Aspirin for you

A person feels a headache and he pops an aspirin in his mouth and he can continue doing his work without the inconvenience of the pain. We medicate ourselves so frequently that we forget the whole point of the medicine, as in why we take this medication in the first place. TV ads encourage us to medicate ourselves so that we continue being productive; after all, that's what life is about, right? If you have any sickness, worry not, your productivity will not be affected if you use the proper medication.

What's wrong with being medicated, you may ask? Well, for medicine like aspirin, it is not a cure, but a reliever of symptoms. You have to ask yourself this question, what brought on this headache? If you take the aspirin, you still have the problem in your head, you have just hidden the feeling of it. Maybe your body is telling you to relax a bit and not be stressed out, but instead of listening to your body, you hide the pain with an illusion and you carry on as if nothing went wrong. This may cause unfortunate damage to the individual in short or long term health. We just don't know enough about our bodies to understand all the possibilities. Perhaps it makes it harder to sleep or makes your immune system weaker and you get other illnesses or maybe your personality just gets out of whack. Theories are plenty and if you ask 3 medical experts, you will get 4 answers, all of them contradictory to each other and all supposedly true, so we just have to know that there are still mysteries that are still with us.

So what if 1 person gets the headache, it only matters to that individual, right? Well without getting into societal health care costs in the long term and health care economics, lets look at the common cold. You get a cold, your job requires you to be present because they do not offer to pay as many sick days as you need, so you take a medication that eliminates the worse elements of the symptoms so that you can still function. I personally believe that this is ideal for rest and relaxation at the house as you do small easy chores like cooking for yourself a nice bowl of chicken soup. Unfortunately, the work force would rather have you spend the last remaining energy you have to continue working for them. The symptoms can be mostly covered, so you can still produce a bit.

Remember, society does not encourage proper thinking (as my previous posts declared), the manager looks at numbers in the short term and says that if you are healthy you provide 100%, if you are sick you provide 50% and if you are absent you provide 0%. Well 50% is better than 0% so the manager insists that you show up. The manager does not realize that being sick at work will spread the sickness to everyone else, will make recuperation that much longer and he will lose out in long term production.

The ideal would be this, if you are sick, you stay home and recuperate and you take as much time as you need to get healthy again, while being paid your full salary by your employer. If you get a headache, you take a nap or rest properly, you drop what you are doing and get back to it when rested, healed or whatever. We are human beings with strengths and weaknesses, we must accept and respect that. Would there be a loss of production? Consider that in the above scenario where we encourage employees to keep working when sick, the sick employee provides 5 days at 50% before he is cured (a total of 250%), and infects everyone else to work at 50% each. My suggestion makes the employee sick for 3 days, with 2 days of work at 100% (a total of 200%). Yes, my suggestion loses a 50% in the 5 day period compared to working for the 5 days; but my suggestion also makes the other employees healthy because the sickness was not spread to the others, hence more productivity for the company by having one stay at home to heal.

Context 2: a fast food employee is sick, he does not have access to any sickdays because there is no social benefits for him in that industry. This employee has to pay his rent and his groceries, so he must show up for work and try to ignore his symptoms--> well he infects a good percentage of his customers as well as his fellow employees. Before some bureaucrat tells me that the regulations make him wash his hands before food preperation, so the risk is reduced by x amount because statistics say so. I ask the following: do the regulations tell you not to wipe your nose or face while preparing the food in front of a hot stove making you sweaty? Do the regulations explain that if you are the employee sent to clean the tables and you push in chairs with your infected hands that the next person to sit there is not to touch the same spot you infected? (see the listeriosis posts in the first week of September 2008 to see how these rules really worked... including last Monday's post on the knee-jerk reaction to solve a new listeriosis case)

What is disapointing is that instead of taking my consideration to heart, some bureaucrat will just create a rule making us wear rubber gloves when we enter any work environment lest we contaminate someone. If you are a bad driver, you will cause accidents. If you are forced to wear a seatbelt and continue being a bad driver, you will continue to cause accidents. The rule will not prevent the accident nor make you a better driver.

If you are sick, please allow yourself the time to rest. If you are a society that really looks to the longterm health and productivity of its collective, please enable the tools for the responsible individuals to continue contributing wholeheartedly. Otherwise, you the individual will not get healthier, and you the society will not grow.