If only that was true...
* $32k annual salary
You'll have the responsibility to take care of the most precious little things that have every walked the earth. Your management are the parents, or as they like to call themselves "the people who pay your salary". These management want you to know they would do nearly everything you attempt to do differently than you do it. They want you to know they would do it differently, but they would never actually do it.
You'll need to show up at 7:15am sharp. You'll be able to leave as soon as the last parent picks up their child, which is sometime around 6:15pm. We are happy to have you on the team.
Edit: in education, there is asymmetry of requirements (similar to the asymmetry of bullshit). The boots-on-the-ground educator has 70-years worth of legal duties to be performed. This educator is working with a wide variety of incoming supplies (i.e. the little humans). Additionally, nearly everyone thinks they are capable of being a teacher, and their own recommendations and their own requirements.
The flippant demand that we should prevent $3.50 Glade plugins in a classroom in the scope of all the other things that matter is asymmetrical bullshit. A kid had a runny nose. Medical advice was to remove tonsils. The parents pushed back and found the real problem.
Maybe the $3.50 Glade plugin covered for another kid who was being bullied because of body odor? Or, maybe it cut down on distractions from nearby human pollution odors? Perhaps, the preschool is the lowest cost preschool around because the parents are cheap and do not want to pay market-rate for childcare. Thus, to be able to break even, the preschool uses a building used has a mold and water problem.
Of all the things that can be improved with education in the US, we decide on an internet forum that a $3.50 Glade plugin is the root of all evil for education because it masks instead of removes odors.
That said, "Truthful way of life" and "Glad plugins don't eliminate the cause of odor, just mask it which has a value all its own" seem to both be able to exist in the same space right? I haven't been to this school, but it seems most teachers aren't actively indoctrinating children to believe the "Big Scent" lie that candles/oil diffusion/whatever actually fix the cause of their problem rather than addressing the symptoms
You need to work on your straw man game. Start with something they actually said and work your way into something they didn't actually say. But just straight up putting fake words into their mouth is far too blatant.
I have severe sensitivity to fragrance and cannot tolerate synthetic fragrances, incense, or essential oils. Simply being near people who use artificial deodorant, shampoo, laundry detergent, dryer sheets or any other mainstream product that leaves them covered in synthetic fragrance is very uncomfortable. Essential oils are less problematic.
With essential oils, many of the chemicals present (such as linalool and d-limonene) break down as they oxidize after diffusion, and the oxidation products have different health effects than the original chemical, such as allergy sensitization and irritation.
My mother-in-law visited for two months, and left one of the rooms in my house saturated with Young Living essential oils from a diffuser. Six months later, I still can't go in there.
I’ve been trying to figure out the specific compounds that give me trouble and why, but there are many, and for a lot of these products, it seems like the ingredients are rarely published in full—or they use obscured chemical names—I guess because companies have some right to maintain their “secret sauce”.
I’m not chemophobic in the slightest, but I have to wonder if this wild mix of VOCs is affecting people in ways that they just don’t notice because they don’t have any allergy or irritation—such as endocrine disruption. And it will be hard to pinpoint if they do cause health problems because there are so many different compounds and they’re so common and assumed safe.
Manufacturers are allowed, as I'm sure you know, to list all scent component ingredients glommed together as 'fragrance'. This is supposedly because they're proprietary - they wouldn't someone to make an exact knock-off of a new perfume too easily, right? It also has the effect of making the health aspects of the formulations very difficult to analyze. It's a lot like a properietary black box in computing... EWG judges 'fragrance' as its own separate ingredient, giving it a (bad) rating of 8/10.
I have noticed 5-6 different main scent 'flavors' on all the disgusting consumer products out there, which probably correspond to specific chemicals. There's the one like fake grapes, the one that's spicy and powdery, the one I call old lady underwear, the fake fruit, the 'manly' scents, and more.
Johnson Wax (SC Johnson?) actually lists the full fragrance ingredients to products like Windex in their site - I was amazed.
I agree that these products highly likely cause widespread harm of different types, including to people who do not perceive a problem.
NHS surgery to fix the deviated septum, whip out my tonsils and a couple of other things and I was much better - and that was nearly 30 years ago.
It's been one of the two most obvious beneficial changes of my LCHF foray, the other being a substantial reduction in inflammation (and no longer suffering with chronic Achilles tendonitis). N=1, IANADr, etc.
The only people really limited in who they can see are those on public insurance like state coverage Medicaid for the poor or federal Medicare for the elderly. Those programs usually only pay a percentage of market value, and thus many doctors won't take them because they often lose money on the transaction.
There are many places in the US where the closest doctor is a few hundred miles away, and many more where the only doctors within a few hours are primary care physicians.
Although this statement may be true, it may also be irrelevant if there are no people in those places. That said, I'm not just being pedantic: my point is that lack of availability is far more likely to be a result of low population density than of being in the US.
Moreover, your comment fails to respond to the original point, which is that of affordability/availability to families with middle income. Poverty combined with low population density would likely result in even less availability, but, then, poverty is incompatible with "middle income".
I have views on this that would seem to most people to be seriously conflicted.
I'm militantly pro-science, and I argue constantly in the face of anti-science and pseudo-scientific bullshit anywhere I hear it. It makes me no fun at all at parties, and even some family members groan whenever someone brings up "alternative views" to the scientific consensus on much of anything as they know I'm about to start lecturing, whether it's climate change, vaccination, flat earth (<- seriously) or most of anything else.
On the other hand, my personal experiences of how medical science is applied locally by doctors and surgeons has made me entirely disillusioned with their whole industry, and I never trust anything I'm told without confirming it for myself.
To explain, I'm based in Northern Ireland, and a debate has gone on for a long time as to whether our National Health Service (NHS) is struggling or in trouble. In reality, it has already imploded.
This isn't hyperbole. Here's an exact quote from the BBC:
"Northern Ireland has some of the worst performance figures in the UK.
During the Christmas period, the number of patients seen in four hours in A&E departments dropped to 63%.
Exactly the same proportion started their cancer treatment within 62 days, according to the latest statistics, while the numbers waiting longer than they should for a routine operation have almost doubled in the past four years."
This hits home for me really hard. In the last six years my extended family has experienced:
- Two missed cancer diagnoses. - A potentially serious (and time-sensitive) diagnosis requiring specialist follow up that was missed on two seperate occasions. - Delayed treatments for potentially life-threatening cancer of over 100% of the recommended waiting period.
Our local hospital has become known as a place more likely to kill you than help you, due to how abysmal the standard of care is. Here's a link from a couple of months ago:
https://www.irishnews.com/news/2018/03/15/news/pensioner-die...
Life threatening emergencies that arrive by ambulance are often left unattended for over four hours (this is recorded in the public record thanks to open data laws).
I sincerely hope the circumstances in the Czech Republic are better and that the doctors are much less overworked and much more capable of helping you, my intention here is just to give you encouragement that you're right in not just assuming that your child's in safe hands without you being involved.
"My friends who believe in homeopathy don’t really care. Those who favor conventional medicine, though, can be just as blinded. Too often, when confronted with evidence that advanced technology might not be providing benefits, the medical community refuses to change its behavior."
He goes on to argue that the distinction between conventional and alternative medicine is misleading. The only distinction should be between what is proven and what is disproven.
Believe it or not, western medicine doesn't have all the answers, especially when it comes to chronic conditions. Thinking that steroids and antibiotics will cure IBS is quack science, and that's what's being practiced in western medicine.
"Western" medicine dramatically improved in the last few decades. "Alternative" medicines do not have the intellectual framework or the ability to improve.
There are many examples: Thalidomide, operating on babies without anesthesia [0], intensive glucose control [1], adenoid removal (the topic here) etc.
[0] http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0810625
I'm not an author of the parent comment, but i also live in the Czech Republic and can say that no, It's not any better. And based on a stories which my friends living in other countries telling me, I starting to suspect that the whole world health care system "made a wrong turn" some time ago. Looks like it's screwed everywhere, or at least for majority of the population.
Of course there are problems, waiting lists, lack of funding. But damn, it's good and (mostly) free. I feel lucky.
Perhaps there are regional differences, but in my city, it's really good.
I think variance is big and individual examples are useless unless you have the exact same problem in the exact same locality as someone else. But I think it's safe to say that anything falling outside standardized diagnosis may not work out so great. I had to do my own research myself and beat a professor's (of medicine) prediction and amazed a few other doctors with "miracles", but I did not actually do anything special, just what I thought was kind of obvious after some research. When you fall into one of the many blind spots your experience will be bad, if you fall into one of the categories which are "standard" you'll probably be one of those people who are very satisfied by what the system provides.
One has to understand how doctors are trained and what the system they work in forces them to do (and what not to do). Once you understand that you may get more satisfaction. For example, doctors prefer treating immediate problems. If you come with a long and varied history, they don't have a time for that, and often they would not know what conclusions to draw anyway - the body is complex and even if they had a hunch, the more possibilities there are the harder it is to diagnose. Also, expectations of expectations: Doctors know (sometimes learned the hard way) that people expect miracles or at least solutions from them when in reality they themselves often don't know.
Finding the cause of a problem may take months or even years of commitment (in retrospect, after a diagnosis, it's always clear of course, "why didn't we think of that sooner"). Few patients have the resources, the patience(!) and will to slowly and iteratively work on a problem, especially when success is highly uncertain. I only solved the one I myself had because I took some very radical steps that set me back income-wise for a decade at least and cost me a few social connections. The majority of people would have gone with "placebos", symptom-covering "solutions" for immediate problems, instead of choosing the great uncertainty (and when I started it was very uncertain indeed and everybody advised me to be "reasonable" and not throw my life away to chase ghosts but listen to the doctors). If I was a doctor I would never treat someone like me - because it would be highly unlikely that the person would be as extreme as I was and give up so much of their current life for very uncertain future benefit. So what doctors offer also is a mirror of what patients expect and are willing to invest (and I don 't mean money, the time and effort under uncertainty is much harder to bear).
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By the way, my tonsils disappeared by themselves! I went to nose and throat specialists a few times during the last decade because during my long recovery I had plenty of throat issues. At some point they wondered why my tonsils where so tiny, and during the last appointment last year or so I was asked when they had been removed - they weer gone. I never had surgery, and I'm sure I still had them a decade ago. No use asking, nobody knows what happened. They were definitely never removed (or the doctor three years ago would not still have found them to be unusually small, and the next one three years later that they were not there at all).
The experience of various family members at different stage of their life (we had to deal with childbirth, cancers, complex surgeries, broken bones, and simply old age, etc) and my experience in living in different countries. I am happy of my city hospital.
That's all pretty standard, all of those I'd trust most modern hospitals with. Yes there can be big differences, but at least all of those are part of the standard things modern medicine excels at. Anything ER, surgery, child birth. Cancer treatment is more variable but there's standards, they know what the problem is, they know what to do for diagnosis, and treatment is pretty standardized and most variance is how much they are willing to experiment with the latest (and most expensive) treatments.
Try having anything that is systemic and not easy to see (or invisible to any biomedical imaging). Each time you have a clear diagnosis for which doctors can go to their catalog of appropriate treatments you are lucky. Anything obviously and visibly broken (incl. by using imaging tech) is "the easy stuff".
Your satisfaction also depends on how willing you are to accept whatever the doctors tell you!
If I had accepted the verdict some ten years ago I would never have found that there actually was a relatively easy to identify and treatable cause for my issues. If I had accepted the endocrinologist's recommendation for surgery to remove the nodule in my thyroid, and part of the enlarged thyroid too, I would have had a happy surgery experience, because they are good at hat. But I didn't - and the nodule disappeared and the thyroid shrank back to normal to the great amazement of the endocrinologist. I don't mean to criticize your assessment, I'm happy myself too - but I had to do all the heavy lifting myself, it's just that I know how to use "the system" and how to get what I want from it and not asking for things they are bad at delivering. If you always accept what they tell you psychologically you will be a satisfied customer and life is easy (even if the problems persist, but if you accept them as inevitable your mind learns to ignore them pretty well). If you don't know and never assume that things could be better you'll always give top-rates.
I was extremely satisfied (no exaggeration) and full of unshaken trust in all doctors for almost 40 years, and I had things like jaw surgery to correct an under-bite. I went into this surgery as if it was an appointment for a hair cut, they did not even give me anything to lower anxiety even though they had planned to - my trust was complete, and for things like surgery it still is. Only when I had a problem where there were symptoms but no known cause did I hit a wall and had a very rude awakening.
I looked it all up and read a lot online afterwards, his procedures were immaculate and complete including all the blood work he had ordered, beyond a normal checkup, left nothing left to ask for given the symptoms I had presented. His diagnoses was 100% correct and according to all guidelines in the modern medical world, whether you are in Europe or the US.
Except that nothing made sense.
He completely ignored when I told him that I had never in my life had so many issues as with the PPIs. He asked me to be patient, just a few more weeks and we could lower the dose. But in addition, I felt that 99.9% of all my problems were "unaccounted for" in that diagnosis, that it only was about one tiny issue, but I felt it was much more systemic and that the recommendations would do nothing whatsoever towards finding a solution. It was putting buckets under the leak instead of finding the leak in the roof and fixing it. But I found that it was perfectly normal not to look for the deeper explanation, the cause of problems such as I had had!
First thing I found after a few weeks was that I had a huge candida outbreak. The professor had ignored the symptoms, I found the description on some website that I thought was entirely bonkers and esoteric, which is why I ignored it at first. But after weeks of no solution, and it got worse, I went back to that website and checked other ones too. I thought, it must be candida! I got an oral anti-fungal (cheap, no recipe required) - and within 15 minutes I had confirmation that it was a fungal infection. I went to a doctor with the diagnosis and got it confirmed, and I even got systemic anti-fungals (fluconazole based), all of it with huge success.
HOWEVER - I soon learned that a fungal infection isn't a cause, it is itself only a symptom. The only thing I found that was a remote possibility was: heavy metal poisoning. I did a test, I searched for specialists, I had to go travel a few hundred kilometers to an environmental medicine doctor at a university clinic, he said I'm a gray area case and I must have something else but that I should start chelation. He never found anything else, and ALL problems I ever had slowly disappeared, including miracles such as the thyroid thing. The prediction about "PPIs forever"? I have not taken one since 5 weeks after the professors prediction and my gut health now is PERFECT, like I never knew it, not even in childhood.
Growing up as a child in East Germany we had lead pipes at home, but they had a thick layer of mineral build-up and even though I also heavily used DMSA, a prime chelator for lead, no significant amounts of lead ever showed up. Given that health came back - to levels not seen in decades - without us ever seeing much of lead, only mercury, I guess it must have been mostly mercury.
The only possible source is amalgam fillings in teeth, which I got in childhood in East Germany. I found a document that indicates that the kind of mixture they used there was different and was abandoned elsewhere long before, so that may be a contributing factor. Nevertheless, my jaw bones had lost their trabecular structure and were in a bad state in exactly the places where the amalgam fillings had been. This was found by the doctor who just wanted to do a regular injection into the buccal mucosa - and ended up deep inside the bone. Ooops, that's bad, he said. He injected DMPS, mercury chelator, and in the following months my jaw bones "came alive". In a positive sense. A year later he found the bone impenetrable everywhere he tried, it was penetrable by a simple needle without pressure in all four quadrants before that (I had had fillings in all quadrants, fortunately none very deep).
I also remembered that my East German dentist, after reunification asked me if she should replace some of the amalgam fillings with plastic fillings. I had no idea why and what and did not care, I always said "yes" to every suggestion a doctor ever made to me, I was completely unaware of any "amalgam controversy" until I had to do my desperate research of what was wrong with me. But now I remember that at exactly that time, just a year after I had started studying, I had suddenly and out of the blue developed severe, almost asthma-like allergy, had inexplicable problems in various joints, had terrible sleep issues, and a lot of other stuff. And I barely managed to pass the math classes (CS study) - I had always been a top math person and we had high-level math instruction at high-school (in year 3 of the CS study I discovered that the lecture was exactly about the same stuff that we had had in high-school from our over-achieving teacher). I had gotten "stupid", but I only realized it when everything cleared up under the chelation treatment and I've taken over 60 mostly STEM courses on Coursera and edX and now my brain works again. My dentist had removed the amalgam fillings with a normal drill and without any protection. When I did the research eight years ago even a fresh doctor in residency warned me not to have my remaining amalgam fillings removed - because of the danger of mercury being freed ("this is dangerous" was what she said), the drill creates vapor no matter how much water you use to cool it, and mercury vapor is the worst since it can penetrate all the surrounding tissues. When I had the remaining fillings removed it was done with special equipment and a chelating agent to wash the mouth after each removed filling.
There's a lot more - A LOT... after all, all those years of (essentially) experiments that hardly anyone ever performs. I've taken waaayyyy more chelators than even the doctors who think amalgam fillings cause poisoning and offer chelation treatments usually do, but since I have had success that could be clinically proven, and since I seem to be handling the whole thing very reasonably the doctor keeps filling my prescription. My conclusion, based on actual, sort of, "experiments" - on and off chelators, is that heavy metals have effects given FAR lower amounts than are clinically relevant today. I feel my conclusion is in line with science, given that we have reached the official conclusion for lead that the amount with zero effects is zero lead - and mercury is worse than lead (according to an NIH document I found). But you won't be able to detect those effects unless you try. The slow decline of health and mind is very subtle, I was "lucky" that I hit an extreme. I see soooo many people with issues I had, such as psoriasis, warts on the feet, colds that won't end, issues with eyes, etc. etc. - a looong list, that I have to wonder.... I DID take bio-chemistry, physiology, anatomy, etc etc. - at least a thousand ours of medical lectures and courses if not more over the last few years, so I am aware of the complexity. I just think that heavy metals contribute much more than is currently accepted. All you have to do to get (what I now think is) a significant amount of mercury is to eat lots of sea fish, especially the predators.
You're not alone there: my partner's tonsils "dissolved" when she was younger. I've never heard of this anywhere else until now.