RWL Newsletter #143 - fake news, grief, and TSG
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! A longer than usual text portion to this week’s posting. I apologize in advance. You will see why if you read on.
(Eggs - this week I did a silly challenge to take a picture each day that is representative of my life. I cook family meals most days as part of my contribution to the family, so eggs. Also, I break a lot of stuff, so … metaphor.)
On to the links!
Read
What: NYT Opinion, Do We Really Understand ‘Fake News’?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/opinion/fake-news.html
Why: This article hit close to home. I was one of those people who used to post all sorts of political posts that favored my point of view on social media. Then we had the 2016 election and I really felt like something shifted. It was like someone came along and dumped bucket after bucket of used cooking oil in a pool we were all swimming in. I had something of an epiphany that I didn’t want to be part of that mess anymore, but I also realized I was contributing to it. The article points out that 60% of the people who share an article haven’t actually opened the article. That’s a bit crazy. All the same, I really enjoy social media and the connections it has enabled. Having been in the Army, I have friends all over the world, so it’s nice to be able to keep in touch with them. So how do we collectively take steps to create a public good? I think I’m not alone in changing my approach to social media. I think many of us felt that social media hit a low point with the 2016 election, and I think many of us have changed our behavior. Social media is a new way of relating, and we have had to develop new norms in an unconstrained environment. Those norms are still coming, but this period of adjustment should have been expected. I guess we just didn’t realize how powerful this new tool would be, or how socially transformative.
Watch
What: Nora McInerny, We Don't "Move on" from Grief. We Move Forward with It (15 min)
Why: I was going to post a different video, but last night I learned a couple whom my wife and I have been friends with for many years lost their oldest son, aged 25, in a traffic accident this past Saturday. Yesterday afternoon I was interviewing a physician for a study I am doing about physician identity, and one of the questions I have been asking is how important is death and dying to the development of the physician identity. The range of answers I get is rather remarkable - some physicians find helping a patient have a good death is critical to their understanding of their role. Other physicians hate it and run the other way (“There’s a reason why I’m a pediatrician” said one). The physician I was talking to was somewhere in the middle - we had to discuss for a while what I meant by my question. Over the last five years I’ve done a lot of interviews. Having this conversation yesterday helped me see that sometimes I don’t really know what I am asking, but rather simply providing a foil for my co-conversant to interpret and work with to allow them to tell the story they want to tell. I mulled over the question of questions as I was driving home from my interview, and had it in the back of my mind as I was writing a finance exam when I saw I had a message on FaceBook. It was from someone who went through ROTC with me. I saw it was a group message with a bunch of ROTC friends. That’s how I found out about the death of our friends’ son. The couple both were ROTC friends - I’ve known them close to 30 years. I first met their son when he was 2 when his mother and I were at an Army course together. I remember seeing her holding him on her hip. I last saw him when he happened to be a college junior at the same college my daughter was a freshman at. He could have probably put his mother on his hip at that point. From what I know, he was a good young man, as one would expect from having had good and caring parents, and he was on his way in life until someone, driving after having had his license revoked, speeding, rammed into the back of a car, drove it across the center line and into my friends’ son’s car, killing him. My wife and I were devastated when we heard the news. We were both awake for a good portion of the night thinking about our friends and the pain they were in now, and thinking about our own children and having that fear rekindled. I think from the moment you have a child, you know fear in a new way.
This morning I gave my finance exam, and while the kids were taking the exam, I popped on to FaceBook on my phone and happened to see this TED Talk by Nora McInerny. A friend of mine who had lost her husband not that long ago posted it. I watched it on silent using the closed captions. The video is about grief and how talk of moving on is not meaningful. Grief is a chronic condition and sooner or later we are all going to be exposed to it. Death and dying don’t just shape physician identities, they shape all of our identities. As McInerny says, research shows 100% of our loved ones are going to die. Grief arising from death and dying, or other losses, shapes our identities. We don’t move on from grief, we move forward with it.
My ROTC friends from 30 years ago, connected virtually through social media, are preparing to provide our mutual friends support in their grief. I usually don’t have quite as much of a theme between my articles I post, but the social media read (above) I had picked out last week. I hadn’t intended to share this link until this morning (it’s Thursday as I write this). We do a lot of crappy things to each other on social media, but it also provides for meaningful and important connection. Thanks to the loose connections (weak ties) made possible by social media, this grieving family will have more support as they try to move forward.
(HT to PT for the link)
Listen
What: Health Leader Forge, Brigadier General R. Scott Dingle, MEDCOM Deputy Chief of Staff, G-3/5/7
https://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2016/07/brigadier-general-r-scott-dingle-medcom.html
Why: This is a re-post from two years ago. Since I posted this, Brigadier General Dingle had been promoted to Major General. Now this week, Major General Dingle was promoted to Lieutenant General (LTG) Dingle and appointed to be the first Medical Service Corps Army Surgeon General. That is a promotion from 2-star to 3-star general for those of you not familiar with the Army ranks, and also it’s a really big deal. This makes LTG Dingle the highest ranking medical field officer in the Army, and one of only a handful of 3-star generals. It is also a big deal because historically The Surgeon General (TSG) had always been a physician, until about 10 years ago when we had our first nurse (LTG Horoho). The Army appointed another physician after LTG Horoho retired, but now we have our first TSG drawn from the administrative ranks. The Army Medical Department is being torn apart, along with the medical departments of the Air Force and Navy, as the Department of Defense tries to realign and streamline the delivery of medical care, so LTG Dingle is going to have his hands full trying to continue to provide world-class care to our soldiers and their families. LTG Dingle gave a great interview back in 2016 - I think even if, or perhaps especially if, you don’t know much about military medicine, this is a great podcast to listen to.
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