You have permission to be healthy

Take a meander through recent media coverage of health and medicine news; you’ll discover that hospital drug reactions are ‘common,’ with one in seven hospital patients in the UK experiencing adverse reactions (half of which are completely avoidable); that the drug methylphenidate, commonly known as Ritalin and prescribed for hundreds of thousands of children each year who are labelled with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may physically change the brain in the same way that cocaine does; and that ‘addictions to over-the-counter and prescription drugs are a “significant” problem and require “urgent” attention’.

Catching up (with how things could be)

While mainstream media reported on the gloom and indecision of power-brokers at the World Economic Forum, it somehow overlooked the energized and decisive proceedings at the ninth World Social Forum held in Brazil, which concluded in early February with a raft of resolutions and proposals for implementation through 2009.

Thoughts from the heartlands (on fences)

An Aboriginal elder and his grandson meander through the maze of picket-fenced gardens in a comfortable suburb of Perth…

Grandfather, why do the white folk build fences and walls everywhere?

Grandson, this is a very important question and there are answers on many levels.

On the surface, the answer is simple: they are setting out their territory and defining the limits of their area of control. If you could look down from above you would see that the network of fences, walls and borders they have produced, enclosing areas within areas, territories within territories, typifies the landscape of the ‘civilized’ world.

Telling it like it is: news from the dead centre (2)

Modern civilization may have no central command (discuss) but it acts as if it does. VIVID thinks it should come clean and set up a reality newswire, which declares in straight-talking, plain-speaking English what is actually being decided at its hypothetical, brain-free centre. This month we’d have:

The ICSANLSMHTL (Institute of Conviction that Science has all the Answers and Natural Life Systems must be Managed by Humans Thinking Linearly) is pleased to announce good progress with its programme of research designed to tell people things they already know, intuitively. This has the ingenious effect of planting in their minds a sense that their ability to know things is entirely dependent on the current state of scientific research.