If it matters, this is a hard column for me to write. I am advising a ‘no’ vote on the latest Pullman hospital bond. It’s not the taxes that bother me, though they are indeed another hunk of money out of my pocket. More, it’s both the direction and denial of the Pullman medical community that put together the request for more money.
To start, the request for funds and explanation is on the Pullman Regional Hospital website. I encourage people to read it for themselves. The $45M, coming in largest part from the bond issue, will be used for the usual garden variety of things — better offices, some equipment upgrades, and renovation. The last attempt at a bond issue (which I also was against) was in 2019. There are some differences between these two, but they are superficial. The medical community wants what it wants, and it’s going to keep shoving these things at us, confronting the communitarian attitude we have, until it gets it.
But what it doesn’t seem to care about at all is what is really happening to the overall health in this community. And there’s no discussion by doctors or administrators in our local paper in order to bring even Philistines like me along on why its priorities should be funded by us.
The biggest denial of crisis in this new bond issue has to be the refusal of the medical community to provide leadership in THE biggest health crisis facing not only our community, but the nation. And that is the metabolic syndrome/obesity crisis. In the last four years, we’ve only gotten fatter. I’ve seen figures that say now the U.S. population is approaching 50% obesity. And especially disturbing to me as a university professor is seeing this statistic manifest itself in our young people. More and more of my students are also obese, at a younger age.
What that means is that our hospital may be gearing up for the inevitable wave of Western diseases (Type II diabetes, kidney problems and heart attacks) in a younger and younger cohort. But that is terrible. We shouldn’t be gearing up. We should be educating and preventing this out of the gate. There’s no question that this will require a very different mindset toward averting this train wreck of public health from turning into something that gives the doctors a new market for all the new gadgets, as part of the medical arms race, they’d like to buy.
Doctors are the only ones in our community that can speak with that factual voice to prevent this. We’re seeing tons of mainstream attempts to somehow normalize this real pandemic among women. (It is absurdly funny there is no equivalent attempt to normalize this among men.)
The second denial of crisis is the failure of the medical community in the area to both learn, and push back against the draconian COVID-19 measures we inflicted on our young people, like masking in schools. Doctors are educated enough to read studies, and offer community guidance. But instead, they sat out their community duties, and let the steamroller of nonsense deprive our school kids of years of their lives.
The last thing we should do is reward them with some fancier offices, new toys and a remodel. The hospital itself is hardly shabby. It certainly is spacious. And there is no need for taxpayers to fund more of the same.
More to the point, it is my urgent plea to the medical community in the area to wake up. Tour Walmart, if you need a refresher to the actual state of community health. The COVID-19 pandemic did no one any favors as far as the obesity pandemic is concerned. But if we don’t confront this larger problem, it has the potential to be a civilization-ending event.
Pezeshki is a professor in mechanical and materials engineering at Washington State University.
