Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Here’s one of the more uplifting thoughts I can imagine:

“It is my hope that more and more people will discover their own power to make good things happen, and at the same time, discover what they have in common with others — namely, a shared belief in the value and potential contribution and impact of every individual; and a desire to help others discover that power.”

Wouldn’t it be fun to build an network of folks who think this way?

I position Martin Seligman just below hero status in terms of someone making a difference in science and academia. He has done an amazing job turning around an entire academic discipline, in just a few short years, and has done so using the best of what science has to offer. So, it is alarming to see his story about negative media and misreporting Science at the New York Times:

“There are media dedicated to the dividends of darkness that both reflect a cultural bias toward despair and simultaneously shape it. They are enormously influential, and if you wonder why our young people are in the midst of an epidemic of depression and meaninglessness in the presence of unprecedented wealth, education, and opportunity, you might start with what they read in the New York Times.”

At the core of this outburst is an article in NY Times, “Agains Happiness” by Jim Holt. He warned that ?Well-being might be bad for you,? basing its thesis on an article that appeared in Psychological Science in May 2004. Seligman goes on to dispute Holt’s conclusion with a letter from the author of the scientific paper, but Holt defends himself as simply taking “a little journalistic caricature.”

I agree with Seligman in the strongest terms. This is not “a little journalistic caricature,” but rather an illustration of the fundamentally flawed state to which journalism is descending.

Let’s look at what our journalists did with the topic of Road Rage af few years ago. I quote from Glassner’s, The Culture of Fear, Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things:

My bureaucratic fantasy is to have Tom Ridge announce:

“The Department of Homeland security has declared a red alert status for our health care system. 3,750 people will die this week due to preventable medical errors, caused by the way we operate our health care system. This has been going on for years, and we aren’t going to take it any more.”

This is a national tragedy that we can and must do something about.

I recently went to a local mom-and-pop cafe in which the waitress swiped a magnetic card before punching in my breakfast order into a computer, which was printed immediately in the kitchen. It struck me that this cafe was using greater security and a better order entry system than 90% of the hospitals in the United States. A system in which the consequences of failure would be to get scrambled, not fried eggs works with great efficiency. A system in which the consequences of failure are death is falling apart at the seams. Why is this?

We didn’t have National Academy studies, massive legislation, multiple bottom lines, blended values, and endless research in order to get secure, efficient order entry systems into cafes. Folks did it just because it was a good idea and made sense in their local context… the incentives were aligned.

We need to get our health care incentives aligned – and this means dealing with values at a more fundamental level than mission statements on waiting room walls. Adding more management paraphernalia to the current 100,000 pages of regulations dealing with our 1.2 million terms for how to be sick, no matter how well-intentioned, is like trying to get out of a hole by digging it deeper.

See CNN.com – Study: Hospital errors cause 195,000 deaths – Jul 28, 2004 and the National Academy of Science’s Institute for Medicine Report, To Err is Human which estimated a low of 44,000 deaths.