This is yet another aspect of the end of life issues we have been discussing. Necessity and quality of care are challenges we all confront.  It would beinteresting to hear from the physicians in our group what they think.

Nasik Elahi

It was lunchtime before my afternoon surgery clinic, which meant that I was at my desk, eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich and clicking through medical articles. Among those which caught my eye: a British case report on the first 3-D-printed hip implanted in a human being, a Canadian analysis of the rising volume of emergency-room visits by children who have ingested magnets, and a Colorado study finding that the percentage of fatal motor-vehicle accidents involving marijuana had doubled since its commercial distribution became legal. The one that got me thinking, however, was a study of more than a million Medicare patients. It suggested that a huge proportion had received care that was simply a waste.

For the rest of the article please click on the link.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande?mbid=nl_050515_Daily&CNDID=17878219&mbid=nl_050515_Daily&CNDID=17878219&spMailingID=7717036&spUserID=MjQ4NTYwMzU4NDkS1&spJobID=680489128&spReportId=NjgwNDg5MTI4S0

Worth reading article about the sold out show in Beirut which is both light hearted and ironic.( F. Sheikh)

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In a measured voice, the middle-aged woman in the blue dress recalled how a colleague had come to her hotel room during a work trip years before and tried to rape her, retreating only after she had screamed to alert the neighbors.

In tears, she hid in the bathroom to ponder her dilemma: Should she tell her boss? Would that make matters better or worse?

Complicating her decision was the fact that her boss had been a father figure to her since she was a child. He was also, as it turned out, the iconic and controversial father of the Palestinian nationalist movement, Yasir Arafat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/world/middleeast/protegee-of-arafat-offers-in-show-ironic-take-on-a-conflict.html?rref=homepage&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Home%20Page&pgtype=article

Please click on the link
< http://www.nybooks.com/shared/6fef846702c9e4bf9c581e0867ac3709>

ON DEMOCRACY PART – 2

Democracy and Islam

Why Compatibility of Democracy and Islam is Difficult?

ABSTRACT: There are many views for and against the compatibility of democracy and Islam. The first four caliphs who succeeded the Prophet of Islam during the seventh century, were though elected through consensus of the elite of Medina, but were not directly voted by the people. Later traditions reveal that the caliphate became a monarchic type of hereditary authoritarian ruler-ship. In spite of some thinkers pointing to the fact that a disposition to democracy is present in the spirit of Islam, it is still a big question, why it is difficult for the followers of Islamic faith to accept democracy? . . . So far there are no signs that the future of democracy in the Muslim world is bright. The only success of Arab Spring is that it has helped the Arabs to understand their position between a fading authoritarian order and the need for a democratic order. In spite of an apparent result of the Arab Spring in smashing the myth of the political passivity of the Arabs, there still exists in all Muslim societies an Islamist-utopia—a religious idealism—which stands as impediment to political modernity as well as to democracy. Another significant reason is that Islam presents itself as a public religion—revealed in the Qur’an as a way of life not a religion—that gets easily involved in the legitimization of political power by religious rules. In Islam, both, the public aspect of religion and its utopia of religious idealism, aim at retaining its society’s communal structure. Democracy is a political system that demands the singularity of a political organization implying a human to human horizontal relationship among the individuals in a society. On the other hand religion is primarily a vertical relationship between an individual and his God, where Divine sovereignty is imposed from top-down. Emergence of liberal democracy is possible when the political system is not imposed top-down. It succeeds when the system based on democratic consensus emerges bottom-up. Within such a frame of thought, Islam’s vertical belief of Divine sovereignty clashing with the democracy’s horizontal concept of people’s sovereignty, poses a key question: Is Islam, particularly in the Arab world, compatible with democracy? — MIRZA ASHRAF

To read complete article please visit: https://independent.academia.edu/MirzaAshraf