February 2013 – education and deconstruction.com

Model Patient

The Book of the Week is “Model Patient” by Karen Duffy, published in 2007. In this ebook, Duffy describes her mid to late 1990’s bout with sarcoidosis, a life-threatening illness that is difficult to diagnose.

A prolonged, severe headache was the first symptom. Numerous tests revealed that she had a growing lesion on her brain and spinal cord. This produced numbness and paralysis in various parts of her body, including her limbs. It took months before she saw a doctor who recommended treatment of steroids and chemotherapy. She writes, “I’d lost the playbook to my life. I had no idea what to do.”

Despite the psychological stress brought on by her inability to continue modeling and working as an on-camera reporter for MTV, she did her darndest to remain positive. Fittingly, she happens to have a facial feature known as “risorius of Santorini”– her cheek muscles form a natural smile, without her consciously trying to do so.

Prior to her entertainment career, Duffy had worked as a recreational therapist at a nursing home. Her job was to improve the psychological states of the residents. She continued to try to volunteer once a week there after she got sick.

Read the book to learn other strategies Duffy used to cope with her illness.

The Intern Blues

The Book of the Week is “The Intern Blues, The Timeless Classic About the Making of a Doctor” by Robert Marion, published in 2012. This ebook documents the internship experiences of three medical school graduates in the mid 1980’s.

At that time, interns were “on call”– had to work eighteen to twenty-four hours in a row, usually overnight, in a hospital every three days. Every month for an entire year, the interns in this ebook were assigned to a different unit such as pediatrics, neonatal intensive care, or the emergency room, at a medical center in the Bronx in New York City.

The hospital staff was kept busy treating patients with conditions whose causes were poverty-related— people in poor health, and those who suffered physical harm from violence and drugs. Many patients and their families had psychological problems. One intern remarked, “…we have two psychotic crackheads roaming around the ER, we also had two psychotic crackheads who were paranoid and had no idea what was going on, which is a wonderful combination.”

Severely sleep-deprived, along with doing a ton of paperwork and presentations, the interns had to admit patients, keep “…track of names, symptoms, physical findings, lab results, and treatments…” They witnessed life-or-death situations for which they felt they were not psychologically prepared. They had to tell patients’ families that their loved ones had died, make serious decisions on whether to report child abuse to the authorities (which was a whole bureaucratic process itself), deal with difficult nurses and lab technicians, not to mention their supervisors; all this, along with the extremely stressful circumstances surrounding the AIDS epidemic.

On top of that, one of the three interns became pregnant during her internship. Read the book to learn how that worked out for her, and to get an insider’s view of what it was like to be a medical intern a few decades ago.

Thank You For Arguing

The Book of the Week is “Thank You For Arguing” by Jay Heinrichs, published in 2007. This is a book on debating. The author teases apart the differences between arguing and fighting, and logic and rhetoric.

There are three kinds of persuasive language: blame, values and choice. Each is of a different tense. Blame is past tense. Values depict the present. Choice talks about the future. The author advises the reader to switch tenses if an argument gets heated. The future, though, is the tense most likely to bring about peace.

People in a courtroom recount past events that involve blame. However, to get their points across, lovers and politicians should try to stick to the present and future. Two useful questions to ask when a problem crops up are, “What should we do about it?” and “How can we keep it from happening again?”

Values, which involve morals, are undebatable. The author says, “Argument’s Rule Number One: Never debate the undebatable. Instead, focus on your goals… If you want your audience to make a choice, focus on the future.” Also, “When you argue emotionally, speak simply. People in the middle of a strong emotion rarely use elaborate speech.”

One more tip: When one is deciding on an issue to argue, the most persuasive issue will be the broadest one. For instance, in launching a protest against consolidating two departments in a workplace, one should seize upon the issue of productivity, rather than fairness.

The author sadly concludes that universities used to teach rhetoric, but stopped doing so in the 1800’s when “…academia forgot what the liberal arts were for: to train an elite for leadership.”

Read the book to learn more debating techniques.

The Google Guys

The Book of the Week is “The Google Guys, Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin” by Richard L. Brandt, published in 2009, with an Afterword published in 2011. This ebook recounts the history of the company that created the world’s largest internet search engine, which can analyze millions of pages a second.

The company has more than one hundred attorneys on staff. It must defend itself against lawsuits in connection with intellectual property, privacy, monopolistic practices, censorship, etc. It has about “twenty thousand employees and $20 billion in revenues.”

Larry and Sergey, the company’s founders, avoid doing conventional things that even many tech companies do. When they set up shop in 1998, the two never wrote a business plan. They “almost never give interviews or attend conferences.” Since they possess incredible power, they are not just tough business negotiators, but unreasonably arrogant ones.

Currently, the company provides a large array of services, in addition to a search engine. These include “PC applications, e-mail, cell phone operating systems, Web browsers, Wiki information sites, social networks, and photo editing sites…”

Read the book to learn more about Google, Inc., its history, and the personalities of its founders.