In Context

26/04/2021

LinkedIn made a post about what career paths can look like. I extended it to include Trauma & Poverty.

May is Trauma awareness month. I’d like to see it expanded to talk about different types of trauma.

Communication & Social Media play BIG parts in Psychological Trauma.

Trauma can be transmitted through media. We need to share healthier ways to talk about trauma.

14/02/2021

I’ve been writing about social media on LinkedIn.

-Amy



https://www.linkedin.com/posts/amy-erdt-3937b11a3_facebook-apple-trust-activity-6766807451401641984-Y93l

Social media & tech have been gaslighting at-risk populations and everyone. For years people raised concerns that when they were simply chatting about... 10 comments on LinkedIn

24/11/2020

Oregon Health Authority & Governor Kate Brown there are more effective ways to communicate to the public. Focus simply on hospitalizations by county (see the phone screenshot for how this can be done in a meaningful way.) Example:
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🚨Slow Down. This IS manageable. I'm not making light of our situation but we basically need to play whack-a-mole with transmission rates for a little longer.

Back in Feb/March I started processing the data that was coming out from around the world. Some of you may remember my spreadsheets. Focusing on hospitalization data gives us the clearest picture.

Please reduce your holiday plans. Everyone wants to have access to the ER if they need it. We do not want to overwhelm our hospitals. A vaccine is close. We want to be able to enjoy next year with our loved ones. Help save lives.

The screenshot of the spreadsheet is one I did in March with details about Clackamas county. (Some of the data may be out of date - I haven't updated in awhile.)

The phone mockup is the information I think Oregon Health Authority & Governor Kate Brown should be focusing on communicating to the public.

The other screenshots are from the OHA Covid dashboards. I included some previous snapshots to show what our exponential growth looks like. If we continue at this pace we will put a lot of pressure on our hospital staff.

OHA links:

https://public.tableau.com/profile/oregon.health.authority.covid.19 #!/vizhome/OregonsCOVID-19DataDashboards-TableofContents/TableofContentsStatewide

18/11/2020

Our country does better when the bottom half has purchasing power. The Santa Clara County displays why we can’t have an across the board minimum wage. That county would be at $43.26 minimum wage, which isn’t sustainable for small businesses that serve less expensive areas in that county.

Walmart and Fast Food are some of the biggest employers in our country. They often serve lower income areas. If they pay more of a living wage it would directly boost communities that need it the most.

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Calculate *County Median Home *Sale Price:

Median National House Sale Price: $226,800

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▪️Bracket 1. If your County median home price falls between 0 - $226,800

11% of $226,000 = $24,948 should be the minimum pay for an EMT-1 worker

Starter-Wage Job, 70% of an EMT-1-Intermediate’s pay:

$17,463 ($9.09 per hour - federal minimum wage)

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▪️Bracket 2. If your County median home price falls between $226,801-$452,000

11% of your county’s median house sale price:

example: Clackamas County, OR $430,100 - 11% = $47,311 Minimum pay for an EMT-1 worker

60% of an EMT-1 pay:

example: Clackamas County, OR - 60% = $28,386 ($14.78) per hour starter wage

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▪️Bracket 3. If your County median home price falls between $452,001 - $678,000

11% of your county’s median house sale price:

example: Contra Costa County, CA $626,000 - 11% = $68,860 Minimum pay for an EMT-1

50% of an EMT-1 pay:

example: Contra Costa County, CA - 50% = $34,430 ($17.93 per hour) starter wage

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▪️Bracket 4. If your County median home price falls between $678,001 - $904,000

11% of your county’s median house sale price:

40% of an EMT-1 pay:

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▪️Bracket 5. If your County median home price is $904,000 and up

11% of your county’s median house sale price:

example: Santa Clara County, CA $1,078,800 - 11% = $118,668 Minimum pay for an EMT-1

30% of an EMT-1 pay:

example: Santa Clara County, CA $1,078,800 - 30% = $35,600 ($18.54) starter wage

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I used an EMT-1 as a base scale because an EMT should be able to afford to by a house in the county they work in within a couple years of training. That should just be obvious to EVERYONE.

06/11/2020

🚩 Okay, I continue to get DM’s about Oregon’s case count. I do watch case counts but I factor things by hospitalizations and area.

We need to slow way down. Please remember Halloween and holidays tend to increase hospital occupancy.

If you don’t know what exponential growth is, please ask or Google it. This virus turns fast which is why we (the public) need to be aware when we should strongly reduce community activity levels in different areas.

This is not something to have anxiety about. It sucks and it’s manageable. We want to protect as many vulnerable people as possible. 💜

(I’ll add screenshots as we go.)

-Amy

12/07/2020

🤔 Inevitably the health insurance industry will stop paying claims and demand a bailout from our taxes/government.

Do we want a bailout or buyout?

30/04/2020

🛑 Here are some key facts about why people take this so seriously:

▶️ Humans have never been exposed to the genetic make up of this virus before. So no one has built up immunity the way we do for the flu.

▶️ We don’t yet know if people *can build immunity. Antibodies don’t necessarily mean immunity, some antibodies are not effective at fighting things off. Antibodies also don’t automatically mean that someone has or had the virus. You can be exposed to a tiny bit, not have the virus take hold but still develop some antibodies. You can be exposed to more virus later, then contract it.

▶️ Early antibody testing is notoriously unreliable. Complicated equations are required to account for false positives/negatives. There are challenges with population samples that can wildly affect the study. There are *lots* of variables. They get better and more accurate over time. The scientific and medical communities have the standards of *Peer Reviewed and being able to *Duplicate Results for many reasons.

▶️ We don’t yet know if people actually beat the virus. Some viruses stay in the body like HIV & herpes and can flair up symptoms down the line. I’m not saying this is likely, but it’s part of the equation.

▶️ *If we can develop immunity, around 50% - 80% of the population has to contract the virus so its growth rate is manageable.

▶️ People can contract and shed this virus WITHOUT symptoms for weeks; Which makes it spread like wildfire.

▶️ There are at least eight known mutations around the world. This is similar to getting *one* flu, you may still be able to catch another.

▶️ One version of this virus *may be able to build effective antibodies that reduce symptoms or prevent you from getting the other. *Also*… Someone may have lung or organ damage from the first bout of Covid-19 and catching a second mutation might cause more health damage. And we don’t know *if we build immunity, *how long it lasts*.

▶️ Most viruses get weaker with mutations. This happens because deadlier versions kill the host before they can spread it to more people. Covid-19 behaves differently; it has a long incubation period and doesn’t usually cause death till weeks later. That doesn’t necessarily mean mutations will be worse, it’s just something scientists and the medical community are watching.

▶️ When this virus is in abundance in our environment, it’s harder for younger, healthy people to fight it off. That’s why so many young doctors, nurses and even teachers, have died or been hospitalized for serious conditions. If we keep our reduction in community activity until it works its way through the population, more people will have milder cases because the virus isn’t everywhere.

▶️ Covid-19 has DOUBLE+ the hospitalization times of influenza. People who need hospitalization have to stay double+ the amount of time then if they were hospitalized with the flu. This is partly why we’re reducing community activity. If the virus spreads too fast, our hospitals won’t be able to keep up.

▶️ After accounting for unconfirmed cases and asymptomatic spread, the data seems to indicate, this virus (the first go around) has less than 1% mortality. And the vast majority of people who have a difficult time, are over 60 with other health conditions.

❤️ We’re buying time. 👉We are reducing community activity and slowing the spread, so our doctors have time to study and learn best practices. If we develop treatments that produce better results and shorten hospitalization times, we can go back to normal sooner. We will also SAVE LIVES. So folks who would’ve been around for years, will still be here.

Oregon Stats:

✅ 4.3 million people.

✅ At-risk population: 200k’ish (at least).

✅ We have the highest rates of asthma and lowest number of hospital beds per capita in the country.

✅ We have 38k people in the tri-county area who’ve been homeless or doubled-up in the past several years.

We have:

✅ Hospital Beds:
2,100 available (‘ish)

✅ ICU beds:
330 available (‘ish)

✅ Ventilators:
730 available (‘ish)

19/04/2020

🛑 Oregon population: 4.3 Million

🛑 At-risk population: 200k’ish

We have:

🛑 Hospital Beds: 2,100’ish available

🛑 ICU beds: 330’ish available

🛑 Ventilators: 730’ish

👉 RIGHT NOW in Oregon WITHOUT our reduction in community activity...

We WOULD’VE had:

🛑 1.5k COVID HOSPITALIZATIONS

🛑 390 COVID ICU PATIENTS

🛑 195 PATIENTS ON VENTILATORS

👉 In a few weeks that number would’ve ballooned a couple thousand more.

WE ONLY HAVE 300 people hospitalized currently because of our EARLY ACTION.

That’s the reality happening all over the world right now.

🛑 THIS ISN’T A MEDIA HOAX OR CONSPIRACY. It’s MATH.

▪️It’s exponential growth.
▪️It’s a reproductive number of 4-5.
▪️It’s DOUBLE+ the hospitalization times of influenza.

And for fu@& sake...

▪️We don’t actually know if this virus stays in our bodies and can flare-up causing more health damage down the line.

▪️We don’t know *if we build immunity that helps prevent reoccurrence, or how long *possible immunity lasts.

▪️We don’t know *if that *possible immunity will help fight against the other mutations going around the world.

▪️We don’t have solid data on treatment options or antivirals.

▪️ We’re not close to a vaccine.

▪️Typically aggressive versions of virus’s kill off hosts in days, so weaker mutations become more prevalent because people live and spread them around. This virus has a long incubation period so it’s behaving differently.

🛑🛑🛑

👉 We have the tools and skills to fight this globally.

👉 We have mass communication and collaboration from our smartest people around the world who are ALL working on this.

👉 We have infrastructure online and with delivery/pick-up in our society that allows for physical distance while shifting our economy/school/socializing to a new model.

🌎 WE WILL BE OKAY. But CHILL OUT with the conspiracy theories and media hoaxes.

We’ll get through this. It’s just a shift.

💕It has the potential to help us make meaningful changes in our national *and global communities.

12/04/2020

✅ Voting is the foundation of our democracy. We should all want a system that provides easy access to voting for every eligible voter. Fixing our voting process nationally is the most important task because it’s the bedrock for every other legislative issue.

We can improve access to voting and create more secure elections by shifting two things:

➖ Move to a federal mail/ballot drop box system.

➖ Drop the electoral college OR create federal regulation for bipartisan drawing of districts. We won’t go into the historical reasons for having an electoral college.
_____________________________________________________________

Gerrymandering is a way to cheat using our electoral college. (See picture for how that works)

Inflammatory voter influence is the use of social media/ads to spread out-of-context or false information... Think Russian interference with the hashtags 'Take a Knee,' and 'Boycott NFL'. Both were pushed by bots and trolls from foreign countries to try and rip us apart. People who benefit from dividing us as a country; And we fell for it. (Research Cambridge Analytica - Two movies to kinda get an understanding are “Brexit” and “The Great Hack”.) For more information about unethical legislation pushing, research ALEC. Read their website *and the information that takes issue with what they do. Then decide for yourself.

The Great Hack:
https://youtu.be/iX8GxLP1FHo

Brexit:
https://youtu.be/E5S1EMmCWAE

Clearly polling machines can easily be hacked. It’s far to easy to change votes electronically.

➖ Most individual voter “fraud” cases boil down to improperly filed name changes or clerical errors. These cases statistically are insignificant regarding federal elections.

➖ Voter suppression is quite different and IS statistically significant. It DOES affect election outcomes.

Voter ID laws make it more difficult for elderly people to vote because often they stop renewing their drivers license. Same for low income people, disabled people and people particularly in inner cities who use public transportation. If you can’t afford to or don’t drive, keeping a valid state ID becomes less important. Especially if you can’t afford the time off work to sit at a DMV all day or the costs associated with getting/renewing a state ID. Voter ID laws also make it difficult for women and transgender people to vote because they more often change their names.

Reducing polling stations in poorer areas is also used to suppress voters. Long lines and restricting voting to one day, makes it more difficult for people with less resources to vote.

This helps keep those with money in power, and helps rig the system in their favor.

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✅ Description of a mail/ballot drop box system:

➖ State election officials mail ballots with return envelopes that have registered voter info printed on it - Voters drop off at *locked, video monitored ballot boxes. ➖

▪️They mail us our ballots. We can check online if they’ve been delivered or report if we didn’t receive them.

▪️We have weeks to study and vote on issues.

▪️We sign and seal the return envelope that has our registered voter name and address printed on it.

▪️We drop them at locked video monitored ballot boxes.

From the time they’re dropped at the box to the time they’re opened and separated on an assembly line, scanned and counted, everything is recorded to prevent fraud. Then they’re secured in locked video recorded storage. Even better if a state website allows the public to stream/watch the process.

▪️We can check online to see that our ballot was received/counted.

➖ If there are issues we can do a paper recount. ➖

12/04/2020

✔️ Emotional Health Check

▶️ Sometimes directing support towards those suffering from emotional regulation challenges is appropriate too.

Kids often can’t leave abusive situations; adults have a difficult enough time leaving. A suffering individual has to live in their own mind. Domestic violence is complicated.

▪️Some people struggle with emotional regulation.

▪️Sometimes this can turn into behaviors that are harmful to ourselves and those around us.

▪️These struggles can be intensified during times of financial and situational stress.

▪️Please know that you’re not alone. It’s not uncommon to have challenges with communication or lash out at the ones we we love.

▪️It is possible to improve communication skills.

▪️It is possible to express/process emotions without causing harm to yourself or those around you. It’s tough and a *practice to learn.

🏘 Neighbors, if you hear noises that are concerning, please call the proper authorities to do a welfare check.

Living in a household with unhealthy extremes is hard enough, being in ‘quarantine’ adds another layer.

DBT (Dialectal Behavioral Therapy) has tangible course material that can help us improve skills and learn new tools.

There are some wonderful Facebook DBT groups.

For worksheets and further reading, you can google “DBT” with:

- Interpersonal Effectiveness
- Emotional Regulation
- Distress Tolerance
- Core Mindfulness

Please remember this is practice; it’s progress, not perfection.

▪️It works, if you work it.

▪️Everyone is doing the best they can *and* we can try harder to do better.

Seeking professional counseling is always preferred. Please reach out if you need help finding resources. 💜

09/04/2020

👋 🛑 Okay the mask debate heard around the world...

The WHO (World Health Organization) and some scientists/medical professionals believe that the general public wearing masks that don’t meet specific requirements and user practices may not be as effective.

As we walk around with face coverings, droplets/virus particles can attach to the mask (some materials more than others). If people are constantly touching their mask or if they wear the same one every day without proper sanitation/rotation, it may not help protect them.

The CDC is taking the approach that if EVERYONE wears a mask it will decrease the spread. Because while improper mask use may not offer the same level of protection... it definitely decreases the spread from everyone who’s sick, especially asymptomatic people who don’t realize they’re infected.

So both organizations are correct. Everyone wearing a mask DEFINITELY decreases overall community spread.

Wearing the correct mask with proper practices can decrease personal exposure risk.

Wearing a mask improperly while in an environment with high exposure to the virus may actually increase risks of contracting the virus.

The CDC is taking an ALL approach. If EVERYONE wears a mask (properly or not) we’re all better off.

Please stop internet fighting. Most arguments are both true and false at the same time.

05/04/2020

Quad Healthcare Payer System - With Single Payer, Private Insurance, HSA and Cash Pay Options

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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2019·
6 MINUTES
Amy Erdt
Healthcare data analyst

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Here. We. Go.

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Single Payer and Private Insurance Section:

*Everyone* is on ONE single payer health-insurance plan that covers ‘set’ diagnosis & treatment/procedure codes (icd10 and CPT codes). Example: cancer is covered, but a typical benign mole removal is not covered under the public plan. We already have an “above/below the line” prioritized Medicaid list. And Medicare sorts covered and non-covered items. We could certainly hash out a workable public plan.

Require all doctors and hospitals to see a certain minimum % of Single Payer Plan Patients in their overall practice. Doctor/hospital tax breaks for publicly billed codes, billed to the single payer option. (Some States don’t require hospitals to pay taxes so we’d need to fix that.)

New doctors & hospitals would be required to take a higher percentage of public-plan billable appointments. A doctor who *only preforms cosmetic services would be exempt.
Established/experienced/highly trained, doctors & hospitals (possibly who’ve earned a better results record) can collect more expensive pay rates from contracted private plans, cash pay and HSA options... and would be allowed to set aside a % of their practice for patients who choose those options.

People (Or employers) who want to, may buy additional private insurance plans, for non-covered codes or higher payable rates, for publicly covered codes.

Contracted rates through private insurance companies would mirror how they already work.... *Except, minimum and maximum charge/payable rates would range from the lowest public plan option amount, to 5x’s higher. Or would have a 5x’s span for all codes not covered by the public option. This helps restrict insurance companies from artificially inflating charge rates by yo-yo’ing payable amounts.

Public plan pay rates calculated by the RVU, GPCI & CF system. (Don’t ask, it’s a complicated, flawed, well thought out way to factor the physician fee schedule.) There are some valid concerns with the RVU system. We’d like to see some different ideas where doctors, insurers and state ombudsmen would reevaluate the fee schedule every two years to adjust pay/charge rates by location & cost of living location.

We’d like to see hospitals, clinics and facilities move away from paying clinicians based on productivity/billable RVU’s. This model often encourages tests and procedures to be ordered that wouldn’t otherwise be and pushes quantity over quality care. It also ultimately increases costs for healthcare.
Private insurance policies can offer tailored plans like they do now. Some economy plans might just cover codes not covered by the public option. Some Cadillac plans would pay higher contacted rates for publicly covered and non-covered codes. Some policies would come with deductibles, co-insurance, copays and outta pocket maximums.

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HSA & Cash Pay Section:

Assign lifetime tax deductible HSA (Healthcare Savings Account) & RSA (Retirement Savings Account) at birth. Cash-out options if a specialty doctor signs off on 12 months or less - terminal diagnosis. Patients at the end of their life, with particular disease progression can cash out accounts and ‘live it up’ if they want.

Lifetime HSA’s & RSA’s stay with the person, not grouped by employer. Optional investment account vs regular savings.
HSA plans can be used to pay for medical bills, private insurance deductibles, co-insurance and premiums. As well as supplemental healthcare costs and lost wages do to an illness or injury.

Employers can contribute to earn tax breaks or they can continue offering investment retirement accounts or *bonus private insurance plans.

Tax deductible contributions to HSA/RSA for individuals/family/friends/employers/wills/gifts. Able to will to another HSA or RSA at death. (We could also offer tax funded bonuses for low income savers, every five years for meeting Savings Goals. This would help keep Social Security solvent) Limit HSA/RSA contribution amounts/types to prevent fraud.

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👆That’s a system that we all can contribute to. Where we all get access to a public plan but still have the choice to pay out of pocket, use private insurance or our HSA accounts.
Patients, doctors and hospitals would have forms to agree which option would be billed. If the patient is unconscious etc. (emergency care for instance) the bill would automatically go to the public option account... unless a spouse or parent etc. wanted to use private pay/insurance for a particular specialist/hospital.

This system encourages competition and innovation between doctors, hospitals and insurers. It also encourages doctors and hospitals to take public payments for the tax breaks and positive social duty. For example, a skilled, experienced, educated, expensive surgeon could reserve 40% (or whatever maximum % allowed) of their cases for private pay patients. Or potentially pay a fee, to wave taking in public plan patients.

Ideally we would include basic dental and mental/emotional health coverage as well.

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One of the biggest things we can do to *Reduce healthcare costs AND increase quality/safe care, is create a universal EHR (Electronic Health Records) and PM (Practice Management) billing, prior/retro authorization and insurance coverage check system.

Right now it’s a patchwork of disorganized/dysfunctional systems and procedures for obtaining, reading and charting records, authorizations, checking coverage and submitting/following up on claims.

This creates barriers to safe, efficient, effective treatments because patient and insurance information is delayed or time consuming to obtain/read/chart.

A difficult and convoluted overall system helps private insurance companies because the more challenging it is to check coverage, authorization, and claim status, the less they end up paying out for more expensive procedure codes.

A universal EHR & PM system would also help prevent billing fraud because everyone would have one place to check for charges to public accounts.

Currently we already have lots of different EHR & PM software being used by all different doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and managed care organizations.

These all come with the same data encryption and security risks but don’t offer the benefits of one universal system. A standard EHR and PM system for our country would create the access needed for effective and efficient care. It would also greatly reduce charting time for doctors, nurses and support staff.

Healthcare professionals often have to learn different programs or search for patient/insurance information in all different formats. Imagine every time you read a book, publishers print it differently. Sometimes left to right, down to up, sideways on the page etc. When healthcare professionals have to spend time re-learning where basic chart items are it increases risks and costs for patients.

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These industries are huge and probably won’t like their market being reduced or changed. They need to adapt. This isn’t business, it’s personal. Our health and the health of our loved ones is our biggest asset in life. We need the best healthcare system and that means some powerhouse players will need to step aside or adapt for the benefit of our country as a whole.

Doctors and hospitals are required to keep records for a certain amount of time. Those software companies can make second party applications for backup data storage and retrieval. Or possibly we could require a set structure for charting, plan coverage info and submitting claims, that the existing software companies would have to adapt to and create a filter to feed information to one main system that’s accessible to healthcare professionals and patients. Obviously, different types of access for different users.
Facing illness, injury and lost wages from forced time off work, shouldn’t be compounded by stacking medical bills.

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We will talk about prescription prices in a separate proposal because that’s a whole different can of worms.

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There are tangible policy changes that can happen now. For instance: forcing doctors, hospitals and insurers to process all claims in the ER and ICU as ‘in-network’.

Currently if an on-call specialist is called in to treat a patient, there’s little ability for a patient to avoid getting charged out of network. That’s wrong and should be fixed ASAP.

13/03/2020

STAY HOME FOLKS. Hunker down for a couple of weeks till we get more testing.
👉Buy gift cards *online from your local small businesses.

11/03/2020

🤔 What makes America think hand washing and social distancing will be enough?

If Washington State is similar to Wuhan, Oregon will be Italy soon.

GOALS & ACTION PLAN in the link below 👇

https://covid-19actionplan.weebly.com/

08/03/2020

▪️COVID-19
▪️Hospitalization rates:

Estimates are over the next year or so...

▪️US Population: 330 million

Let’s guesstimate our ‘at risk’ population is 70 million (Co-morbidities, aged population, in prison/facilities).

5% serious infection rate of that group
= 3.5 million

2.8% mortality of the ‘at risk’ population with serious complications (very conservative, it’s likely to be higher.)
= 98k deaths

▪️For reference: 34k deaths - 490k hospitalized for influenza 2018-2019 (typical hospital stay 5 days)

That’s a little under 15x’s hospitalization rate...

= 1,470,000 hospitalization stays from COVID-19.

Unfortunately, the data seems to support longer hospitalization times for serious complications from COVID-19, which would further exasperate things.

——————

We have approximately 1,700,000 hospital beds (U.S. & Community Hospitals)

65% typical occupancy rate (may be more, some community hospitals are treatment centers)

That leaves us with 595,000 beds (or less)

▪️Even if we overlap those numbers to account for people who would fall in the 65% typical hospitalization already, it’s likely that our system will become very stressed.

▪️We need to slow transmission rates at the first signs of supporting data. These figures are based on very conservative estimates.

👉 If the data shows higher transmission and mortality rates, we need to move faster to quarantine.

Luckily we have delivery and online structures already in place. We’d need to expand on utilizing those services for a bit.

18/10/2019

How we work together...

🚦Don't Regurgitate Other's Views

➖ Put Your Own Spin On It

➖ Know Your Facts (and What You Don't Know, Research Experts in the Field, Confirm Creditable Sources)

➖ Practice Empathy and Kindness

➖ Find the Common Ground

➖ Concede When You're Wrong

➖ Stay Calm and Civil at All Costs

➖ Step Away if you need to

☑️ Communication is the way people living in groups make decisions. It’s directly related to Building Community.
__________________

▪️Terms and Strategies to become familiar with:

__________________
👉 Inflammatory Voter Influence:

▪️The use of social media/ads to spread out-of-context or false information. Usually pushed by people who benefit from dividing us.
__________________
👉 Splitting:

▪️The failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole.

▪️Splitting can interfere with relationships and lead to intense and self-destructive behaviors. A person/entity who splits will typically frame people or events in terms that are absolute with no middle ground for discussion.

▪️Examples include: Things are either "always" or "never", “Best” or “Bad”, “Good” or “Evil”.
__________________
👉 Wicked Problem:

▪️A problem, concern or social/cultural issue that’s difficult to explain or solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.

▪️Examples of wicked problems include: GLOBAL PANDEMIC, education design, financial crises, voter suppression, healthcare, abortion, income disparity, systemic oppression, corruption, obesity, poverty, terrorism, extreme violence, climate change and sustainability.
__________________
👉 Critical Thinking Strategy and Confirmation Bias:

▪️Identify your own bias, then research the heck outta the opposite side. Practice recognizing people/resources who are experts on the subject. Always be open to new information.

__________________
👉 Paradox:

▪️Remember that two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time!!!

▪️Another persons experience/truth does not invalidate our own and vice versa.

__________________

🤯 It seems counterproductive but being open to ALL information is the antidote for “Fake News”.

▪️Check and recheck your preconceived notions.

__________________

😎 The way we use language matters. Bad moods are contagious... but so are good ones!

▪️If we take a minute to re-read what we write... how we frame things, we’ll have more productive interactions. Let’s try to word things with less assumption and more curiosity.

👉 Remember, we read comments in the tone of emotion we’re experiencing. Take a moment and reflect.

💜 Thank you for helping build community.