This is a map of Asia. North Americans, you may notice this map is not solely comprised of Japan, Korea, China and Thailand. People in the UK, you may notice India is not a continent. That is, if those of you who generalize entire continents can even pinpoint India on a map. Indians are Asian, gasp! And not all brown skinned people are Indian, also, gasp! There are an alarming amount of people, of all ages, from all backgrounds, who seem to be unable to process this.
I’m ethnically Asian. Since Asia is an extremely large continent, I could be from any number of countries. I am neither from India, China, Korea, Japan or Pakistan, yet not so surprisingly, I am still Asian.
Yes, there are commonalities across regions, through the conflation of cultures, colonialism, globalization, transnationalism and movement of diasporas. Sometimes these are all the same thing. Rickshaws, rice and curry can be found across the continent. But let’s not overgeneralize. You can also find Buddhists, Catholics, Muslims and Hindus across Asia. Cantonese Speaking Chinese Muslims! English Speaking Indian Jews!
No, we are not all the same. Orientalism? (Please look up Edward Said for basic concepts) No thank you.
Geography, people. It’s important.
This pops up on my dash every so often. I reblog it again, not just because I wrote it, but because nothing has changed since I first posted this.
What’s cool about Iran is that it falls in 3 different regions of Asia so depending on what part of Iran you’re in, you can kind of get culture shocked a bit. The central and western part of the country is West Asia, the north east is Central Asia, and the southeast is in South Asia.
To the folks wondering about Russia being included, I want to mention that the cultural debates and angst about that has been going on for CENTURIES. While France has been pretty fetishized all the way back from Peter the Great, there is no question that we are not Europe, even with that influence showing really obviously in historical seats of power like St. Petersburg. Nonetheless, the whole country was under control of the Mongols (The Golden Horde) from roughly 1242 to 1480, and that left an enormous Mongolian and Tatar heritage that remains to this day. The ancient Scythians are huge in the cultural imagination as well. And besides… look at the Russians who are outside the standard “Kievan Rus” phenotype (which most folks assume is how all Russians look.)
Here are three of the 30 distinct ethnic groups in Siberia alone:
Buryat grandfather, photo by Alexander Newby
Evenk children, photo by Evgenia Arbugaeva
Young Yakut couple, photographer unknown
boom
AS SOMEONE WITH NORTHERN IRANIAN (AZERBAIJANI)/RUSSIAN/ HAZARA-PERSIAN/ UYGHUR-CHINESE ANCESTRY THIS IS SUCH A BEAUTIFUL POST
And that’s why sometimes you’ll see a person with curly black hair, pale skin, and hazel-green eyes (my grand-father’s sister) who turn out to be Chinese. Mad recessive genes game at play, I swear. Mongols, they really got around.
No. No, you know what? NO. This is NOT how medicine works. NOT. AT. ALL.
First of why is anybody asking a doc stuff like this over iMessage? How can you even get a wrong number like this??? So no.
Secondly no. You can’t just google symptoms and hope the right thing will come out of it. Especially like this, it is an incredible coincidence that the person googling it got the right answer in the end. In the worst case you get answers for everything from “its an infection” to “it’s cancer” from google.
And do you know why? because symptoms are stuff like “pain” or “a red
rash” and it’s not like that “pain plus rash plus random symptom a
equals specific sickness XY” No it’s not like that. It’s more like “this
sickness MAY cause a number of the following list of symptoms” as well
as “this symptom MAY appear in following sicknesses”
To find the
right diagnosis you gotta combine a lot more than the knowledge of
symptoms. You need the result of your examination, you need blood tests,
pictures, a whole lot of tests. Not just to confirm your theory but
also to prove that it isn’t something else. Pain in the chest could just be from a pulled muscle. It could also be an upset stomach, the onset on an pulmonary infection or an heart attack. And you GOTTA PROVE that it isn’t one of the serve ones that could lead to death.
So just googling symptoms is like the most bullshit way to get to an diagnosis, let alone to get to the treatment, like that is another whole box. (because who would have thought, there are different options for each sickness)
And what the fuck is up with that “it took 3h for trained medical professionals for figure out what took you 3 minutes”? NO THIS IS BULLSHIT. The person googling stuff didn’t figure it out. They gave an guess that happened to be correct.
But you know what the trained medical professionals did? They figures it out. They tested this shit, asked a lot of questions, they examined the patient, did maybe a arteriography and a duplex sonography of the leg to find that there was an blockage of an arterial vessel. They might have done some blood tests and went on to search why there was a blockage, what kind of it and THEN decided that it was the best to put in the stent. They needed these 3 hours to figure out if it was an blockage or a leak of the vessel or something entirely else. They needed the time to figure out if that person even could have the OP, if there were contraindications for this procedure or if there was a better option for this case. And most likely there were other patients they had to care for at the same time too so yeah.
Trained medical professionals figure stuff out. They do the work on the patient.
Some random person googling symptoms are making guesses with the internet.
AngelMihe 