Patt Morrison for Monday, 9/19/2011

PATT MORRISON SCHEDULE

Monday, September 19, 2011

1-3 p.m.

 

CALL-IN @ 866-893-5722, 866-893-KPCC; OR JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE ON THE PATT MORRISON BLOG AT KPCC-DOT-ORG

 

1:00 – 1:40

OPEN

 

 

1:40 – 2:00

Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery

How many surgeries have you gotten? How many more do you expect to get? Statistically, as an American, you will undergo at least nine surgeries in your lifetime. On top of life-saving surgeries, each weekday, 85,000 elective surgical procedures are carried out in hospitals and clinics in the U.S. With Americans going under the knife so frequently, it is amazing where surgery began. In his book, Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery, Nicholas Tilney takes a look back and tells stories such as Werner Forssmann’s testing cardiac catheterization on his own arm and tying a helpless nurse to the operating table in the process! Tilney also previews a challenging future in the field, where decisions will have to be made whether or not to prolong a life or not given the unsustainable costs of new technologies. The surgeon is live with Patt, to share his wildest stories from the operating room and respond to your stories and questions.

 

Guest:

Dr. Nicholas L. Tilney, honorary surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston; professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School

 

 

2:00 – 2:30

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell No More

This Tuesday will mark the long awaited reversal of the 17 year old ban on gay men and lesbians serving in the military. “Don’t ask don’t tell” is the contentious policy adopted by the United States Military in 1993 that barred homosexuals from openly serving in the armed services. Since its inception, the policy has been responsible for the discharge of nearly 14,000 servicemen and women. This final repeal comes almost a year from the landmark survey of 550,000 military personnel in where 70% of those surveyed agreed that the allowance of open homosexuals into the armed forces would be a “positive change.” Dr. Aaron Belkin, one of the nation’s leading advocates for gays in the military will join Patt to examine how DADT was repealed and why it took so long.  His new e-book from the Huffington Post is “How We Won: Progressive Lessons from the Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

 

Guest:    

Aaron Belkin, associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University and director of the Palm Center, a gay rights advocacy group.

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2:30 – 3:00

Co-workers can be dangerous to your health

A study done over 20 years by researchers at Tel Aviv University reinforces what we all secretly knew: your co-workers are responsible for your health and happiness in the workplace. But did you know they could be responsible for your early death, too? Although a small, longitudinal study – scientists followed 820 adults in several occupations over 20 years – the research faces us with the fact that our workplace has a huge impact on our health, revealing that employees who claim no “peer social support” were 2.4 times more likely to die during the course of the study, especially if they started employment between the ages of 38 and 43. Longer hours at your job or a mean boss didn’t affect longevity, however – just the quality of and relationship with co-workers. Other research has found that control matters as well; a study which analyzed 28,000 English civil service workers starting in 1967 revealed that men and women who had the most control over their workplace were the healthiest and happiest. Indeed, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy were four times more likely to die than the people at the top. The Israeli study, however, found that only men with control were healthiest and that women fared better who had little or no control over what they did in their jobs. So, take a look around you – like what you see? Is it time to smile at the person in the next cubicle instead of growling a hello in the morning?

 

Guests:

Jonah Lehrer, contributing editor at Wired; author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist; contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and WNYC’s Radiolab.

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