NO wonder, most doctors get rich quick (note that we said most, since a vanishing few of them still believe in ‘humanitarian’ medical charges)  because  they bill astronomically and bleed patients mercilessly. More so, if they are a couple – husband and wife—engaged in allied fields of medicine, each complementing the other in terms of patient referrals.

Sometimes, if we were a socialist state, we wish they’ll ban couples from engaging in the same profession especially, medicine. You know what we mean, of course: The poor   patient becomes a milking cow in the hands of both, with neither hardly being   cooperative or attentive to a particular patient’s needs if he doesn’t “patronize” the other.

Now, when did health care become a buy one-take one affair?  We said it once, we say again: Some doctors do not live by the Hippocratic Oath. If they ever hang a frame of that Oath in their clinics (seven out of 10 they don’t, ever noticed that?), you can be sure it’s only for show - especially if they’re a husband-and-wife team of, uh, smart artists.

If you happen to know any such couple of health specialists, write to this column or e-mail us at pangasinan.star@gmail.com. Help our lawmakers and professional regulations officials instill better discipline on such greedy practitioners. You don’t deserve them.

IF there’s still any doubt that retail business is the “in” thing in the economy today, the rise of so many commercial malls even in Dagupan’s urban jungle should dispel it. Nepo Mall, Magic, CSI, they’re all here in our neck of the woods. Soon, even the giant SM or even Shopwise which has taken over much of the pioneering Rustan’s Department Store, could be in the city too.

Even St. Joseph Drugstore has become a chain pharmacy company almost overnight, opening several store branches all over the city like there was no tomorrow. No doubt, as corporate and market think-tanks say it, the retail sector in the Philippines today has never been as vibrant.

This trend however, it seems, only validates the common perception of many analysts, both foreign and domestic, that Pinoys may really be only good at retailing but shy away (dread) going into manufacturing.

Many trade officials have openly wished the Filipino entrepreneurs would somehow find the nerve—and capital – to venture into the really challenging world of production or manufacturing. Finding our own mark in the market with our own native skills, materials and capital – beyond of course making bathroom soaps and shampoos and our woodcrafts and handicrafts that are now really hitting it well in the exports – would help put us in the First World status that President GMA wants this nation to be in 10 years.

Retailing – the selling of other people’s and companies’ products or services — is good and pays well as the current trend with malls and chain stores strongly indicates. But it is time to break out of that shell and mindset and go into manufacturing.

Only then will we stop fearing this giant specter of trade liberalization that dumps cheap foreign items on us on the notion that beggars can’t choose and have no right to.      

Few, if any, of these aspirants mind if, as economists and other labor analysts often say, they are actually gettting a relatively (by international hiring rate standards) lower pay than their call center counterparts in the United States, UK or even Hongkong. Dollar is a dollar is a dollar,no matter how the total pay compares lowly with that paid in the same currency to  others. What they’d do– twist their native

tongue this way and that just to get the perfect American slang or the English tight upper lip inflection and nasal twang right over the phone — to land a job as CC hiree. 

And now comes news from the US of A, saying the American Senate, bothered obviously by all the labor outsourcing of their bigger companies and subsidiaries, plans to make a law to compel these companies to disclose their actual business locations out of the country to their clients. Something like an Information Act. 
If this means anything, it’s a plus and minus thing. Plus,  because it means our locals don’t have to be training that hard anymore just to sound like Brits or Norte Amerikanos while transacting with clients on the phone — and therefore a more relaxed training module for them; and minus because it could very well lead to an even reduced total take-home pay than what they’re getting at present since the “supremacist aura” of an American or British accent is gone, which actually ups their ante.
Whatever, the Philippines will always be a cheap source of labor and technology.That’s for good or bad
 

Last night, I watched silently enthralled inside a restaurant (not one of those swanky, fancy dining places but an ordinary but popular one in the city) as a typical laborer’s family ( no offense meant really now, but  it was quite obvious from the outward appearance of the characters) gorged, literally gorged, on the food at a table. No pretenses, no conscious table manner observance, no frills in their dining-out clothes — but definitely with money to burn. For the food ordered, at least. 

I was watching, I mused, one of thousands of poor Pinoy families eking out a living in a nation now flapping its wings at having achieved for the first quarter of the year a 5.5 Gross National Product (GNP), up from something lower for the same period last year, or so the NEDA says.

The father, weatherbeaten face, in faded jeans and equally faded t-shirt, was taking his soup with a loud slurp while his four kids, all boys, attacked the pancit guisado, lumpia shanghai and a little cup of ice cream each with gusto. The mother, as most women usually are, was a bit more reserved with her spoonfuls, amost tentatively eyeing her surroundings every now and then as though siently apologizing for her brood’s undisguised hunger.

It was apparently a Big Night  Out for the family, the scrawny erpat perhaps deciding to treat his wife and family to something “extraordinary” after earning megabucks from a hard day’s toil. Megabucks of a thousand pesos perhaps that is the equivalent of a hundred pesos to most blue-collar workers ten, fifteen years back. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the family hied off to the nearest moviehouse from the restaurant after; they left ahead of me as I waited for my take-out order.

Inwardly, I thought I would be so happy to see more and more of such very ordinary families eating out and savoring the “uxury of being served” in restaurants, not doing the “serving” themselves. Now, that would be the perfect proof of an economy really going up and up, wouldn’t it?

Frankly, seeing the middle-income and the upper crust frequenting restaurants and fine dining places, no matter their numbersand frequency of dining and the smackeroos they spend for their food doesn’t at all translate to an economy going robust. It only means these slobs and fancy dressers are cornering most of the goodies while the bigger majority of the unwashed are hardly getting any.

That is hard economics, maybe, but it’s a truer picture whatd’ya think?

But how many, just how many, of these State Cop-acting LTO teams ever, and I mean, ever, even just randomly check whether any of these vehicles are still using the now banned R12 aircon freon on their vehicles? And there are fairly easy spot checks for this which LTO agents must know.

I know that kind of inspection is supposed to be done on registration per a December 27,2005 memo from the LTo to all its field offices. If you still don’t know, Sec 11e of the Revised CCO bans the use of chloroflurocarbons in MACs starting 2006 in motor vehicles manufactured and/or initially registered from 1999 onwards and explicitly prohibits their registration.

That should keep those CFC-emitting cars off the road, shouldn’t it? Think again, bud! For why, in Leandro Mendoza’s name, are those small car aircon shops by the road still obviously using R12 freon on their customers’cars? And the more interesting question — why are these old model, obviously beaten cars sporting updated registration stickers?  Get the point? Some LTO registration inspector must have been sleep-walking when he did the once-over on the vehicles. 

Bad, real bad, for the environment. Some guys must have not heard of the revised Chemical Control Order for Ozone Depleting Substances issued by the Departmnent of Environment and Natural Resources.

Come to think of it — and let me see some raised hands now– how many of you guys have heard of the DENR? 

The “fad” caught on soon enough and Nestle and other bottlers and health drink companies came up with their versions of the great green tea in flavors similar to the C2 line, selling these at cheaper price to gradually chip away at C2’s market lead. The drink madness recalls the storm generated by the Noni Juce some years back when health buffs of all ages and shape would do anything to get a bottle of the juice extracted from some exotic plant that was supposedly the secret for the sickness-free condition of  the natives of a Pacific island or something. 

That “elixir’s” marketing strat levelled off and faded soon enough and many former users now smile when reminded of the folly of it all. 

The “green tea” promotion is following pretty much the same pattern. Sure, everyone knows the Camella sinensis, sometimes called Thea sinensis the original brew of the green tea, does have properties that help relieve (to the less discerning, relief means cure itself) some common health problems. Unlike black or oblong tea, green tea is made from unfermented tea leaves which probably explains its better healing properties.

Take note however that  nothing in tea, to include green tea, ever reduces the risk of heart disease as concluded by the US Food and Drug Administration. FDA recently denied a petition by Ito En Ltd., a Japanese company, seeking to allow tea labels to make the claim that drinking green tea cuts the chances of a person contracting cardio vascular  disease.

No, I am no green tea-basher or a health drink irreverent   chap; I do buy C2 with the passion of a beginning addict but I do it to refresh myself and savor the taste without really wanting to be “cured” of anything. 

In this world, one must know how to recognize hype from hypertension.    

Jasonpickles provides us a ‘typical’ fast-forward scenario of how a simple activity like ordering a pizza from your favorite store would run, circa 2020. 

But other than that, one can just understand how a national ID system as being espoused by our leaders is met with some grave reservations (mainly arising, we believe, from having watched or read about the Big-Brother-is-watching syndrome) by some sectors.

As every human being cannot avoid becoming a buyer one time or the other or needing  customer service sometime, once tagged through a national ID, he remains tagged till death. Of course one can always go the mountains and live the life of Ka Roger, incommunicado for the most part outside of the trusty cellphone, but that’s a rather abnormal life. I seriously doubt many people would want that.

And so, to live or not to live with a national ID, that is the question?

Send your comments here.  

No less than National Tobacco Administrator Carlitos S. Encarnacion made the announcement. Schweitzer-Mauduit International, Inc., a paper company based in Quimperle, France is negotiating for importation of tobacco pulp from Manila after their sample tests showed that NTA’s tobacco pulp is of good quality.

NTA has been producing pulp from tobacco stalks as main component in its research and development program on other uses of the tobaco pulp. Now it seems its modest efforts have paid off and Philippine tobacco has been noticed — definitely a ray of sunshine once again on what some have labelled (because of the scientific warnings on health risks in smoking) a sunset industry.

With the French buying our tobacco pulp, more jobs and investment oportunities are there for the grabbing. Here’s hoping the deal is a done one. Schweitze-Mauduit is known as a “diversified producer of premium specialty paper” and is also among the world’s largest supplier of fine paper.  

So simply written, so greaty conveyed was the message. we thought we’d share you this one — maybe not consumer issue-related but just to ponder on as we go thru life. The blogger is some kind of doctor.

It was a busy morning, approximately 8.30am, when an elderly gentleman, in his 80’s, arrived to have stitches removed from his thumb. He stated that he was in a hurry as he had an appointment at 9am. I saw him looking at his watch and decided, since I was not busy with another patient, I would evaluate his wound. On examination, it was well healed, so I talked to one of the doctors, got the needed supplies to remove his sutures and redressed his wound.

While taking care of his wound, we began to engage in conversation. I asked him if he had an important appointment that morning, as he was in such a hurry. The gentleman told me no, that he needed to go to the nursing home to eat breakfast with his wife. I then inquired as to her health. He told me that she had been there for a while and that she was a victim of Alzheimer’s Disease.

As we talked, and I finished dressing his wound, I asked if she would be worried if he was a bit late. He replied that she no longer knew who he was, that she had not recognised him in five years now.

I was surprised, and asked him, “And you still go every morning, even though she doesn’t know who you are?” He smiled as he patted my hand and said, “She doesn’t know me, but I still know who she is.” I had to hold back tears as he left, I had goose pimples on my arm, and thought, “That is the kind of love I want in my life.”

True love is neither physical, nor romantic. True love is an acceptance of all that is, has been, will be, and will not be. “The happiest of people don’t necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the best of everything that comes along their way.”

True love, anyone? Bet there’s no greater love than loving and sacrificing for someone who doesn’t even recognize you anymore, huh?.