The need to be sharp as dragons.

 I wonder where you get your health information?

Before 2020, if I had any health issues I would make an appointment to see our family doctor, and follow whatever advice or instructions they offered.

So much has changed since then. 

Our trusted and beloved doctor retired before the pandemic hit, and since that time there has been little consistency of care and getting an appointment is so difficult that I no longer even try.

Then as we came out of the pandemic we had a very welcome (to some of us) rollout of a preventive procedure we trusted and were eager to take. Many of us have been ill ever since.

For myself, the years since 2021 have been spent primarily managing illness that settled into chronic illness, searching for solutions from all the usual trusted and respected sources — our family doctor surgery, hospital consultants, doctors working in the private medical sector, and the testing facilities they recommended. All this left me a lot poorer and no more well. By the end of 2023, after numerous scans and blood tests, randomly prescribed antibiotics and anti-depressants, and endless visits to kind and courteous but clearly unengaged doctors, I realised I was on my own with this.

For 'on my own', read 'Youtube and Facebook'. 

I steadily gathered information and followed a number of false trails until eventually I found my way to a diagnosis and therapeutic pathway that is gradually restoring my health. It's long and slow (and will continue to be so), but every week is now better than the week before, and I have stretches of days when I am no longer frantic with pain. Every now and then comes a day when I have very low levels of pain, and can even go to sleep at night without a TENS machine attached to me. I think I'm getting better, and without information sourced on Youtube and Facebook, it is highly unlikely that would have happened.

But through the last year we have watched the rise of AI, which has indisputably changed the Internet — what you can find, what you can access, and what 'information' is offered.

In case you, like me, have had to rely heavily on self-sourced material gained primarily from Youtube and Facebook, I invite and strongly recommend you to watch this video from Max German (whose work I highly respect).

As Jesus warmed us, we need to be as sharp as dragons as well as being as simple as doves. Trust is a good thing in this world, but we have to be careful where we place our trust.

Max Ehrmann, in his poem Desiderata, observed:

... Exercise caution ... for the world is full of trickery...

... but let this not blind you to what virtue there is...

Absolutely.

If ever there was a time to pray daily for discernment, I think it is surely now. At the moment the information we need is still there for us, but we have to know who to trust and where to look.