Some follow-ups
I’d like to follow-up to a couple recent posts in this blog, triggered by comments I received via e-mail and other media.
In the first place, I’ll comment on the post that labelled bloodletting and electroshock as “barbaric methods”. I received two comments about this. The first one was from a heamatologist who pointed out that bloodletting per se is not an abandoned practice, and that is still the method of choice, for example, for some pathologies that consist, precisely, on elevated bloodvolume (eg., polycythemia vera). The second of these comments was regarding electroshock, and how it can or is still used to treat long-term depression (and pointed me to this TED talk by American surgeon Sherwin Nuland, who apparently had severe depression himself and was well served by electroshock therapy).
These comments were called for, so I’ll amend and say that only “indiscriminated bloodletting” should have been described as barbaric, like doctors in the distant past used to do as far as I know. For electroshock, however, the fact that it may cure depression doesn’t make it less barbaric in my eyes, at least if the amounts of pain involved in the treatment are what one has been led to believe. So I think it’d belong in the same category as treatments for cancer: we use them despite being horrible because we’re sadly not quite there yet in the “knowing better” ladder of History. (And this is just my opinion, of course.)
Regarding my recent post about Oposiciones, it was pointed out out that the original intent of for-life employment when working for the State is to free such workers from possible politic pressures, and to avoid firing en masse when a new party arrives to the Government, to hire people that will sympathize with their agenda.
And finally, about my somewhat older Meritocracy and entitlement, I was told that —even if the reader would know me relatively well— it was very easy to read the short entry in the opposite way it was intended by me. If that’s the case, let me clarify: my thoughts on the matter are that the more power or positions you get in a project (to which you arrive by meriting them, obviously), the less entitled you should feel.