STREET NEWS newspaper of New York City 1996

Short stories, blogs, poems, filmscripts, news articles, video journalism, and tramp journalism by Bryan Adrian ... follow this link



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"Why We Have More Private Lawyers 
than Public Toilets in New York City"

reprinted with permission of "STREET  NEWS" and the author Bryan Adrian [1996] (2005 online reprint)

"You walk into the emergency room of a 
   city hospital. Suddenly, you're treated 
   like a rancid slab of beef, sitting and 
   waiting and rotting for over eight hours"

by Bryan Adrian

Being homeless, unemployed, or uninsured is nearly always an indignation. The unpleasant and scabrous treatment of patients calling upon New York City's Health Services brings too little comfort. These people become bitten hourly by lives of hardship and misfortune.

Imagine you have been homeless for over one year. You fought in Vietnam in an undeclared war, or, for the oil fields of Kuwait, or the chopping pits of Serbia, or in the Gulf Wars 1 and/or 2, thanks to the Bush Family and HALLIBURTON. Or, you paid handsome taxes in the industrious years preceding your homelessness. You now need immediate health care in New York City. Something is bugging you. You have made immense sacrifices for your country in the name of "democracy". It's time to see just what tax money buys and why you have invested your trust into the System.

You approach the EMS room of a City hospital. Suddenly you are treated like a rancid slab of beef, sitting, waiting, and oftentimes rotting, for over eight hours --- only to be misdiagnosed or partially treated. Take your pick. Uptown, midtown, downtown, and especially Brooklyn General, public or private, OPD or STD clinic, or children's services, most hospitals and many clinics heap derision upon the uninsured, and nothing better.

You can easily find plenty of glaring exhibitions of mismanagement of taxes and valuable human resources, and conspicuous examples of administrative apathy. These enormous bureaucracies are quite capable of dispensing undisguised disdain for the poor, indigent or uninsured Americans, rather than helpful human services. I am not speaking at all here about the 50 million or so illegal immigrants allowed in by our profiteering lobbyists and their paid off Senators on both sides of the House, for that is another disaster to address.

If you have any doubts, go yourself and check out any hospital where our uninsured legal citizens are kicking down the door trying to get healthcare or a job!

First thing, try calling the NYC Department of Health for specific information upon your problem, and ask who might help you in this "the greatest country on earth." Follow up on the information (if you are lucky enough to obtain some useful referrals) and see if you aren't always two steps backward rather than one step forward.

Next, go to an emergency room with a personal health matter that demands critical or immediate attention. You are better off many times simply to walk, if you can and are able, into Chinatown, pay a few bucks and obtain a herbal treatment, or even some acupuncture, or better yet receive some basic rural medical advise from a Chinese health practitioner in Chinatown. If you don't have these few couple of bucks to spend in Chinatown, lord help you when you enter the House of Horrors of the New York City Public Health Services [you will feel like a poor Iraqi peasant in Bagdahd]. Your anger will go through the roof when you think of all the taxes bringing in trillions in the City, and then look around at the obvious misplacement of public funding and public trust. Where does the more than 18% hotel tax and the overall city resident taxation money go anyway, ... or the never-ending home-owner's property taxes, hidden taxes, surtaxes, sales taxes and other covetous revenues? Into a few pockets, you can be sure!! 

Those very same ever expanding pockets, lined with latex, of shark-like real estate sultans, and Wall Street manipulators, and HMO or hospital CEOs, with their retinue of lawyers who respond to their schemes as readily as call girls, those same morally deficient hookworms that have already done so much to wreck our nation and suck it dry, long before Enron and Adelphi and WorldCom and Freddie Mac! Tax monies flow also, to foreign countries cozy with their DC lobbyists, who with their fat stubby fingers are clutching their moneybags, all the while displaying a blatant and arrogant flaunting of numerous UN sanctions and treaties. To arms dealers too. Why do we honor in our U.S. press the ruthless self-made billionaires, or the war-mongering Ariel Sharon, rather than the unsung social reformers? How much longer will the old and stagnant power structures, that are currently creaking under the weight of so much Federal Reserve Gold, and the endless stockpiles of Pentagon missile weapons and biological/viral weapons , throw obstacle after obstacle at Hillary Clinton's former moderate yet numerous and refreshing health care reform initiatives that she has since abandoned out of fear wedded to her Presidential ambitions?

New York City should be so lucky to have a mayor that is not merely always "rudolphing" or channeling tax billions into his pals' hands, and never the public's. Or just sitting on Mount Zion upon his billions like Moneybag Mike Bloomberg!

Trying to take this social matter into my own two hands (every able body helps), I made a physical survey of many medical facilities and agencies myself. I recommend the same for anyone who believes we don't have a very serious problem (which can be corrected if we gouge out the profiteers and HMO legalistic "ERISA-experts" in our healthcare system).

At one major public hospital I met a woman around 50 years old who had taken a bad fall down a single flight of stairs. She had to wait for over 36 hours in the corridor of the emergency room for her hip bone to be set. She screamed out frequently in agony, begging for pain killers. The staff would promise her a pain killer, "doll ... in a few minutes," but never administer it. This dragged on for hours and for hours and for hours. A form of torture, I speculated, or a side-effect of the totally incomprehensible long shifts assigned to all physician residents, in which they involuntarily sleep only a few hours every three or four days [someone should investigate the REAL reasons for this institutionalized malpractice of sleep deprivation, immediately]. 

If we encouraged an over-supply of MD graduates instead of our redundant numbers of essentially dime-a-dozen lawyers [i believe there is a lawyer for every toilet in America, the math comes out the same ... for the last few years enrollment in MBA programs has dropped as precipitously as our economy and available jobs, and applications to law school have risen dramatically, like a sudden erection], then the generous numbers of graduating residents and interns -- the numbers of U.S. citizens in their medical training classes is dwindling rapidly in our overall higher education student student population -- these medical students and residents would have no need to work more than a 35-hour-a-week shift in the hospital. In addition, all physicians and residents should be restricted by federal laws to never work more time than 55 hours weekly for a hospital. If they wish to work longer hours in the week, they can volunteer their unpaid services to a community clinic. I don't think less than .05% of the American population would not applaud the extended education of a physician, where he or she could not benefit on the title "doctor" until they were 35 years of age, or even older, and in turn new legislation should get them giant reductions in their med school tuition which is MONSTROUS! 

Most U.S. citizens are not in the least bit opposed to laws prohibiting doctors and lawyers in the United States from earning more than an educator -- as their normal salary. And I'll bet that one-half of that small percentage of U.S. legal citizens quoted above couldn't care a cockroach's whisker WHICH prestigious university the lawyer or doctor attended. American citizens simply relish satisfactory social justice, confirmation that their trust in governmental leadership is well-placed, and last but certainly not least, their medical fitness. We are still in the trenches of our mean and bleak societal warfare reminiscent of the "us versus them" 1990s America, in which nearly every social program was drastically cut back, strangled, deconstructed, or extirpated by its roots. Now all money has gone to violent battle in the Oil Fields of the Euphrates for Big Business!

Upon inspecting yet another major hospital, I met a couple of guys who were very busy scratching their entire body. Their scalps too! They had a skin parasite which was not visible to the naked eye. The physicians there insisted their malady was not scabies nor bedbugs [as reported in THE NEW YORKER in late April 2005] and told them it could only be an "imaginary illness." "There are no micro lice," they were told, with such hideous smirks stapled onto the faces it was as if what was also declared was "No nanobots too, Trekkies!"" [heard under spasms and hoots of derision] echoing the sentiment nowadays that nearly everything seems to bee connected to nanotechnology or the world wide electronic spiderweb. The physicians suggested sarcastically to the men (both chronically unemployed college honor roll grads, languages and humanities majors, who are both very willing to work, but cannot find even minimum wage jobs) because there are so many tens of millions of new immigrants in the US now stealing their jobs from them. If you aren't a recent immigrant, chances are slim for you, born here in America, to obtain a job, even if you are literally starving to death and would almost kill to have that job as a construction worker, plumber, cashier, farmhand, custodian, or car or drug dealer. 

The hospital medical staff insinuated to the two unemployed men in question, who are both fluent in several languages, that they "go upstairs to the psychiatric ward, or better yet to Bellevue".

Weeks later I met up with these same two distracted men to follow up on their non-Bellevue progress. They told me they had spread this imaginary illness to at least a few dozen people already. They wanted to infest the physicians with their "imaginary" microlice, and then tell them that THEY were the "deranged psychotics" who needed "psychiatric evaluation." All three of us laughed, but not for long. The itching and aggravating tickles of thousands of micro-filamentous and hairy-legged critters dominated their every bodily sensation, and they repeated their paroxysm dance, as they scratched, suffering not unlike that of an epileptic. Despite the egregious and erroneous and incomplete medical diagnosis they had received, the examining physicians along with the hospital billed the men $515 each (which the City of New York will eventually end up coughing up).  Nobody gained from this transaction except the hospitals, the doctors, and the micro-lice (and certainly many of the HMO investment insiders who play the strings of the hospital's financial portfolio, avoiding ERISA laws like a lively gypsy fiddle player.

Later, in the non-gentrified hinterlands of the Chelsea District, I met a woman who had been beaten so many times by her ex-husband that her nose had been broken four times. She could luckily afford reconstructive surgery each time, because, even though she was a single-mom, she was also a highly paid CPA. Even though no longer married, her former NBA ex-husband could visit their little daughter without preventative restrictions, upsetting the balance of the mother-daughter household, and both female psyches (and on occasion the mother's already scarred and tilted nose). She knew of no agency in the City yet that had helped her nor that had recommended to her a productive course of legal or protective action. Previous City Hall metro agency recommendations had actually brought her embarrassment, shame, and potential loss of employment, in the end. It's not only the homeless who suffer as a result of our pre-Neanderthal social services, it is every last one of us. Anyone can suffer. You could be next. Yes. You reading this article.

In Western Europe and Japan and even in Eastern Europe the people would be shocked to witness the extent of our callous lack of humanity towards our fellow citizens, especially from our government leadership, and the slim percentage of our tax revenues used for social safety nets, despite the incessant crowing of our more and more meaningless media and press, touting our BOOM ECONOMY, and that we are the "richest nation on Earth" while we spend nearly all our tax money on military subcontractors worldwide, in particular in Afghanistan and Iraq. What kind of boast is this?

Many homeless people have a horrible diet because they eat whatever is cheapest, and most accessible. That means food that doesn't need cooking. Food with more chemicals in them to preserve their shelf life than exists in the combined warehouses of Proctor & Gamble, Union Carbide, Shell, Dupont, and Monsanto. Alcohol, not the lobbyists of the above, helps these poor souls to forget their despair and destitution. Twinkies, crackers, greasy potato chips, candy bars and cheap alcoholic beverages, such as Mad Dog 20-20, Irish Rose, or a 40 ounce bumper of Old English 800, without sufficient or supplementary nutrients, bring on a fierce systemic yeast infection called Candida Albicans, which can take over any part of the body having a soft mucous lining. Especially vulnerable: intestines, stomach, sinuses, eyes, vagina, anus, and lungs. It can cause exhaustion, diarrhea, flu, lack of mental clarity, depression, pneumonia, allergies, and death. 

There is little acknowledgement of this illness by the American Medical Association, nor from the doctors it yearly manufactures in its factory-like training hospitals during the educational grind of earning an MD title. Even rich people, if prescribed too many inappropriate antibiotics by their physicians, get this same Candida Albicans. The broad spectrum antibiotics used indiscriminately for the last several decades, kill off vital, friendly, and symbiotic bacteria that live in our body, and replace them with a choking overpopulation of budding asexual yeasts, spores in a sense, such as Saccharomyces Ceres. It takes years to fully recover, rich or poor, and it is much work to re-harvest the indispensable intestinal colonies of the life-sustaining, mating bacteria. Most US doctors label this systemic yeast-spore illness "imaginary" also. Could it just be that arrogance and the profit motive have completely killed off reason in the medical profession, as surely as justice has been squeezed out by money in our American courts?

I caught up again with the guys with the nano-lice. They explained that they had learned that what was really their ailment was not lice but microscopic mites, on the same dimensional scale as our current nano-technology and the micro world of asexual fungal spores and unisex nematode bloodworms, which can only be seen with an electron microscope, colonizing your intestines or getting under your skin, the same way a pimp slips into a full length mink coat.

The taller of the two, Ross M., had done lots of research. He discovered that mouse, rat and pigeon mini-mites were endemic in parts of New York City. When abandoned buildings, or hotels, housing projects, apartment condominiums, subway tunnels, or trash dumps, are exterminated for rats, the Bdellonyssus bacoti mite or the Liponyssoides sanguineus nano-mite jumps from the dying or dead rodent, bat, or pigeon (flying rats) onto a human host/victim. They can bring or cause rickettsial pox and typhus fever. Much time and money needs to be spent to obtain a correct diagnosis when one is afflicted with these micro-mites. The baby nymphs and adults BOTH attack man, the nymph being even more troublesome. Both are microscopic. The current campaign in New York City to exterminate the crushing rat problem [the worse ever in New York history, paralleling the illegal immigration explosion, the biggest multi-waved immigration volume ever in the history of our nation] ... is also increasing the mite problem, because there is not much effort to collect and burn the dead rats. 

The pesticide used by the Bloomberg Administration is also killing many curious Park Avenue dogs who lick up the pesticides like new doggie goodies.

The two homeless men had been to numerous emergency rooms, clinics, and city agencies begging for relief. They never found it. Finally, they found the answer at an old pest control business off of Times Square, where the kindly and wise old proprietor, Dave who has been in his business for decades, had guided them to the Handbook of Pest Control, 6th edition, and Elimite skin cream. He told them that environmental control was perhaps even more essential than bodily control. Carpets, bedding, clothing, even shoes, can serve as resting, breeding, feeding, and staging areas for the invisible blood suckers. He recommended silica aerogel and Lysol for environmental control, and Elimite lotion for corporeal control. Doctors seldom prescribe Elimite anymore today, perhaps because it is not pitched by the armies of pharmaceutical salesmen that guide doctors through the labyrinth of commercial and global pharmaceutical megalithic drug "products." Doctors in the U.S. today are apparently no more than desperate street hookers cowering under the fist of their pharmaceutical mulitinational pimps.

Elimite is produced from the permethrin 5% extract of various plants. Some say that the chrysanthemum flower that is grown in the deserts of Egypt, South Africa, and elsewhere for this purpose, is the best source. Still, many others find that these two geographical areas do not supply as rich a botanical source of natural insecticides, harmless to man but lethal to insects, as several plants in more densely forested areas. Plant hormones are the age old nemesis of crawling parasites on humans. Yet today, toxic and poisonous synthetic and polymerized substitutes are often prescribed (and rapidly becoming ineffective) because the vermin have become more and more resistant to the man-made (meaning often more profitable too) laboratory preparations (Lindane, Kwell, Eurax, etc.)

If our medical services bug you, in New York City, or across the USA, or if dreadfully inadequate distribution of tax moneys offends you, or if you are suffering from the symptoms of Candida Albicans or the mouse, rat, bat, or pigeon mite, please raise your voice, badger and bug your politicians, or write to Street News or to me, of your experience, or better yet, take the issue to the streets yourself and do something now, before the handcuffs and shackles of the 3rd Bush Family Administration makes every last one of us all mere food tidbits for the belly of the beast.

by Bryan Adrian 
 

**************

Bryan Adrian 1996 feature essays in ELECTRONIC WHIP LONDON/NYC

https://www.angelfire.com/de/Boiishaft/B-Traven-Circle.html

God of War

https://www.angelfire.com/de/Boiishaft/Electronic_Whip_London1996.html

 Times Square Call to STRIKE

https://www.angelfire.com/de/Boiishaft/history-Times-Square.html
https://www.angelfire.com/de/Boiishaft/STRIKE_part1.html

https://www.angelfire.com/de/Boiishaft/STRIKE_part2.html

GOD OF WAR

https://www.angelfire.com/de/Boiishaft/god-of-war.html

https://www.angelfire.com/de/Boiishaft/Electronic_Whip_NYC1996.html

Short stories, blogs, poems, filmscripts, news articles, video journalism, and tramp journalism by Bryan Adrian ... follow this link



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