YOU DIRTY RAT!

The white rat released the hooded rat in the tube.

Late Fifties “white rat” experiments were sneered at in the romantic Sixties where people insisted on free will.   But even hippies had to admit that a stimulus to a living creature led to a response of some kind.  Skinner and his notorious boxes in which a cat could learn how to trip the latch have by now led to far more elaborate experiments in which rats had to cooperate with each other like Air Force guys down a missile silo, both tripping switches together.  Or, even more intriguingly, rats would actually throw the lever to free their fellow rat from a transparent tube.

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-social-empathetic-pro-social-behavior-rats.html

Stimulus/response plus conditioning have, since those early days, been joined by a host of ingenious experiments that teach chimps to talk, cause you to buy things you don’t need, and twist your mind politically.

At first the conditioning was pretty obvious:  ring a bell when you feed the dog and pretty soon the dog slobbers when you ring the bell, even if there’s no food.  But then the SR conditioning went into the subconscious.  So much of the mind is subconscious.  FAR more than is conscious.  SR conditioning works even at the level of the knob at the top of the spine that is the earliest precursor of brain.  But it’s not conscious.  “Why do I do what I would not do?” asked Saint Paul.  (I shudder at the possibilities of just what that might have been.)  Why do I go on a diet and then find myself standing in front of the refrigerator holding half a ham sandwich without any memory of how I got there.  SR conditioning.

Reference Ranges for Blood Tests

We can see operant conditioning on an fMRI.  Neurons love to travel on the paths they know, a repertoire of connectome patterns.   And they’re not necessarily conscious.  Anyway, neurons aside, much of consciousness and thought is at least influenced and possibly the product of hormone messaging.  We know enough about testosterone to make jokes and enough about street drugs to realize how much they change behavior, but not everyone thinks about the hormones their own bodies necessarily and constantly make until they get out of whack.  Luckily, we can monitor them with frequent blood draws and chemical assays and compensate with med antagonists.  Of course, it’s a drag to test blood all the time, even if it’s just a blood glucose test at home.  If you’re rural, you’ll have to drive.  Often.  Calibration of meds is now a given of many treatments.

Certainly organs can be taught schedules and expectations:  how do you think your stomach knows to growl when you miss a meal?  But we think of the molecules themselves as being inert, just passive substances.  Now we begin to realize that our situations change our responses which change our secretions which affect our minds but not CONSCIOUSLY.  Fertile and pregnant women have such drastic changes in their body chemicals that their resulting behavior becomes obvious to themselves and others.  In the best of cases, after the baby is born or after the woman has aged past menstruation, everything returns to normal -- whatever that is -- but not always.

ANY dimension necessary for function can go rogue and threaten survival.

Maintain homeostasis!

The “solutions” of the body’s dispersal of molecules in fluid in turn affect organs.  So in finding out whether or not metformin has given me a susceptibility to lactic acidosis -- which is a change in the acid/alkali balance of the fluids of the body -- the Ph.D. nurse practitioner gave me a lot of information about kidneys reacting to the base number.  I listened closely because when I did my clinical pastoral education, a young girl was brought in who died from drinking too much lemonade on a hot day -- the acid level of her blood was beyond the level that would allow function.  They keep telling us this is the same thing happening in the world’s oceans, which are becoming too acid to allow the formation of lime-based shells on the little marine creatures.

One’s acid/alkali balance is managed unconsciously but voluntary behavior can overcome it, causing us to do harmful things.  Is making the world’s oceans more acid a voluntary behavior or an involuntary behavior?   The medical/social research people tell us that only thirty per cent or so of patients are compliant when they are told what they need to do to say healthy:  pills, diet, exercise, both public and intimate behavior, may be involved.  Why is that?  The unconscious reaches up from our internal sea and grabs us.  We are conditioned to eat our neighbor’s pie at a church social.  Want to talk about smoking?  How about a steamy Saturday night?

It goes even deeper than that.  We creatures are really colonies of one-celled animals who cooperate to keep the complex process that is “us” surviving in the world.  And now that we can detect what goes on in a cell, each little blob turns out to have preferences and prejudices about what it will take in and what it will kick out.  Fold the proteins wrong, introduce strange molecules, alter the temperature -- you might or might not survive as a whole process.  Human planetary society is the same thing only larger.  This is called “fractal,” when one little part’s pattern is repeated by the whole.

A fractal pattern

So that implies that the behavior of the people of the planet is about thirty per cent of what it ought to be.  Is there a difference between the white powder of cocaine and the white powder of sucrose or the white powder of processed wheat flour?  The Ph.D. nurse practitioner said that the warning label on metformin, which is very definite about the danger of lactic acidosis, is so scary that it makes people obsess.  Therefore the medical community tries to resist testing people’s blood.  In fact, they’d just as soon keep the problem secret because it is “very rare.”  It’s such a nuisance to have to give the test.   At least this person filled me in on what conditions are likely to trigger the condition, mostly failure to hydrate or a suddenly high demand on muscles.  You know -- cramps.

It turns out that research devised to understand rat behavior is often more useful and interesting than research on their internal organs after they are cut open.  And since death is not involved in behavior research, much of what is learned will transfer to people when experimenting on them.  It is not reassuring.  You know the one about the person who thinks he is shocking a disobedient volunteer and takes the level of supposed shock to a life-threatening intensity?  You know the one about the person sitting in a room with others when the room begins to fill with smoke?  The others know it is an experiment and pretend nothing is happening -- so the person being tested just sits there as well.

But now the experiments have gone online.  Here are two to ponder.  
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/29/internet-human-experiment-facebook-dating-sites

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/06/facebook_unethical_experiment_it_made_news_feeds_happier_or_sadder_to_manipulate.html

They don’t call it experimenting.  They call it “tweaking the algorithm.”  Such funny business can make a person paranoid.  Pretty soon we think there’s an “evil cabal” planning all this stuff.  But the real danger is the conditioning that forms all by itself, the habitual behaviors we trigger over and over until they are part of our lives, though we never really intended either them or their consequences.  The laws of convergence, emergence, synergy and the like are not human-planned events -- they are the realities of interacting forces in the physical world.

No one planned ebola, but now we’re faced with the need for some kind of monitoring and counter-meds, just as we were with the World Flu epidemic and the present World HIV  -- and global warming.  The trouble is that so much is unconscious -- but our consciousnesses can only deal with so much at one time. 

So where is your free will now, Mr. Romance?  But, hey, I'm not ready for the return of John Calvin yet.  If religion is a way of guiding one's behavior so as to maintain homeostasis for one's self, one's society and one's planet, which religion is it?  Science?  Tao?  Some hybrid?  Start from scratch?  

A SIMPLE TEST

Since the last Nurse Practitioner who got stuck with the Valier Clinic refused my wish to take a lactic acidosis test on grounds that it was VERY RARE and therefore I didn’t have it, also advised me that my aching arms were either “atypical rheumatism,” “atypical arthritis” or “atypical fibromyalgia.”   No treatment.  To her, I guess I could be “atypical” but not “rare.”  So I waited until the next NP was assigned to the clinic.  In the meantime the arms have cured themselves.

Oh, boy.   Here’s the new Nurse Practitioner -- actually a PA, a Physician Assistant -- on YouTube.  Joni Walton is a “yummy mommy” -- that is, so honeyed, so moneyed, so enviable, so honored, so married to the finest surgeon in town down in the capital, and yet so willing to tell all her little foibles, etc.  My antennae are stiff with vibes.  Some of you will love her at once.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on1YZIZDwxU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfkMZvF9xsI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqk6p3UMBZs

She even knows all about Indians and spirituality.  (By now people who know me are all laughing their butts off.)  In short, she’s a typical UU type.  The Southern variety. (The nurse who did the blood draw -- a new one yet again -- was very skillful.  Ask for Amber.  Local ranch girl.)  

This is not the doc in question.

Frankly and transparently, the management brought in this elite, well-connected woman to counteract a big old bull of an abusive doc who probably could not pass a mental health test.  He’s a leftover from a different era.  But he had money.  For the particulars see http://www.cutbankpioneerpress.com/shelby_promoter/news/article_e6251184-8841-11e3-ae4a-001a4bcf887a.html.  Be assured that when I worked in that clinic as a ward clerk years ago and even in the community at large, I heard stories far worse than bad language.  He’s lucky he hasn’t been punched out -- maybe he has.  But to PA Sugar, Ph.D., verbal abuse is a major sin.  Juries will love her.

I asked for just the blood test -- but got pushed through the BP, the oxymeter, the conference, anyway.  It’s money.  Medicare will pay.  But I take care of my own health, thank you, because there is a steady procession of medical people through this clinic and they vary extremely.  I really liked the woman doc who was an amateur geologist and who cut a little tumor off my forehead.  And I really liked the one who had been a nurse and wore a skirt and apron instead of scrubs.  Both were brisk and businesslike. The best PA was a big bear of a man who was gentle, thoughtful, funny, and did the only full diabetes checkup I’ve ever had, though one instrument had been put away broken so he had to improvise a bit.

My time employed at the “Mother” Marias Hospital in Shelby was a tumultuous one to say the least.  I got the job of ward clerk because I was the only applicant with any computer skills, but even after six years doing data input for the City of Portland, I had a devil of a time with the clinic’s software.  Then they changed to a program even more difficult.  They shared the common management conviction that technology can prevent human error.  All but theirs.

The ward clerk just before me turned out to be only taking time off rather than quitting, so I was relieved of the job when she came back, but the truth is that Mary Maxwell set the bar high by doing a lot for the nurses to compensate for their overloads -- including routinely cleaning the break room and nurses' stations.  She had been a lab technician and had the right temperament for it.  I do not.   She was universally loved. (I liked her, too.)  I was not. My training and probably my temperament were a much better fit as student chaplain in a major regional hospital which was part of my ministerial training.  When this ward clerk quit, she was replaced by two senior nurses who -- the last I heard -- were still struggling with the computer software.

So Dr. Joni is sitting there making oh-so-familiar little speeches about the major importance of exercise (stop laughing, you guys!) and trying to figure me out.  By quitting time she probably knows quite a bit more, since her clerk’s father was a student of mine and the clerk’s father’s mother was a student of Bob Scriver’s, etc.  Of course, it will be an edited version because even that family doesn’t know EVERYTHING, even though they live just across the alley.  But maybe her clerk is more discrete than I think.  What would I want Joni to know?

Maggie on the left.  Lady on the right is from Colorado.

It’s not an info prob -- it’s a life-experience prob.  Nurses around here who are effective are generally a salty bunch.  They’ve likely done as much veterinary care as helping people.  Maggie Nutter was my fav.  She used to bring in ranch animals for the old people to enjoy -- calves, a burro.  The windows looked onto a closed courtyard.

PA Joni, Ph.D., who teaches at Carroll College, has written an article summarized here:   http://www.acperesearch.net/dec07.html .  “Prayer Warriors: a grounded theory study of American Indians receiving hemodialysis.”  $15 to buy online.  I did NOT want to tell her what my own CV includes.  It would not have improved the dynamics.  At least, like the Indians she recruited, I speak English.  I looked up "grounded theory method."  Very interesting.

I tried to tell her about “Sarge,” who mistook my glasses for my eyes.  I tried to tell her that I seriously blog long-form, rather than write little stories as she assumed, and am in daily contact with some very informed people.  She spent a good deal of time advising me about narcotic abuse locally.  (Never mentioned alcoholism.)  Maybe she thought I was fishing for a prescription.

Very nice lady -- don't know her -- off Google images

This whole thing really bothers me.  I can’t crack the puzzle of Nice Prosperous People who are supposed to be experts who have NO CLUE to the reality of people’s lives, not even those of nurses they are supposed to be teaching.  Or is it me who is clueless?  In my experience such people are intervenors and that makes trouble because they force action on THEIR terms.  Usually, society gives them the power.  Being “helped” adds up to being made a capture victim, so trust is a bad idea.

The kind of writing I do (you don’t see all of it) means rummaging around in one’s interior and ripping off scabs.  I have issues with success and class, money and education, but that’s not it.  She’s making big ultimate mind-blowing subjects into little pillow-fluffing exercises.  (Hear that sneer?  I could censor it, but that would eliminate evidence.)  

There’s also a thing about me being a phony, that my time as a UU minister was somehow a fraud, that I tricked my way into it and then was found out.  It’s in me, not her.  Worse, once "in", I was disillusioned and wanted out.  She could have no idea these things were fermenting in a tubby old white-haired woman with a big mouth.  But that’s the point.  I feel she SHOULD be able to guess such a thing.  I’m not the only person around here with a surprising past -- in fact, mine is better known than some others I could name.  It's an impossible expectation.

In part it’s her sense of entitlement that bugs me.  Maybe she thinks that intending to help me and having been praised as an academic should give her access to my private and personal self.  But it doesn’t.  It doesn’t even give her info she could assimilate.  She's more like a typical doc's wife than like a nurse.  She DID personally call me with my test results, which are within normal limits. I begin to understand that "lactic acidosis" is less a constant condition than a floating figure that can get too high or low, something like glucose.  Balance.  

Crossroads Correction Center

Then I start "replaying the tapes" of the conversation.  (Just memory.  No machines.)  Very little was about me.  Something else was present in the room.  A lawsuit?  Not about me but about the Marias County hospital and the little Valier Clinic? Why is this high-powered woman who operates in a national context treating our local chronics?  What was she really trying to figure out?  Shelby, location of the Mother Hospital, is a major transportation hub, a prison town that shares nurses with the hospital, a place that is not comfortable for Indians, full of nomadic oil field labor, and close to the Canadian border.  In fact, some of the travel nurses live in Canada.  Or is this all paranoia?

Shelby, Sweetgrass Hills in the background -- the Canadian border