the most downloaded podcast in the world, The Tim Ferriss Show, so he’s in a relationship with a lot of other people, and could care less about me. One of the things I really like about Tim is he works very hard to learn from other people, which is my preferred mode of research as well. He recently published a book based on his podcast called Tribe of Mentors that summarizes the most important lessons he has learned from his interviews. I’d heard him talk about this TED Talk a number of times, but I had never watched it all the way through. I think it’s worth a watch. He starts out talking about his close brush with suicide. He then moves into his discussion of fear setting. Like me, Ferriss is a fan of Stoicism. Toward the end of the podcast, he quotes one of his mentors, “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” Watch the video to understand what this means.
Listen
What: Jama News Network, Philanthropists Fund Johns Hopkins Center for Study of Psychedelics (28 minutes)
https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/audio-player/18003702
Why: I think the first time I heard about the Johns Hopkins Center for Study of Psychedelics was actually from Tim Ferriss. I believe he is one of the philanthropists supporting the study. There seems to suddenly be a lot of press being given to the psychiatric use of psychedelics. The famous food writer Michael Pollan has written a book about the benefits of psychedelics. I don’t quite know what to do with this nascent shift in public sentiment. I’m a Gen Exer, and I grew up with the Just Say No movement, and unlike most of my friends, I did just say no. Not to booze, but to everything else. I’ve never even smoked pot, so I can’t really imagine doing magic mushrooms, even in a controlled environment. But the studies seem to be saying that there are some conditions that can be helped by even a single application of psychedelics. Check out the interview here - this is JAMA, not Rolling Stone, so you’re not getting a counter culture sales job.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
Have a great weekend and do amazing things!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau