Pragmatic Capitalism

Calculated Risk The Reformed Broker How Our Brains Stop Us From Achieving Our Goals (and How to Fight Back) Global Macro Monitor Dealbreaker: Wall Street Insider Inspire Me Now The Bonddad Blog SurlyTrader Peter Pronovost The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been uniformly fatal. Now survival is commonplace, and a large part of the credit goes to the irreplaceable component of medicine known as intensive care. It’s an opaque term. Specialists in the field prefer to call what they do “critical care,” but that doesn’t exactly clarify matters. The difficulties of life support are considerable. But the emergency technicians continued CPR anyway. After six hours, her core temperature reached 98.6 degrees. First, her pupils started to react to light. What makes her recovery astounding isn’t just the idea that someone could come back from two hours in a state that would once have been considered death. On any given day in the United States, some ninety thousand people are in intensive care. “I need to get out!”

CARPE DIEM