THE northern suburbs of Sydney could have the healthiest residents in the city if it weren't for just one thing - their drinking.
A Herald analysis of NSW health statistics by local government area has found vast disparities in the health of Sydneysiders, with poorer suburbs bearing a far greater share of the burden of disease.
While the northern suburbs were the healthiest parts of Sydney, they were let down by hospital admissions linked to alcohol use. Hunters Hill, Manly and Mosman made up three of the five local government areas with the most admissions. The figures include only residents of those suburbs - not people who visit them to drink.
The healthiest local government area in Sydney, which topped three categories and did not fall in the bottom five for anything, was North Sydney.
Ku-ring-gai and Lane Cove were first in two categories and not in the bottom five for any.
The director of population health for the South Western Sydney and Sydney local health districts, Peter Sainsbury, said alcohol was almost unique among health indicators in that risk was not linked to poverty...
Professor Sainsbury said socio-economic differences were the most significant factor in explaining health inequalities. Poorer people tended to have less access to safe jobs, quality housing and good education.
"These harmful factors hunt together in packs and they augment each other," he said. "It's the way we structure society that makes this happen. It's not just the result of individual fickle behaviour."
The data was compiled from the Health Statistics NSW website of the Ministry of Health.
The Herald used Australian Bureau of Statistics data to rank local government areas by socio-economic status. Each was rated according to 11 indicators, from antenatal care and smoking during pregnancy to alcohol and smoking-related hospital admissions and potentially preventable deaths such as those linked to unhealthy lifestyles or lack of healthcare.
Campbelltown was in the bottom five for nine of the 11 categories. Blacktown was the second most unhealthy area.
Holroyd, Penrith and Rockdale came third and Botany Bay and Sydney fourth. Sydney, which has extremes of rich and poor and is in the middle in socio-economic disadvantage, had about double the potentially preventable deaths of other poor performers, and nearly five times more than the best performing area...
The history of self-experimentation is littered with corpses, proof to the truism no good deed goes unpunished.
A Herald analysis of NSW health statistics by local government area has found vast disparities in the health of Sydneysiders, with poorer suburbs bearing a far greater share of the burden of disease.
While the northern suburbs were the healthiest parts of Sydney, they were let down by hospital admissions linked to alcohol use. Hunters Hill, Manly and Mosman made up three of the five local government areas with the most admissions. The figures include only residents of those suburbs - not people who visit them to drink.
The healthiest local government area in Sydney, which topped three categories and did not fall in the bottom five for anything, was North Sydney.
Ku-ring-gai and Lane Cove were first in two categories and not in the bottom five for any.
The director of population health for the South Western Sydney and Sydney local health districts, Peter Sainsbury, said alcohol was almost unique among health indicators in that risk was not linked to poverty...
Professor Sainsbury said socio-economic differences were the most significant factor in explaining health inequalities. Poorer people tended to have less access to safe jobs, quality housing and good education.
"These harmful factors hunt together in packs and they augment each other," he said. "It's the way we structure society that makes this happen. It's not just the result of individual fickle behaviour."
The data was compiled from the Health Statistics NSW website of the Ministry of Health.
The Herald used Australian Bureau of Statistics data to rank local government areas by socio-economic status. Each was rated according to 11 indicators, from antenatal care and smoking during pregnancy to alcohol and smoking-related hospital admissions and potentially preventable deaths such as those linked to unhealthy lifestyles or lack of healthcare.
Campbelltown was in the bottom five for nine of the 11 categories. Blacktown was the second most unhealthy area.
Holroyd, Penrith and Rockdale came third and Botany Bay and Sydney fourth. Sydney, which has extremes of rich and poor and is in the middle in socio-economic disadvantage, had about double the potentially preventable deaths of other poor performers, and nearly five times more than the best performing area...
Oh helleluja, how far we have come in embedding social attitudes and tropes of John Howard's 1950s American idyll...
“Membership
in each social class tends to impose its own kind of strain on people
in it. There seems to be a general agreement that the most severe
strain (or the least capacity to withstand strain) is in the bottom
class. People of that category have twice as many psychiatric
breakdowns as they should have if mental illness were distributed
evenly over the population. A team of sociologists and psychiatrists
at Yale University, headed by August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C.
Redlich, made an exhaustive study of the social relationship between
mental illness and social class. These investigators found that a
person in the bottom class (Class V) was eleven times as likely to
suffer from schizophrenia as a member of the top class (Class I).
Schizophrenia it should be added, follows to a large extent the
general pattern of distribution of mental breakdown over the classes.
(By this I mean it is not by its nature peculiar to the lowest
class.) Some types of mental disorder do show some tendency to favour
a certain class. The manic-depressives are three times as prevalent,
proportionately, among the two upper classes as among people in the
bottom Class V. Juergen Reusch has notice a preponderance of
psychosomatic reactions (ulcers, hypertension, allergies) in people
of the lower-middle (or limited success) class. He attributes this to
a lack of expressive facilities, because of their drive to conformity
and their excessive repression. And Joseph A. Kahl points out: 'If the
symbolic middle-class neurosis is obsessive compulsivity,
complicated by ulcers, the upper-class illness is ennui, complicated
by alcohol'. And speaking of alcohol, earlier investigators have noted
that among nationality groups the Irish have led, by several
lengths, all other in alcoholism.
What
is more startling, perhaps, is the discrimination show against
persons of the lower classes by psychiatrists, both in private
practice and at the free or low-cost clinics. This discrimination,
arises in large part from the inability of upper-class psychiatrists
to communicate with lower-class patients; so that the patients are
not regarded as good prospects for extended individual treatment.
The
Yale team found that, even at the out-patient clinic where cost is no
factor, 'the higher an individual's social class position, the more
likely he was to be accepted for treament, to be treated by highly
trained personnel, and to be treated intensively over a long period'.
(Students treated the lower classes, residents-in-training tended to
be assigned to middle-class patients; and the senior staff members
took the higher class patients.) It was found that these clinics
spend eight times as much money treating a Class II patient as they do
treating a Class V patient. There is a tendency to give individual
psychotherapy to the higher classes, and administer shock treatment,
drugs, organic therapy, etc., to the lower-class patients.
Hollingshead
and Redlich report that this finding of discrimination 'came as a
“bolt out of the blue” for the men who determined the policites
of this clinic. It was certainly not planned. A similar situation is
found in the public mental hospitals, where, also without regard to
the ability of the patients' families to pay, the acute
schizophrenics in Class III are more likely to get psychotherapy than
Class IV and V patients in the same disease group who entered the
hospital at approximately the same time'. The Class IV and V
schizophrenic, they add, may receive one or two series of organic
treatments in a a public hospiral. If these do not succeed, 'the
patient drifts to the back wards where, in stultifying isolation, he
regresses into a world of his own'.”
Vance
Packard
The
Status Seekers(1959)
pps
230-231
Of the diseases mentioned above one is conspicuously 'present' - ulcers. Unless they are of the skin kind, ulcers of the stomach are generally caused by Helicobactor pylori. The treatment for which earned two Australian medicos the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and removed a bread and butter income stream cash cow for the Gastroenterologist and the Harmaceutical professions.
The history of self-experimentation is littered with corpses, proof to the truism no good deed goes unpunished.
Early on in my Honours year at RMIT, a sucker punch (sucre punch? Sugar is apparently a key ingredient to spell casting, something to do with the way it effects metabolism and psychobiology, as is trust, oxytocin, dopamine, etc.) was being delivered by 'the messengers' to have me study religion(s), "as part of your fine art training, religion is infused in all aspects of polity".
And so it is.
Alcohol is the somatic substance of one particular branch of western spiral theocracy, typically the Catholic 'tragic' strain of the Christian arm of Abrahamic narratology.
Cannabis is the somatic substance of the eastern theocracy, the basis of the lotions and potions, smells and spells, of the the kundalini serpent of the symbolic dragon/draco spiral arm of IndoChinese origin.
Now if I could only figure out what induces sane men and women to worship ascetic, self-hating, sack-cloth-socialism... and bottle it.
And, so it came to p'ass.
'The messengers' were both rite and wrong. Affectively creating a theatrical space in which the Other(s) were alternately script writer, off stage prompt, film crew, editor, broadcaster and audience. Impossible mission to call it "spiritual" so much as i-ron-ic.
Her's one/won/juan Ron prepared softened up, earlier.
Was it Dionysus, Jim Bacchus Backus or Nietzsche that was the god of madness? (One for the kiddies). What was the point in sending Apollo to the Moon to play with the lunatics on the dark side, when his project was to balance the horned and hoved devil (that waskally Bacchus Dionysis) here on earth. Did the cojoining of a sun god and lunar diety produce harmony or just another blues harp?
Meanwhile, back in the real world, volumes have been writ and published about the positive, health giving effects of green space, more so for the poor for some reason. Can you join the dots between Rockdale, Botany Bay and Sydney - population density? Pub density? Traffic density? Library density? Human density?
The veracity of any state sponsored or institutionally ingrained metaphysic is in the epidemiology. The gold standard for epidemiology is suicide and the suicide rate goes up when conservative governments are in power. Hmmm.
Voodoo Economics anyone?
http://www.vice.com/en_au/hamiltons-pharmacopeia/nzambi-episode-1
Voodoo Economics anyone?
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