Editorial Message: Fashionable Worries

It is hard to believe it is a new year. Where did 2015 go? As I look back over the schedule and see what I have done this past year, I wonder how I made all those meetings and understand why the people at Delta Airlines are such good friends! As we look forward to the prospects of a new year, we tend to wonder and worry about all the bad and horrible things going on in the world today. It is no wonder that we think about these issues because we are confronted with them all day every day on the news and all other media sources. Climate change, population overcrowding, global hunger and starving children, pollution, horrible uncontrolled previously unheard-of diseases—the list goes on and on. 

Author P.J. O’Rourke has labeled these and others “fashionable worries.”¹ Fashionable worries are “those enormous global problems that are endlessly in the news and constantly on our minds but about which we mostly don’t have a clue.”¹ I know that sounds a bit harsh, but have you heard anyone come out with a solution to any of them? Even with the Ebola epidemic, despite all the news stories and television coverage, very little was done about it except to let it run its course. What was done was too little and definitely too late. What about climate change? That is an example of something we should all worry about, isn’t it? It has been said that the climate change issue is the perfect worry we should all have. The threat cannot be solved in the near term and the danger and outcome are difficult to predict or measure.² All we need to do is trust the politicians to solve the problem which, by the way, may take around 80 years or so, according to them.² They won’t be here in 80 years to be blamed if the problem is not fixed. Some say an obvious problem is overcrowding—we are getting too many people on the planet for us to sustain life, but no one I know is volunteering to be eliminated. It is interesting to note that the number of people per square mile in Bangladesh is exactly the same as it is in Freemont, California!¹ I haven’t heard that the folks in Freemont are struggling for food and resources. When money and food are donated to feed the hungry, what do they do when the money and food are gone? Has anyone come up with a way to provide a sustainable source of food for those in need? The bottom line is that it is easier to worry about a problem than it is to fix it; and with most of these problems, when all is said and done, there is usually more said than done.

Let me assure you I am not suggesting we ignore those larger problems, but that finding real solutions for them in today’s world will not be easy. If we normal human beings with day jobs want to worry about something, we should worry about things we might be able to solve. We might think about how we can get everyone to provide good, evidence-based wound care. It seems apparent that providing guidelines and algorithms is not working. How do we get the message about good wound care to the people in the large hospitals as well as the rural areas and convince them that evidence-based care is better than what they are doing? Any ideas? We can’t solve all the “fashionable worries,” but we should be able to make a difference in wound care.