Flashback 1994: Cultural Differences Hamper Health Care

Station Hospital, by Robert Smullyan Sloan (Metropolitan Museum)

    
     "Medical stories are always interesting," I told my wife, justifying the hours I've been spending downtown this week, researching an upcoming column at a Chicago hospital. Between that, and a big piece due for Mosaic early next week, I'm going to have to phone in the blog for a few days. Since I'm in a medical mode, a few medical stories from the hazy past, including this, which I found out about through contacts in the Russian emigre community.

     They complain of serdtsa boleet -- literally "heartache" -- or pitchen boleet, a pain in the liver. They wave mysterious bottles with Cyrillic labels and demand valerian, an herbal tranquilizer rarely used here since the 1800s.
     They are immigrants, mostly Jewish, from the troubled, fractured land that once was the Soviet Union. Their steady influx into Chicago—3,000 last year, 14,000 in the last seven—has created a massive health care challenge for local social service agencies and affiliated hospitals.
     "They're sick folks," said Joan M. Schulhoff, director of Jewish Federation programs at Mt. Sinai Hospital, summing up the general health of the immigrants.
     "We are seeing many more problems than had before, because of the deterioration of the economy of the former Soviet Union. We are seeing more untreated cancer, untreated heart disease, untreated diabetes."
     Mt. Sinai and Michael Reese Hospital treat without charge any Soviet immigrant with a serious medical condition for the first four months they are in the country. Sometimes it's longer.
     "Any urgent or emergency care," said Carol S. Goldbaum, director of Michael Reese's department of social work. "We're not piercing ears, we're not doing breast reconstruction. We do cardiac bypass, radiation therapy, anything that has to do with cancer. Cataracts or glaucoma if they're looking at permanent damage unless something is done."
     The program is set up under the auspices of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, under contract with the state to provide health care for all refugees.
     Mt. Sinai provides $1.5 million a year in unreimbursed services, and Michael Reese as much as $1 million. The federation spends $2.5 million a year on immigrant health care, including the money it gets from the state.
     "We've been refugees for thousands of years—we know how to do this stuff," said Joel Carp, associate executive director of the federation.
     Many of the new immigrants are elderly relatives of people who came to this country years ago.
     Naum Zhits and his wife, Tslya, both 68, spent only one night under the roof of a relative in Highland Park before Tslya, who has a history of heart trouble, needed to be rushed to the hospital. Less than a week after leaving Minsk, she is in Michael Reese awaiting a triple bypass.
     For those with less urgent needs, the first step is a screening at the Touhy Health Center, run by Mt. Sinai. Doctors have two goals—ascertain individual health care needs and spot public health dangers—syphilis, AIDS, even leprosy.
     It is no vain exercise: One-third of all the immigrants are carrying tuberculosis.
     Ed Gilmore, a physician assistant, helps examine the 30 patients a day coming into Touhy.
     A major challenge is dealing with the myriad differences in medical culture. The Russians, for example, often are averse to taking aspirin. But many are addicted to tranquilizers. "It is an over-tranquilized population," Schulhoff said.
     Then there are the aftereffects of Soviet medicine with which U.S. doctors must deal.
     "Oftentimes their doctors lacked the facilities to perform necessary tests, so they made diagnoses 'from the ceiling,' " said Gilmore, using the Soviet slang term for a doctor sitting back in his chair, gazing skyward, and making up a significant-sounding diagnosis.
     An important part of this care is teaching new patients fundamentals of nutrition and preventive care, and how to use the U.S. medical system.
     Caregivers have been sent to Berlitz courses so that they have at least a rough understanding of Russian.
     It helped Gilmore one recent day, as he examined 8-year-old Ilya Samovskiy.
     Gilmore set the boy at ease with a magic trick, and proceeded to examine him, speaking a mixture of English and poorly pronounced Russian. "My bad accent amuses the old folks," he says. "They like it a lot."
     The boy's condition, he tells Ilya's mother, Galina, is "ne seriosna," -- he just has a slight fever -- and Gilmore perscribes "Tylenol, two tabletski."
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times April 4, 1994

Quaker Oats quietly touches up its iconic oatmeal man

Out with the old, left, in with the new and slightly different. 

     Maybe because we’re both gents from Ohio who ended up working in downtown Chicago. Maybe because we’re men given to chubbiness and self-promotion.
     But the Quaker Oats Man is on my radar. Always has been. So when my wife came home with a container, the moment it was removed from the Sunset Foods bag I noticed something amiss. I set the old and new cylinders together on the counter.
     The new Quaker Oats man is different. Windblown, for starters, his white neckerchief flapping in the breeze. His complexion paler, with rosier cheeks; his predecessor had a uniform, peach quality. The image a little smaller, his face a little thinner too, more of a distinct chin. Behind him, a faint image of farmland has been worked into the deep red background.
     Could I have missed the big announcement? Online, there was nothing but a brief mention in a trade magazine earlier this year. I found more hoopla from 2012, when they last fiddled with his image. Trimming five pounds, according to Quaker, which let slip that in-house, they call him “Larry.”
     “Larry”?
     Seven years is awfully quick to redo Quaker’s icon. Calls and emails were fired at Quaker — headquartered in Chicago — and PepsiCo, which bought the brand in 2001.
      While waiting, I started to dig, beginning with Quakers. Formed in Britain in the 1650s, George Fox called his sect “The Society of Friends.” They immediately got in trouble for failing to bow and scrape to officialdom, and were beaten and jailed. After Fox told a judge he should “tremble at the word of the Lord” the judge called him a “quaker,” derisively. Eventually the sect started calling themselves Quakers — a kind of defiant rebranding, the way gay people started proudly referring to themselves as “queer.”

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Something new under the sun: Hoplark HopTea

    For a guy who doesn't drink, I spend a lot of time in bars. Which raises the question, What do you drink in a bar if you don't want to drink booze? Club soda is zupped down in a heartbeat. Regular sodas are either sugary or vile. Non-alcoholic beers are surprisingly good nowadays—Beck's, St. Pauli Girl, Clausthaler—but not every bar stocks them. Lack of demand, I suppose.
     Craft mocktails can be quite good, redolent of mint or basil or cucumber, particularly at a chi-chi restaurant like The Dearborn in the Loop, my new favorite go-to place.
     But both of those have drawbacks: calories for one.  And they also can be hard to find.
     I was far from the Loop, however, last spring, sitting in a sushi bar in Boulder, Colorado, when the bartender, considering my strange interest in beverages non-alcoholic, suggested Hoplark HopTea, iced tea that is brewed like beer, with zero calories, zero sugar and zero alcohol.
   Introduced in June, 2018, made right there in Boulder, it had a surprising, refreshing, kindy beerish, kinda tealike taste.  It was complicated, and took time to drink, which is kinda the point. You can buy HopTea at a number of Whole Foods around Chicago, as well as other locations, as detailed on their web site.
     The restaurant, just in case you ever get to Boulder, was Japango on the Pearl Street Mall. I liked the food, the service, the ambience, and the cylindrical tank filled with jellyfish.  So much that, with the broad range of Boulder restaurants at our fingertips, we went back the next day to have lunch at Japango a second time. Good call.

Turning away from wonder to gaze at matters Trumpian

     The word “placebo” is not only from Latin, it is Latin, an unaltered Latin word meaning “I will please,” the first person singular future indicative of placere, “to please.”
     It wasn’t originally used to describe a sugar pill pretending to be medicine, of course, but a part of Vespers, Book of the Dead, taken from the line, Psalm 114:9 in the Latin Vulgate Bible: “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum,” or “I will please the Lord in the land for living.”

     By 1200, it was used to describe flatterers — Chaucer names a character in The Merchant’s Tale “Placebo.” By 1811, it was a term for pills with no medical value but offering psychological benefit. 
     OK, OK, Donald Trump. Do you think the media wants to natter on obsessively about him? Others perhaps do. But not me. Gazing into Trump’s world is like directing a flashlight down the hole in an outhouse while the Northern Lights flash and flicker in the heavens right outside.
     But focusing elsewhere, no matter how fascinating, also feels like describing a pretty flower when the school next door is burning. Worse, your entire country aflame. I was going to write today on last week’s Alabama debacle. You know the particulars if you’re paying attention. With Hurricane Dorian turning up the East Coast, Trump said Alabama was in peril when it wasn’t, the risk already past.
     A small error. Worth correcting only because people in Alabama could be alarmed by the president suggesting a deadly storm is bearing down on them. A normal human being would dismiss it with a shrug.

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Lighted balloons

    Did you have a good summer? Now that we're hurtling into September, hard to believe it's almost gone. For me, spine surgery carved out a big two-month chunk, cancelling two vacations and sucking up all my attention and energy. That was unfortunate.
     But I did have one beautiful day. Center Avenue had a block party a few weeks ago. It was a marvel of planning—thank you Carla, thank you Tanya, thank you all the other neighbors who helped out. Not only the usual tables of food and tubs of cold drinks, but live bands. A fire truck and bouncy house for the kids. Games. My oldest boy was in town, and we all hung out, chatting, eating, listening to music as day turned into evening, then into night. I think I spent eight hours, from setting up to the last stragglers sitting around a fire pit in the front yard. Playing corn hole. Dancing in the street—really, how often do you get the chance to dance in the street? Not often enough.
     After dark, someone produced something I had never seen before. Lighted balloons. I hope that doesn't tar me as hopelessly out of it, and that you haven't been enjoying LED balloons since the 1950s. I'm sure you'll let me know. But they were new to me. Not only did the balloons glow sooth shades of blue and green, but they changed colors. I'd never seen anything like it. Finally, a new technology that isn't menacing.
      A tiny girl—5, 7, it's hard to tell anymore—walked up to me and, with heartbreaking solemnity, presented me with one, saying, "Would you like this balloon? Please take it." You can't very well say no to that. I accepted it with a bow.
     Though once I had the balloon, there was a difficulty: what to do with it? I carried the balloon for a bit, giving it a few tentative tosses into the air and catching it. But that got old. I didn't want to cast the balloon away, not after that little girl had so earnestly entrusted me with it. It would pop on the ground. And be my fault.
     Then I had a brainstorm. There was a low branched tree in the yard where the block party was centered. I took the string from the balloon and wrapped it around a branch. A good idea spread. Other people automatically followed my lead—that never happens—and soon the tree was festooned with balloons, all gently changing colors. It was gorgeous. When I think of the summer of 2019, I'll think of that.

This might not be the outrage Patti expected, but it’ll have to do

     Friday was the rare day I had two columns in the paper, the second being a quick hit ordered up in response to Patti Blagojevich shaking her fist at the heavens for the unfairness of life. A few readers found this harsh, feeling pity for Patti and her fractured family. They might not realize that it was her father, Dick Mell, who inflicted Blago on the state in the first place, as a wedding present. She had plenty of opportunity to spare him, and herself, and us, this endless drama. Sympathy is misplaced.

Coincidence can be a satirist.
 A reader sent in this, which ran
 in the paper the same day. 

     Oh, Patti. Do you really not get it? After all these years? You “cannot even wrap” your head around former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock, having his indictment dismissed while your hubby is seven years into his 14-year prison term? (That is, assuming Donald Trump, friend of frauds and crooks, doesn’t commute his sentence as a big wink to his cronies that he has their back.)
     Shall I explain it then? OK.
     First, Schock’s acts were penny-ante — Super Bowl tickets and fudged expense reports. It was not trying to sell a seat to the United States Senate, and doing a botched job at that. The harm of a crime matters — a guy who takes a sledgehammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta is in more trouble than somebody doing the same to a plaster Elvis. Both guys are swinging hammers. Schock got a fancy office; Illinois got Sen. Roland Burris. Those are not equal harms.
     Second, Schock played ball with the feds. He cut a deal. He did not prance and preen and glory in the attention, the way your husband did. He did not go on “Dancing with the Stars.”
     Not that Rod didn’t have a point. Sure, he only did the kind of horse-trading politicians do. But into an open FBI tap he knew was there.
     Third, what makes you believe the legal system is fair? Murderers walk while mopes sit in stir for decades over a $50 stick-up. Dan Rostenkowski committed petty thefts over postage stamps and office chairs — and ended up in the joint. (Taking it, I might add, with far more grace than Rod, who practically had to have his hands pried off the radiator as they dragged him to prison, like Jimmy Cagney going to the chair in “Angels with Dirty Faces.”)

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Ping Tom Park part of a growing Chinatown

Artist Anna Murphy finishing mural at Ping Tom Memorial Park in Chinatown.

  

     Nobody calls the near West Side of Chicago “Jew Town” anymore. The great-grandchildren of the merchants who sold ... well, just about everything ... at the sprawling open-air market on Maxwell Street have scattered — to Rogers Park, then Skokie, then everywhere.
     Many of the city’s old ethnic enclaves were shattered by supposed “progress,” whether the Italian community on Taylor Street, bulldozed by the expanding University of Illinois at Chicago, or the heart of Bronzeville, cut out by CHA high-rises.
     Chinatown is an exception. Not only has it preserved its ethnic character — 90% of the neighborhood’s residents are Asian, most speaking Chinese at home — but it’s growing, despite, and in some cases because of, setbacks it suffered.
     “Chicago’s Chinatown is really interesting,” said David Wu, executive director of the Pui Tak Center, a community center in Chinatown. “Philadelphia and New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston — every Chinatown is within blocks of the financial district and City Hall, and every one of these cities would say their Chinatowns are dying.”
     Chicago’s Chinatown was originally jammed into two blocks of Clark Street in the Loop. But in 1912, rising rents and white hostility prodded the Chinese community to move, wholesale, to Wentworth and Cermak.
     Bad then, good now.
     “If we were at Clark and Van Buren and wanted to expand at all, we couldn’t,” said Wu. “A hundred years ago, it wasn’t nice to be pushed out of your community. But now Chicago’s Chinatown is the only one flourishing. It’s more like a normal community, without huge pressures of gentrification.”

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