Some good attention is coming to Rwanda's national health plan.

I finally begin to feel that I'm getting my body back. The new presupposition that underwrites this feeling is the discovery that the body isn't a material object, but a pattern of activity. Sounds wooky, but let me explain.

When people say, “You're looking good,” it's usually because you're not looking good. Expand the statement to: “You're looking better than I expected” or “It's noteworthy that you're looking good.” Not a problem; assume people mean well. Part of it might be expanded thus: “I can get a grip on my fear of getting sick by announcing how well you are surviving your case of whatever it is.” The expres...

The following email just arrived from Gonaives, a bit after the passage of Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna. The Haitians have a saying that “wet poverty is worse than dry poverty.” Although it’s not true that Gonaives cannot be reached by vehicle, it is true that the city center is still under water, and that the road into the city is well and truly flooded. Between Pont Sonde—the only way to the coast, since the major bridge between Port-au-Prin...

We've all known people who were obsessed with animal testing of medicines and cosmetics. I wonder if many of those soft-hearted folks are similarly enraged to hear about medical experimentation on human beings? Well, maybe that's OK, since humans deserve what's coming to them. But how about ones too young to sign a consent form? Or what if they live in such desperate poverty that they can't really refuse the token payments offered? (People tha...

I’m starting to really panic about moving. I wake up in the middle of the night, remembering the toughest moments of the adjustment to life in Seoul and blowing them up into imaginary future catastrophes.

K Klingensmith’s post “Pictures of You.,” on medical images of the body, asks the question, “For the person who sees a copy of their X-ray, MRI, or sonogram, how can it seem like their body?” I’m fascinated with this complicated sense of dissonance between the body that we experience and the image that we see — between the body that we experience and the mystery of its inner workings, proceeding without our knowledge or control. What stories ...

Going into yesterday's election, I was looking forward to making an all-nighter of it, chronicling shrieks of joy and groans of despair as they rent the night calm across this fair land until the rosy-fingered dawn came in and told us to knock it off. I didn't make it: around 11 I got too woozy and flab-brained to deserve any reader's attention, and tucked in for the night. But my poor showing on this night of all nights-- this night of pleasa...

One of the things I did on my printculture vacation (to follow E Hayot’s lead) is get my mom on a Medicare prescription drug plan. She turned 65 earlier this week, and my goal was to have the plan in place before her insurance plan expired and her Medicare coverage began. I’ve been dreading the prospect of wading through the paperwork for over a year, and all the media coverage about the proposed drug coverage, the “donut hole,” and the disco...

One of the things about living in Los Angeles is, everyone you know has already tried the new-agey thing your midwestern self is afraid of. I have been writing lately about acupuncture, specifically about a brief moment in the early 1970s when doctors in the People's Republic of China began using acupuncture to produce anesthetic effects during surgery. The results caused a brief stir in the West, largely because acupuncture anesthesia (it's ...

One of the most e-mailed articles on The New York Times site two days running is “Shutting Themselves In,” which appeared in the Sunday magazine (read it now before they archive it and make you pay!). It’s about the growing numbers of young men (and some women) in Japan, mostly in their teens and 20s, who have dropped out of life and shut themselves up in their rooms, often for years at a time. Yes, years! They simply drop out of school, or d...

As an Angry Young Man my New Year’s resolution was not to make any resolutions. This seemed clever at the time. The crankiness about the resolution ritual was in many ways related to a crankiness about the holiday formerly known as Christmas (which, amazingly, seems to have endured one more year, despite the vast conspiracy against it). It wasn’t that I found wishing for peace or giving gifts to loved ones inherently worthy of disdain, but tha...

The recent creation of mice with human brain cells has got a few people excited about the possible legitimation of Don Bluth––director of The Secret of NIMH––'s cult following, and lots of other people very, very worried. Now, this study is not simply a foray into genetic mixing for its own sake, nor an attempt to form a pack of lovable, super-intelligent philosophermice. Rather the addition of human brain cells to the...

Driving out of the parking garage of my big-state University a week or so ago, I spotted a red magnetic ribbon affixed to the back of the car in front of me, which at first glance I recognized as the largest HIV/AIDS awareness ribbon I’d ever seen. But on a second look I noticed the white “Go Badgers!” printed up one side of the ribbon. My reaction was ungenerous. Am I supposed to be aware that you love the Badgers? Are you s...

If you have come to this site seeking information about masturbation and/or pregnancy, please check out the WebMD site, which may provide the answers you’re seeking. Pretty much everyday, I check printculture’s sitemeter to get a sense of who is visiting our site and how they’re getting to us. I’m happy to say that more people seem to be visiting us on purpose than not; that is, they’re getting to our site direc...

My tooth hurts. Not unbearably, not excruciatingly. But it’s letting me know it won’t be ignored for long. A couple of weeks ago, a different tooth on the other side of my mouth had started hurting, to the point that for the 24 hours before I could get in to see my dentist, I couldn’t eat any solid food because it was too painful to bite down. (I am now in the multi-step process of getting a root canal.) And now this other to...