AHC: Eddie Van Halen does vascular surgery before music; different Flexner Report in 1910.

And this is high trajectory.

So much so, that he makes Bono look like a rank amateur. I mean, Eddie is Doyle Brunson to Bono's Chris Moneymaker! :cool:
 
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Baby health crisis in Indonesia as formula companies push products

The Guardian, Zoe Williams in Jakarta, 15 February 2013.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/15/babies-health-formula-indonesia-breastfeeding

' . . . She started feeding Riska formula, rather than breastfeeding her, when her daughter was two months old; she was on contraceptives, and thought it was interfering with her milk supply. The midwife agreed, and gave her a free sample of formula milk. Now she spends 400,000 rupiah (about £26) a month on formula, which is half of her husband's monthly salary. She seemed to be a pretty good example of one of the main problems of formula feeding in Indonesia. Even the cheapest brands punch a huge hole in a poor family's budget, and they end up over-diluting it, which leaves the babies malnourished. . . '
This is perfectly okay as journalism. But it's not the most effective activism because it seems like an overstatement and then people will kick at the whole thing.

It's better to lead with a case where, say, the family is spending 25% of their income to buy formula for one infant, and then acknowledge that some cases are worse. We don't need to hide cases. It's all a question of what cases you're going to lead with.
 
Now, that company in Indonesia is the Danone Group (Dannon yogurt in the U.S.). Of course, the most known player in the infant formula business is Nestlé, which is a Swiss company.

During a Van Halen European tour, Eddie's going to talk about this. Of course, he is, in skillful understated fashion. And with dates in Bern and Geneva, the story might have extra legs.
 
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Eddie is a talented individual really into his music. It is royally unfair to expect him to save the whole effin' world.

This is a thought experiment that asks, how far could really skillfully done celebrity activism go? The type of activism which learns from its mistakes and takes the next (?) communicative step with fellow citizens.
 
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Remember the part with Nestlé where if Swiss citizens think their company is being attacked by outsiders, they're likely to defend it. Whereas if they think the company is embarrassing them, it's a whole 'nother matter.

Well, you can have transparency of tactics where you talk about this openly. You can make a 45 second commercial where you talk about the good things the company has done and at the end have text which asks, Why is Nestlé slow on the uptake regarding the ethics of infant formula? And you can test market it in midsized Swiss cities and survey people both before and after.

And to the extent TV stations run the commercials at the beginning and then stop, or refuse to run them altogether, all this plays to your strength.
 
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https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/history

In the 1970’s, it came to light that babies in Global South countries were getting sick and dying from bottle feeding—a handful of major corporations were aggressively marketing powdered infant formula throughout countries where it simply could not be used safely. Poor mothers couldn’t afford to buy enough of it for their babies—they had no refrigeration, or the fuel and utensils to sterilize bottles, and the water in their communities wasn’t safe enough to use in the formula.

Corporate Accountability International (then the Infant Formula Action Coalition, Infact) was born when four activists joined forces: Leah Margulies, Doug Johnson, Mark Ritchie, and Doug Clement. They agreed preventing more deaths would require a strategic approach that had never been attempted before on a global scale. They tried shareholder resolutions and law suits against U.S. companies, but the changes wouldn’t happen fast enough to save lives. But if the organization successfully targeted the market leader, Nestlé, to stop its dangerous practices, it might just send a ripple effect across the entire industry.
This worked great back in the '70s. But Eddie realizes that if we keep going after Nestle, there will be the perception that they're being picked upon. So, he comes up with a new plan.
 
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Eddie likes the phrase "the Dirty Dozen." He likes it a lot.

But he realizes that if he makes it corporations, companies that are 8th, 9th, 10th, etc, may actually welcome the publicity! So, he decides to make it "the Dirty Dozen" of corporate practices, and if Nestlé or Danone show up a couple of times, Oh, well.
 

CalBear

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Is there any actual point to this thread or are you just throwing crap at the wall and hoping something will stick?

Right now this whole thread looks like one long troll post.
 
Yes, a couple of things.

1) What if medical education was radically different, where especially surgeons (where youth matters) could have second careers?

2) And we've never had a rock star doctor*, at least not to my knowledge. Just how far could we take successful and effective celebrity activism?


* closest might be Rindy Ross lead singer of Quarterflash (best known for "Harden My Heart") who became a therapist. But I don't think she's gone public as a campaigner on health issues.
 
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