A thoughtful review of Slow Medicine

The reason we need Slow Medicine now is that in every developed country the cost of healthcare continues to increase, no matter what money-saving schemes policymakers put into effect. Capitation, competition, electronic health records, telemedicine, team-based care, bureaucracies for the calculation of value—everywhere the same ideas lead to the same results: healthcare takes two to three times as much of every nation’s GDP as it did forty years ago, patients are ever more dissatisfied, doctors burned out and policymakers frustrated. Yet in my life as a physician, what has impressed me the most is the opposite—how efficient and cost-effective it is when patient and doctor simply have enough time together.

There is a secret that economists have missed in their attempts to fix the problem. And that secret is, that what one wants as patient and as doctor is the right diagnosis and the right treatment. But to get that, speed, technology, and efficiency—Fast Medicine—are not enough. What patient and doctor also need, in addition to wonderful technologies, is time. Time may not heal all wounds but it heals very many of them, and having enough time, though so inefficient on paper, turns out to be the most efficient healthcare of all. In Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing, you’ll meet the doctors, nurses, and patients, and experience the events that have led me to this conclusion.

So as in God’s Hotel, I show and tell their stories but in this new book I pull the camera back and Slow Medicine is both a prequel and a sequel. Jung’s philosophy enters at the very beginning, along with the cultural elements that set up the modern rediscovery of Slow. The twelfth-century mystic, theologian, and medical practitioner, Hildegard of Bingen, contributes the missing piece, with her concept of viriditas—greening—a kind of natural healing power that needs, above all, time and nurturing.

What I have learned in my life as physician is that Medicine and Nursing are spiritual paths. They are relational and personal; they are more like parenting and falling in love than providing healthcare off some healthcare shelf. To do them well requires not only enough time but also a deep and hard-won knowledge no algorithm can replace. Miraculously—ironically!—when done this way we end up with not only the most satisfying medicine but also with the most cost-effective medicine.

So Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing is an account and a call to action and non-action, with bearing not only on Medicine and Nursing but also on what we need to bring to our own living—the Fast and the Slow together, the right tool for the right task, recognizing that the operation is Fast but the healing is Slow.

Hello world!

November 14, 2015 / kilopapaadmin / Uncategorized / 1 Comment

Testing display of HTML elements

This is 2nd level heading

This is a test paragraph.

This is 3rd level heading

This is a test paragraph.

This is 4th level heading

This is a test paragraph.

This is 5th level heading

This is a test paragraph.

This is 6th level heading

This is a test paragraph.

Basic block level elements

This is a normal paragraph (p element).
To add some length to it, let us mention that this page was
primarily written for testing the effect of user style sheets.
You can use it for various other purposes as well, like just checking how
your browser displays various HTML elements by default.
It can also be useful when testing conversions from HTML
format to other formats, since some elements can go wrong then.

This is another paragraph. I think it needs to be added that
the set of elements tested is not exhaustive in any sense. I have selected
those elements for which it can make sense to write user style sheet rules,
in my opionion.

This is a div element. Authors may use such elements instead
of paragraph markup for various reasons. (End of div.)

This is a block quotation containing a single
paragraph. Well, not quite, since this is not really
quoted text, but I hope you understand the point. After all, this
page does not use HTML markup very normally anyway.

The following contains address information about the author, in an address
element.

Jukka Korpela,
jkorpela@cs.tut.fi
Päivänsäteenkuja 4 A, Espoo, Finland

Lists

This is a paragraph before an unnumbered list (ul). Note that
the spacing between a paragraph and a list before or after that is hard
to tune in a user style sheet. You can’t guess which paragraphs are
logically related to a list, e.g. as a “list header”.

One.
Two.
Three. Well, probably this list item should be longer. Note that
for short items lists look better if they are compactly presented,
whereas for long items, it would be better to have more vertical spacing between items.
Four. This is the last item in this list.
Let us terminate the list now without making any more fuss about it.

The following is a menu list:

One.

Two.

Three. Well, probably this list item should be longer so that it will
probably wrap to the next line in rendering.

The following is a dir list:

One.

Two.

Three. Well, probably this list item should be longer so that it will
probably wrap to the next line in rendering.

This is a paragraph before a numbered list (ol). Note that
the spacing between a paragraph and a list before or after that is hard
to tune in a user style sheet. You can’t guess which paragraphs are
logically related to a list, e.g. as a “list header”.

One.
Two.
Three. Well, probably this list item should be longer. Note that if
items are short, lists look better if they are compactly presented,
whereas for long items, it would be better to have more vertical spacing between items.
Four. This is the last item in this list.
Let us terminate the list now without making any more fuss about it.

This is a paragraph before a definition list (dl).
In principle, such a list should consist of terms and associated
definitions.
But many authors use dl elements for fancy “layout” things. Usually the
effect is not too bad, if you design user style sheet rules for dl
which are suitable
for real definition lists.

recursion: see recursion
recursion, indirect: see indirect recursion
indirect recursion: see recursion, indirect
term: a word or other expression taken into specific use in
a well-defined meaning, which is often defined rather rigorously, even
formally, and may differ quite a lot from an everyday meaning

Text-level markup

CSS (an abbreviation;
abbr markup used)
radar (an acronym; acronym markup used)
bolded (b markup used – just bolding with unspecified
semantics)
big thing (big markup used)
large size (font size=6 markup used)
Courier font (font face=Courier markup used)
red text (font color=red markup used)
Origin of Species (a book title;
cite markup used)
a[i] = b[i] + c[i); (computer code; code markup used)
here we have some ~~deleted~~ text (del markup used)
an octet is an entity consisting of eight bits
(dfn markup used for the term being defined)
this is very simple (em markup used for emphasizing
a word)
Homo sapiens (should appear in italics; i markup used)
here we have some inserted text (ins markup used)
type yes when prompted for an answer (kbd markup
used for text indicating keyboard input)
Hello! (q markup used for quotation)
He said: She said Hello! (a quotation inside a quotation)
you may get the message Core dumped at times
(samp markup used for sample output)
this is not that important (small markup used)
~~overstruck~~ (strike markup used; note:
s is a nonstandard synonym for strike)
this is highlighted text (strong
markup used)
In order to test how subscripts and superscripts (sub and
sup markup) work inside running text, we need some
dummy text around constructs like x₁ and H₂O
(where subscripts occur). So here is some fill so that
you will (hopefully) see whether and how badly the subscripts
and superscripts mess up vertical spacing between lines.
Now superscripts: M^lle, 1^st, and then some
mathematical notations: e^x, sin² x,
and some nested superscripts (exponents) too:
e^x² and f(x)^{g(x)^a+b+c}
(where 2 and a+b+c should appear as exponents of exponents).
text in monospace font (tt markup used)
underlined text (u markup used)
the command cat filename displays the
file specified by the filename (var markup
used to indicate a word as a variable).

Some of the elements tested above are typically displayed in a monospace
font, often using the same presentation for all of them. This
tests whether that is the case on your browser:

This is sample text inside code markup
This is sample text inside kbd markup
This is sample text inside samp markup
This is sample text inside tt markup

Links

This is a text paragraph that contains some
inline links. Generally, inline links (as opposite to e.g. links
lists) are problematic
from the
usability perspective,
but they may have use as
“incidental”, less relevant links. See the document
Links Want To Be Links.

Forms

Tables

The following table has a caption. The first row and the first column
contain table header cells (th elements) only; other cells
are data cells (td elements), with align="right"
attributes:

Sample table: Areas of the Nordic countries, in sq km
Country	Total area	Land area
Denmark	43,070	42,370
Finland	337,030	305,470
Iceland	103,000	100,250
Norway	324,220	307,860
Sweden	449,964	410,928

Character test

The following table has some sample characters with
annotations. If the browser’s default font does not
contain all of them, they may get displayed using backup fonts.
This may cause stylistic differences, but it should not
prevent the characters from being displayed at all.

Char.	Explanation	Notes
ê	e with circumflex	Latin 1 character, should be ok
—	em dash	Windows Latin 1 character, should be ok, too
Ā	A with macron (line above)	Latin Extended-A character, not present in all fonts
Ω	capital omega	A Greek letter
−	minus sign	Unicode minus
⌀	diameter sign	relatively rare in fonts

Hyphenation

In the following, a width setting should cause some hyphenation,
depending on support to various methods of hyphenation.