Stuart’s Thoughts - January 11, 2022
                                        

                                                                    Heads or Tails

Just as a coin has two sides, most everything in life seems to have two sides.  On the one hand there is a good or beneficial side but there may also be a harmful aspect or “bad side”.  For example, nearly every medication used in the treatment of disease also has potential adverse effects.  Pharmaceutical discovery and development is primarily concerned with describing these two sides of a new drug both qualitatively and quantitatively.  In order to be useful, there needs to be a significant difference between doses that produce benefits and doses that cause potentially harmful adverse effects.  The team of pharmacologists and toxicologists developing the new drug work to establish the “therapeutic index” of the drug,i.e., the ratio of the dose producing a beneficial effect in 50% of the patients to the dose producing an adverse effect in 50% of the patients.  In general, one likes to see a wide difference in those two ED50s, for example a ten fold difference (therapeutic ratio = 10) is usually indicative of a drug safe to use in most people.

I’ve previously written about the down side of progress pointing out that, as with new drugs, new technology often has the two sided coin characteristic.  Perhaps the most obvious example is the automobile.  Motor vehicles play an important role in the lives of nearly everyone in this country.  Families often have multiple vehicles, often one for each family member.  We need our cars for every day life and they provide us with untold benefit but on the other side of this coin is the tragic loss of lives in motor vehicle accidents, ~ 38,000 per year in the U.S. with many more suffering severe injury.  One could also mention guns and other firearms.  While I spent many happy days during my teenage years pheasant and duck hunting with my Dad, today I am convinced that the flip side of that coin is so bad that I now have a hard time justifying the gun situation in this country.  In fact, in recent years there have been as many gun deaths in the U.S. as the number killed in motor vehicle accidents, about 75% being acts of murder.  Guns were initially developed as weapons of war, hardly another positive aspect of humanity.

In 2017 and 2019 I published two articles in “The Rabbit Hole” focusing on the downside of modern day technology, e.g., television, the cell phone, GPS and the like.  Rather than repeating much of that discussion here, I refer you to two articles, “The Downside of Progress” 9/15/2017 and “The Downside of Progress (Revisited) 2/6/2019.  Suffice it to say that given the serious adverse effects of social media, especially on children, the downside of social media is looming larger in our present day consciousness.

In conclusion, my hope is that somehow we escape the dreadful shadow of negativity, turn from shooting one another to helping one another.  We certainly need a reset of our politics.  We need a new look, different from the tiresome, dishonest and ineffective politics of recent administrations.  Hopefully, new faces will appear on the scene to pull our politics “out of the mud” and onto a “silver lining” new highway to more glorious times where that “sweet spot” of compromise between socialism and free market capitalism is achieved and embraced by all.  While everyone should be free to practice religion as they see fit, I would hope that we all recognize the potential power of positive thinking and, in particular, the magic that can be achieved by practicing “The Golden Rule”.