Definition of health

Having gone through a rough one year in terms of family health, I must say i am disgusted with the current state of doctors, their concern (lack of) for patients and medicine around here.

Hospitals are no longer a place where you go to get your heatlh back. It is more like a grey area with shady business practices (ah - the joys of insurance!) where you go to get abused and probably come back feeling sicker than you went in.

For all claims of advancement, i strongly believe that most of our doctors (or is it the medical science itself?) dont have passable competence or knowledge in handling human health.

Try finding out what causes hyperemesis, or eczema or whats a reasonable cure for sciatica...? It is not surprising that once popular conventional methods fail, people try alternatives (how long can you take painkillers and sedatives and hope that you get better).

Again find a good doctor in the alternate field is just as hard..... I hope that these systems get more attention than they currently have. For e.g. acupuncture does a lot of good for sciatica cases (still in process of trying it out - so far results are pretty impressive), homeopathy is great for chronic cases (personal experience with my back ache) etc..

What we probably need is a site where people can share their experiences - i went to X hospital, Dr. Y is incompetent, the hospital ripped me for insurance money. Went to Dr X with disease Z and got healed in 3 months.

Vithoulkas has a great site on homeopathy, and I find his views pretty human. The site is worth visiting. Read about his views on definition of health too..

Process Monitor...

This new tool is worth its bytes in gold. Has already come in handy for me many times. It is a huge upgrade from filemon/procmon. Ability to track short lived processes, logging, better filtering...

Check out the authors video: using proc mon

Get the tool here

Quillpad...

This is a cool transliteration website built by rampi&Co. It is pretty intuitive to use, you just type in whatever seems phonetically right to you and it automatically converts it to the language that you choose.

No more mix of capitals and smalls, artificial repetition of a's to get your words transliterated. If you are used to other transliteration tools, this could be confusing, forget your habits and try to write naturally. This promises to be a great tool for the indian market.

For eg. type iroju nenu chala santoshamuga unnanu and it converts it as you would expect. Try it out and give feedback to them: quillpad

Ted talks...

These days, whenever I go to a talk/meeting, I see these features:

1. They are completely unprepared.
2. Don't respect the audience's time - "hey, i am on the stage" kind of talks.
   
3. Have no theme or decision to convey.
4. Randomly ramble or use keywords till you get irritated.
   

So naturally I am pretty happy to find some talks which violate all of these guidelines. These are among the best talks I have ever listened to. Wide range of speakers and it suprising how much they can convey in half hour. Here's the Ted talks link

I am back ...

The picture below explains why there were no posts from me
for a long time :)