Good OldTimers

Saturday 18 June 2011

Medical outfit gives a boost to de-addiction treatment

Oman's potential for medical tourism has got a new impetus with MediCare Tourist, a local outfit, stepping in to cover the constraints of inadequate manpower and facilities.
MediCare Tourism, a division of Travel Point LLC, has focused on providing the best partner hospitals and doctors for satisfying the needs of their patients. The partner hospitals and medical centres are among the largest, most trusted and internationally accredited available in Oman.
Dr Vishakha Deshmukh, medical adviser of MediCare Tourism, who has more than 15 years of experience in the medical profession in India and Oman, gives useful advice in understanding and analysing the patient’s disease as well as guiding them for quality treatment. Moreover, while discussing the patient’s ailments with the overseas treating doctors, it is much easier to convey the exact picture to them and get a realistic idea about the treatment programme outcome. MediCareTourism strives to take care of every detail, right from the time the patient goes to them with his complaint to the time he returns home after treatment. Patients are treated for orthopaedic, cardiac, cosmetic, ophthalmic, neurological and cancer treatment, as well as for weight reduction and rehabilitative programmes.
"We have added a treatment programme for alcohol and drug addiction to our numerous services. Oman has a large number of young population in need of this facility. Drug addiction is common among the youngsters of today, who will be the future of tomorrow. They resort to petty crimes to satisfy this need. Becoming a victim of drug is easy, what is difficult is to get rid of that habit. With the help of our trained and skilled partners we try to cure the addicts," said Dr Vishakha.
"Medical tourism or ‘global healthcare’ as it’s increasingly called, involves travelling to a foreign country for a medical procedure. This industry has been growing rapidly over the years as more and more people seek faster or cheaper alternatives to the healthcare offered in their own countries. Occasionally the medical procedure needed is urgent, but more often it is an elective treatment such as cosmetic surgery or dental care," said group general manager Travel Point LLC, Oman Sunil Prabhakar.

 

Sunday 5 June 2011

Britain's Got Talent? More like a very bizarre addiction

Roll up! Roll up! Take your seats for the hotly-denied Britain's Got Talent conspiracy theory, in which an anonymous blogger claims Simon Cowell has fixed tonight's final so it's won by some tween singer – a tween Cowell has in fact had on his books for the past two years. Not since the alleged Islamist plot to target The X Factor has it been possible to give quite such a toss, and I'm thrilled to learn that lawyers for Cowell have attended a west London police station. Unfortunately, they reported the alleged crime of malicious communications, as opposed to the theft of an entire generation's neurons.

If you can judge a society by its imagined enemies as well as its real ones, then I can't help feeling Britain's Got Problems. The point about being plugged into the Matrix was that it allowed humans to believe they were at the peak of their civilisation. On that model, Britain is plugged into a conspiracy in which the apogee of human cultural achievement consists of a merely adequate pre-pubescent singer, a keyboard-bashing granny, and a couple of performing dogs. Take the red pill, Keanu! Whatever the truth is, it couldn't possibly be crapper than this.

Once again, we are obliged to confront the smallness of this septic isle. Not for us the suggestion that Pearl Harbour was secretly allowed to happen, or that alien remains are stored in a government facility. For us, it is the suggestion that a couple of talentless chihuahuas are going to be done out of their rightful victory by a kid with six months of disappointing record sales in him before his voice breaks.

Many of you will prefer to wait until Oliver Stone immortalises the tale on film, but for those in need of a recap, the facts are these: this week, someone claiming to be "a Sony music executive" posted detailed claims that Cowell had fixed Britain's Got Talent – claims that spread round the internet like wildfire. That the story was arrant cobblers was obvious from the first paragraph, in which the notional executive claimed the business "has left me increasingly uncomfortable about the integrity of Britain's Got Talent". The what, love? The "integrity of Britain's Got Talent"? I can't imagine a more ludicrous concept, short of "the corporate social responsibility of Spectre".

The claim that such programmes are secretly manipulated is not exactly new. Indeed, it was first made in the form of a cave painting. But we are talking low-level, amusingly ghastly manipulation, exemplified by shameless editing, or the former X Factor contestant whose father had died, who claims he was ordered by producers to sing Luther Vandross's Dance With My Father.

In fact, the real conspiracy in all these shows is not secret. It is right up there on the screen, and that is Cowell's greatest trick – all the greater for its preposterous blatancy. Put simply, the formula of a Simon Cowell talent contest is this: ordinary people queue in their tens of thousands for the chance to work for scale or nothing on a primetime, top-rating TV show, in which Cowell persuades the public to pay him (via phonelines) to tell him which acts he may sell back to them.

Lex Luthor it ain't. But then it doesn't need to be. Instead of the Great and Powerful Oz, I frequently imagine Simon Cowell as the man behind the curtain, working the levers of public taste while torn between opportunistic enthusiasm and gnawing inner despair at how easy it is.

So what are we to make of people's need to believe in conspiracy theories such as the one floated above? In his famous essay on conspiracy theories in America, the historian Richard Hofstadter noted that a significant part of these tales is psychological projection – people ascribe their own worst traits to the imagined enemy, thus relieving themselves of various kinds of responsibility. And so with an increasingly savvy reality TV audience, who understand that Cowell always wins, yet watch in ever greater numbers and have to find a way of elevating their involvement into something more than a mug's game.

Both fans and haters need to develop outlandish conspiracy theories because they can't actually believe millions upon millions are genuinely in thrall to this stuff. The weeks after the finale of a Cowell show are a bit like that scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream where the drug wears off and Titania can't actually believe she was carrying on with a donkey. What visions have I seen! Methought I was enamoured of Steve Brookstein! Even now, there will be countless folk who can't believe they invested time and possibly money rooting for Matt Cardle – last year's X Factor winner and a chap of absolutely zero star quality – or indeed for almost all the previous victors, who are essentially competing for the chance to be dropped by Cowell's record company inside of a year.

The only bearable explanation is that we are being duped by some master villain. And as the steward of a deadly serious theory in which Cowell is designated the Karaoke Sauron, I am quite convinced I should know.

 

The Addicts Under The Bridge

A small fortress on a hill in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Heroin addicts in Afghanistan's capital usually meet in hidden places. In an abandoned building. In a disused cargo container. In places where the dealers who bring them heroin paste can find them and they can spread the paste on tinfoil, light it, and inhale the smoke through a thin plastic tube.

But with so many addicts in Kabul, the hidden places are spilling into public view. One of those places is a bridge over the Kabul river in the neighborhood of Pol-e-Sukhta, near Kabul University. There, hundreds of addicts gather daily for their fix.

Recently, I went to the bridge to learn more. On the first visit, drug dealers chased me away with stones. On the second, accompanied by police, I was able to mingle with the addicts undisturbed and learn their stories.

The world I enter in the darkened recesses beneath the bridge stinks of urine and feces and is filled with trash. But the men there do not notice. Their attention is fixed only on the bright fire of their matches heating the heroin paste until it smokes and, then, for several blissful moments they enter the state they crave most of all, where nothing touches them.

Inadequate Medical Help

I speak with one user who had already been hours under the bridge and is between fixes. He says his story was typical of those around him, just as those around him were typical of the some 8 percent of Afghans the UN says is addicted to drugs, often opium or heroin. That is 8 percent of the population between the ages of 15 and 64, twice the world average.
I said, 'I'm sick, I can't walk.' But the doctor said, 'we have no bed for you'


The man, who does not give his name, says he is 38 and used to be a professional football player. He says he picked up his habit while he was a refugee in Iran. There, he says, drug dealers offered people their first tastes of opium and heroin for free, knowing they would become addicted.

I ask if he ever tried to kick his habit since returning to Afghanistan. Yes, he says.

"I decided to leave [this habit behind]. I went there [to the hospital] for one month, coming and going, coming and going, and they told me 'don't smoke.' I said, 'OK.' The doctor told me, the day you decide, then don't smoke. So, I stopped. But then I began to vomit and have diarrhea. I said, 'I'm sick, I can't walk.' But the doctor said, 'we have no bed for you,'" he said.

The doctor had only one treatment for him: "The doctor told me to take cold showers. But I didn't feel better, I felt worse. Later, the doctor asked, 'are you feeling better now?' I said, 'yes.' And then he said, 'take this broom and sweep the hospital'. I said, 'am I a patient or a cleaner?' And the doctor said, 'if you don't do it, I will kick you in the stomach.'"

The man, who soon relapsed, tells his story so matter-of-factly that he seems to have lost hope he will ever end his addiction. And, unfortunately, the statistics for drug use in Afghanistan support that view.

Only one in 10 addicts receives any drug treatment, because programs are rare and underfunded. According to a study last year by the UN Office of Drug Control (UNODC) there are roughly 700,000 people in Afghanistan who want treatment for their addictions but cannot gain access to a facility. And even when they gain access, long-term treatments like methadone substitution are rarely available, making the likelihood of relapse high.

Unhappy Locals

The presence of so many addicts under the bridge is deeply disturbing for residents of the area. One man, Hamidullah, who lives nearby recently left this recorded message for Radio Free Afghanistan's popular talk show "Liberty Listeners."

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