SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, USA, April 5, 2019 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Intermountain Healthcare’s Research and Medical Foundation honored three individuals who have had a major impact on the quality of healthcare, both locally and around the globe, during the Foundation’s 29th annual Legacy of Life Dinner and Gala, which raised more than $77,000 for cardiovascular and pulmonary research.
Legacy of Life awards were presented to an entrepreneurial surgeon, a biomedical informatics professor and a retired human resources executive and volunteer.
The Legacy of Life award for helping those in community live healthy lives went to G. Marsden Blanch, MD, MPH, FACS. Among his many accomplishments, Dr. Blanch founded Megadyne Medical Products, one of the largest electro-surgical product companies in the United States.
Dr. Blanch, an adjunct professor of Otolaryngology (head and neck surgery) at the University of Utah, and his family recently made a significant gift to fund a new education center at Intermountain Healthcare’s Alta View Hospital in Sandy.
The Scientific Achievement award, recognizing the advancement of research and medicine, was presented to R. Scott Evans, MS, PhD, FACMI. Dr. Evans, a longtime medical informatics expert at Intermountain Healthcare, is also a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. His work has helped reduce the incidence of medical errors and improve patient care.
Retired Intermountain human resources executive Pat Ninomiya received the 2019 Gold Caduceus Award for her service as a community volunteer and board member of the Intermountain Research and Medical Foundation.
The gala was sponsored by Capita Financial Network, Deseret Management Corporation, the Larry H. and Gail Miller Family Foundation, Les Olson Company, Sinclair Oil, WCF Insurance, and Alvey Media Group.
Nearly 50 years ago, a group of physicians founded what is now known as the Intermountain Research and Medical Foundation to provide seed grants to researchers with innovative ideas. Since then, the foundation has awarded more than $11 million to 453 projects – laying the groundwork for clinical advances and insights related to a host of conditions, including heart disease, cancer, depression, and dementia.
In addition to funding seed grants, foundation donor fund initiatives have helped many other programs, including the Behavioral Health Access Center at Intermountain LDS Hospital, the Arthritis Program at Intermountain TOSH-The Orthopedic Specialty Hospital, Healing Homes for patient patients and families at Intermountain LDS Hospital, and neo-natal intensive care bereavement support groups.
For more information: https://intermountainhealthcare.org/giving-volunteering/intermountain-foundation/what-we-support/intermountain-research-and-medical-foundation/ or call (801) 507-2040.
Intermountain Healthcare is a Utah-based not-for-profit system of 24 hospitals, 160 clinics, a Medical Group with some 2,300 employed physicians and advanced care practitioners, a health insurance company called SelectHealth, and other health services. Intermountain is widely recognized as a leader in transforming healthcare through evidence-based best practices, high quality, and sustainable costs. For more information about Intermountain, visit intermountainhealthcare.org.
Lance Madigan
Intermountain Healthcare
(801) 442-3217
email us here
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Barr is just another word for obstruction
by Tom H. Hastings
588 words
We on the Portland Peace Team were invited out the other day to provide some nonviolent public safety for the local demonstration of perhaps 250 people calling for the unredacted release of the Mueller Report to Congress and to the American people. There were dozens such demonstrations across the US, some larger, some smaller.
Of course there were a couple pro-Trump counter-demonstrators, one of whom was a fairly gnarly bruiser who began yelling, interfering with everyone else’s right to hold a peaceful demonstration and actually listen to the scheduled speakers.
This is when the Peace Team will approach the disruptor and offer to listen but a few feet away to avoid the competing speaking. No dice. The fellow ranted on and on about how the demonstrators were sore losers and couldn’t accept the fact that Trump had been cleared. I offered no argument—that is not our role on the Peace Team. We try to de-escalate and arguments often escalate. Our role became to calm people from the peaceful demonstration who were getting understandably annoyed with the loudmouth. We did so successfully, avoiding violence for the day.
Still, it was stunning to watch this fellow look at the signage, all of which simply called for the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. No one was making any big claims other than the perfectly legitimate insistence that the report should be available, not the tiny interpretation summary put out by the Attorney General, a man handpicked, apparently, by Trump to cover up the actual report. Cover-up? Well, if it waddles like a cover-up, if it quacks like a cover-up, then without the release of the report it surely is logical to call it a cover-up.
William Barr wrote an unsolicited legal memo criticizing the Mueller investigation long before it concluded. This was in effect his application for Attorney General of the United States and Trump duly nominated him and the Republican-controlled Senate duly installed him. He is doing now precisely what the grotesquely corrupt Trump regime intended, a serious red line for anyone interested in preserving the democracy Trump has been unable to destroy so far in his many machinations.
What did Mueller find? We do not know. Congress does not know. Certainly the pro-Trump Senators and Congress members who are blustering about the Democrats’ calls for transparency being mere partisan politics do not know. Trump doesn’t know, despite his braying claims to the contrary.
It is obvious that the Trumpeters simply lack basic reasoning skills when they yell that Trump is completely and totally exonerated (Trump tweets made this false claim as soon as Barr put out his dissembling four-pager that actually did not exonerate Trump. At all.) Let’s see the report. Let Congress have it completely unredacted and let them have all the evidence Mueller gathered.
Russia gave the 2016 election to Trump. Thanks Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Thanks Russian intelligence hackers and trolls. Thanks, credulous Trump supporters. Was there collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign? There were certainly a number of meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russians (more than 100 actually, most of them before the 2016 election), both in and out of government—though the nongovernmental Russians were oligarchs with close ties to Vladimir Putin, so one seems to quite naturally shade into the other. The circumstantial evidence seems overwhelming.
But we have a Barr to our ability to learn for ourselves and we will see if the American people are interested enough in democracy to remove that Barr, that obstruction.
—30—
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is PeaceVoice Director and on occasion an expert witness for the defense in court.
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MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO IN 2020
By Robert C. Koehler
1078 Words
Reparations for slavery? Upending militarism and waging peace? Taking climate change seriously? Getting carbon out of the atmosphere and fossil fuel money out of the EPA? Valuing healing over punishment in our disastrous criminal justice system? Ending mass incarceration?
Bringing all this up — and much, much more — in a presidential race?
“Join with me for a year,” cries Marianne Williamson. “of talking about things that matter!”
Williamson, best-selling author and long-time political activist (and a friend I’ve known and respected for many years), is, indeed, running for president of the United States, bringing into her campaign a burning commitment not so much to winning as to pushing past the consensus of know-nothingism that has long dominated American politics — and certainly the Democratic Party — at the highest level.
“Our democracy has stage 4 cancer,” she says in her campaign video, “and all the traditional politicians are offering is a topical ointment.”
Can this actually happen here? Can American democracy dig to the level of the national soul? Can it burrow beyond our superficial “exceptionalism” into our past and truly look at what we’ve done over the last two and a half centuries? Can the nation hold itself accountable . . . for slavery, for Native American genocide, for wasting trillions of dollars and murdering millions of people by waging endless war?
Can America change?
How, I asked her the other day, did you decide to run for president?
“One day I was sitting on my bed in New York and the idea just popped in,” she said. Her first thought was: “Are you insane?” She spent a year and a half processing the idea before finally making the commitment to such an arduous undertaking: to run not simply as an isolated individual with a strategy and a bumper sticker, but as part of a movement, determined to bring the aspirations of that movement into direct confrontation with the forces of Big Money.
Join the evolution!
“I’m doing this,” she said, “not just to elevate the conversation but to begin the process of making it happen. Why assume the American people won’t do it?”
Williamson says on her website: “There is a groundswell of Americans seeking higher wisdom, in politics as well as everywhere else. . . My campaign for the presidency is dedicated to this search, for wisdom of the heart has been absent from the political sphere for far too long. Together we can reclaim both our democratic principles and the angels of our better selves, expressed not only in our personal lives but in acts of citizenship as well. Politics should not be a pursuit disconnected from the heart; it should be, as everything should be, an expression of the heart. Where fear has been harnessed for political purposes, let’s now harness the power of love.”
This is not how a presidential candidate is supposed to talk. A word like “love” ignites cynicism. It’s soft. What about our enemies? What about the interests we need to pursue in a hostile world? Politics is supposed to be tough and hard, or pretend to be, as candidates spout clichés about “a strong defense” and dance away from any real challenge to the status quo.
Suddenly, as I was talking to Williamson, I thought about the John Kerry campaign of 2004 and how, when I received a call from a Kerry fundraiser one day, I got hung up on when I kept pestering the guy about Iraq. At that point, we were a year into the carnage and quagmire. He refused to discuss the candidate’s position and finally rang off. I was so disturbed by this I called Kerry’s central campaign office, where a spokesman did nothing but spout Bush-lite truisms. Even though the heart of Kerry’s constituency thought the war was a disaster, the spokesman could speak only of “crushing the terrorists” and “building a democracy” in Iraq. He too hung up on me.
This confirmed what I pretty much knew. The country had become no more than a spectator democracy. The government’s agenda is none of our — the public’s — business. We get to go shopping and watch the bombing on TV. But . . .
“There is a groundswell of Americans seeking higher wisdom, in politics as well as everywhere else . . .”
Yes, I believe this as well. American democracy has not been completely undone. There’s something happening here. Evolution — the creation of a world beyond war and environmental exploitation — has grabbed hold of the political system and is no longer irrelevant to it. In 2016, Bernie Sanders scared the DNC to within an inch of its corporate life. In 2018, a wave of progressive change flooded Congress.
Williamson told me she wants to confront the gatekeepers with “the necessary audacity to keep democracy alive.”
Visit her website and imbibe some of her audacity:
“America should embark on a 10- to 20-year plan for turning a wartime economy into a peace-time economy, repurposing the tremendous talents and infrastructure of our military-industrial complex in such a way as to leave us strong enough to deal with America’s legitimate needs for military preparedness, yet moving on to the urgent task of building a sustainable society and sustainable world. . . . (It) is time to release this powerful sector of American genius to the work of promoting life instead of death. . . .
“In many ways, America has continued the process of racial reconciliation begun in the 1960s. Yet in other ways, we have actually slipped backward. Yes, there are no more colored bathrooms and separate drinking fountains. But we now have mass incarceration; racial disparity in criminal sentencing; lost voting rights; outright voter suppression; and police brutality often focused on black populations. . . .
“Criminal justice has become both a political and moral disaster. . . . Trauma sends people into the criminal justice system, and then the criminal justice system too often heaps more trauma on those incarcerated or facing incarceration. If we are serious about breaking the cycle of violence, we need to be sensitive to these traumatic experiences that lead to violence, and by doing so, we have a chance of addressing both.”
And there’s so much more. Her goal is to cry truth at the American political consensus. To get into the debates, she must receive 65,000 unique donations. She’s about two-thirds of the way there right now.
The political groundswell is just beginning. Democracy does not mean business as usual.
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Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.
