Still Clickin

Last month, before I went “under the knife”, my surgeon asked if I had any questions. I know I mumbled a few things, but I really felt stupid. Everyone tells you that, in this day and age, you must become your own advocate. It is your obligation to learn about what is going on and become involved with and knowledgeable about the process.

I confess. I didn’t do any of that. I was raised in an era where you trusted your doctor to give you the best care and physical pain was something you absorbed stoically. That style is not PC today, but it seems to be how I always react after I turn over the Medicare card.

In hindsight, although I can’t abandon my “boys don’t cry” orientation, becoming informed doesn’t mean that I consider the doctor my adversary. It simply means that I can be a better patient. I need to be aware and provide proper feedback to help the medical professionals provide the quality of care that they want to deliver.

That said, where do you go to learn enough to ask intelligent questions? In today’s world, that means the Internet. The following sites I found after my surgery seem to offer a sufficiently broad range of information to help with the most common health questions.

• The Google Search Engine - This is an obvious place to start looking, but you need to enter your search criteria carefully, not logically. Start with the most important word first and place the following words in decreasing importance. E.g. surgery heart ventricle left, rather than heart surgery of left ventricle. Google led me to The British Medical Journal, which I never would have found on my own.

• WebMD - This is the granddaddy of Internet medical information sites and is quite comprehensive. However, it is broad, rather than deep, so you might want to use it to make sure you are using the correct terms before you dig deeper. It is a commercial site, so you will see a lot of ads.

• The Mayo Clinic - You have to bounce around this site to locate everything you are looking for, but the information goes much deeper. It would be helpful if the site offered more graphics.

• The Merck Manual of Medical Information - This is a well organized resource that has extensive information as well as helpful graphics. It is very easy to navigate through this site. Its inclusion of associated topics can help expand the scope of your search.

• RN Central List of 100 Health Sites - Leave it to the nurses to reach out and lend a hand. They have done just that with a list of 100 health and wellness sites for seniors. These sites not only deal with health, but with aging as well. The RN Central site is actually a place on the web for nurses, but they created this list specifically as a help for seniors.

• The National Health Information Center - A site oriented more toward living a healthy lifestyle than information on diseases. This is a US government service. It has no commercial aspect.

• Tips for Understanding Medical Information - This site contains some guidance from the University of Connecticut about how to deal with all of the medical information that we encounter in today’s world. It’s a dose of common sense.

Hope this has been helpful. Click below to make a comment. Or, if you would prefer to make an enhancement to the original article, please go to wikiSenior and click on edit.

Personally, I hate web squiggles almost as much as I can’t stand the labels they now put on fruit. I don’t know about you, but I find these jumbles of numbers and letters relatively difficult to decipher. Placed there, right when you want to finalize a transaction or a comment, you are given a challenge test in graphics. Half the time, I fail that test. (Thankfully, they give you another chance.) I’m told by the doctors that my eyesight is reasonably good, but the lines through the characters often make the identification hard to determine. I simply get it wrong.

The web squiggles are placed there to determine if this message or comment happens to involve a human being. Professional spammers use computers to spread their garbage around the net. (Note: Sometimes, they can even enlist our own computers to do the nasty deed, especially if we are linked to the web for any length of time.) The spammers have not yet figured out how to program their way around the squiggles, and there are still enough unprotected sites that they don’t have to.

This blog used to be hosted by blogger, but their introduction of squiggles was one of the reasons I decided to leave and host the site independently. This past week, I faced the squiggles decision once again when our companion site, wikiSenior.com, endured another spam attack.

Wiki sites are extremely vulnerable to spam because they are structured to allow anyone on the web to add a comment or entire article. That openness makes them sitting ducks for spammers. At first, the wiki was forced to ask people to register, albeit using any name they could conceive. (Donald Duck is still available.) But the spammers leapt that hurdle.

Now, just about every spam block has been placed on the wiki site . . . except for squiggles. The squiggles are all programmed and ready to go, but I just couldn’t take that step without trying a more gentle challenge first. You are very welcome to add your insights and experiences to wikiSenior.com, but permit me to apologize for the intrusion of challenge tests.

If anyone has heard of other options for blocking spam, I’m all ears. Thanks for your interest.

This has been a very frustrating week! The automated spam engines are on the attack once again. This time, their attack is deliberately targeted toward wiki sites.

Readers of StillClickin know that another facet of this web site offers WikiSenior, a collaborative senior lifestyle guide. The purpose of WikiSenior is to provide an organized Internet space that permits seniors to freely share their insights on the joys and frustrations that they face at this time in their lives. The index of topics is diverse, and the ease of entry is fairly straightforward. The software is deliberately structured to be welcoming. Unfortunately, that makes it a sitting duck for spammers.

If you are starting a new Internet site, there are a number of firms that offer to boost your ratings with the search engines. They do this by placing a link to this new Internet site on every other site they can locate that will accept it. Essentially, they are stealing the hosting services and infrastructure of the site they invade. When a search engine such as Google crawls through the invaded site, they will note the URL and raise its ranking.

At first, WikiSenior was open for contributions from anyone, even anonymous users. When new porn and drug sites seemed to appear on the site every morning, anonymous users had to be cut off. Only registered users could make postings to the site.

Recognizing that, the spammers now have a new program that will automatically register hundreds of wiki users at a time. They then slip “contributions” by these users containing scads of URL’s into every wiki site they can find. Interestingly, they even follow proper wiki formatting.

Every wiki site administrator has to remove each of these new “users” one-by-one. Last week, WikiSenior received about 500 “users”, so this administrator had no choice but to shut off all new users. Obviously, that is totally contrary to its purpose.

What comes next is a question mark. If anyone has any novel ideas, I’m listening. Frustrated, but listening.

Well, the votes are in and the campaigns are over.  What happens next?

I remember standing down on Broad Street on V-J Day, fiercely waving my little flag with 48 stars on the field of blue.  Everyone in the town was so excited.  We were so proud of our country that we got hoarse from shouting.  Patriotism bubbled through our blood.

Today, those days are a distant memory.  I suspect that the abysmal ratings experienced by our current President are in large part due to the fact that he abused the good will of the country and defined patriotism as loyalty to his particular agenda.  That agenda was never developed with a broad consensus.  Any questioning was characterized as unpatriotic.  Instead, a closed-door, siege mentality seemed to reign.  His definition of patriotism, i.e. support anything I ask for, is an unfortunate reminder that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Hopefully, this new President will demand patriotism of us all.  How he defines it, however, will be critical.  So far, his words seem to strike the right cord for many people.  But his most serious initial challenge will be to defeat the spirit of partisanship that has infected our land.  In my own judgment, partisanship has become the greatest threat to patriotism today.

Partisanship is arrogant, deaf, and divisive.  It strikes at the heart of the Union.  It breeds vindictiveness and contempt.  It doesn’t show respect.  Worse, it doesn’t even listen.  It concentrates on keeping score and getting even.  It has infected Washington to the point where the People it supposedly represents have developed a fundamental lack of trust in its institutions and its members.

We, the People, are hungry for fairness, decency, thoughtfulness, and cooperation.  We want to believe again and feel proud.  We want to feel that our country, and our individual districts and states, are being fairly represented.  The particular party involved has to take a back seat.  There is too much serious work to be done to allow time for “party games.”

This new President-elect is saying all the right words about partisanship.  But politics, as we all know, can be a dirty business.  Hopefully, he will be able to lead us back from party-first to country-first.  He deserves our support to achieve that.  If he strays from that, he deserves our honest questions.