Heroes Not Zombies

I took this photo at the “Cote Sauvage” (the wild coast) earlier this year. I hadn’t been to this, one of my most favourite beaches, for over a year because during the pandemic we were forbidden to travel more than a few kilometres from home for many weeks and public spaces including parks, forests and beaches were closed.

I think you can feel the sense of expansive openness I experienced once I got here. But the first thing which struck me was how much this landscape had changed. Storms and high tides had completely changed the dunes. It was no longer possible to walk down into the sand directly from the forest behind. The slopes had been turned into cliffs. And the wooden walkway from the car park had been totally destroyed.

Months later I returned and the walkway had been reconstructed. The new cliff edges of sand, however, are the same.

These large scale changes of landscape caused by the interaction of the sea, the wind and the land are amongst the most dramatic changes I’ve seen over a mere matter of months.

Partly this gets me thinking about the fact of constant change. Even large structures on the surface of the Earth are constantly changing – mostly slowly, but occasionally dramatically. We’ve seen a number of these dramatic events over the last couple of years – floods, forest fires and volcanic eruptions. Melting ice caps, shrinking glaciers, earthquakes. Hurricanes and cyclones and other extreme weather events.

But this image also gets me thinking about our somewhat delusional perspective on outcomes and fixes – in every area of life – but, especially in the context of the pandemic, in the area of health.

There is almost an obsession with so called outcomes in health care. That’s always struck me as odd. Human beings are complex ever developing creatures. Looking at only a small period of time in anyone’s life always runs the risk of failing to really understand them. We need to hear their full story, not just measure a couple of changes over a short period of time.

Choosing to focus on an isolated set of measures in a whole person seems to me to give too much importance to the “outcomes” instead of the lived experience of an individual. It seems precious little research looks at the life time consequences of interventions and treatments.

The focus on measurable outcomes shifts the attention from the long term to the short term, and to data from story.

And what this does is delude us into thinking we are “fixing” things.

There’s been a pursuit of simple fixes in this pandemic – we were told lockdown would fix the problem, then mass testing would, then vaccines would.

In fact, we need to address the factors involved in creating the pandemic and its devastating effects…..from the way we interact with Nature (forest destruction, over consumption, pollution, carbon production), to the way we run our societies (inequality, poverty, overcrowded housing, precarious jobs, run down under-resourced Public Services, lack of adequate safe care of the elderly) if we want to really deal with the pandemic.

Quick fixes don’t last. And they aren’t fixes. Despite what politicians and Big Pharma tell us.