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Finland's government has cited security concerns for the closure of all border crossings with Russia – Russian-speaking Finns say their rights are being violated
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- Title
- Closure of Finnish-Russian border sparks protest - DW - 12/08/2023
- Word count
- 1268 words
I have sympathies for the innocent folk affected by this, but there's a very good reason to be cautious of the bear. These people are a minority minority and a couple of thousand people's interests quite frankly do not weigh up against the geopolitical danger that is Russia.
The family going to Russia for a doctor is especially self-inflicted. You don't need to see a doctor in Russia, there's plenty capable people elsewhere. You can't always have it both ways.
Yeah, as much as I wish we could provide asylum for the Russians who don't want to be part of their war economy, reunite with family or otherwise, it's very difficult to interact in a normal good faith manner right now. Russia (and it's allies, see Belarus with its border conflict with Poland) have a history of using demographics like this in an almost cartoonish evil way. This is a matter of security for the European continent.
Not even a far away history, just last month they attempted to engineer a refugee crisis on the Finnish border and were only stopped because the Finnish government acted decisively, immediately.
Any articles about the Finnish response?
Just what you see here. They closed all but one crossing in the border, patrolled that heavily, eventually closed that too. Russia gave up. Last I heard, they were trying to recruit those refugees into their war to salvage some of the plan.
Not named in the article, but a painful side effect of this is/will be the further erosion of Karelian culture, which is an ethnic group that spans both Finland and northern Russia (primarily the bordering Republic of Karelia) whose wider contributions are significant and can be seen throughout Tolkien's work, for example (esp. the Kalevala).
Their culture and native language are already endangered, and without the exchange with Finland, the Russian side is going to be even worse off as some of the main heritage programs are based in Finland. Fragmenting an already small community will ultimately be harmful for cultural preservation in Finland as well without additional measures. So if protection of national interests is the goal, I hope this dimension is taken into account (but I have my doubts).
This is not entirely true, there are some procedures that are basically only available in Russia. I have a family member that recently got treatment in Russia, and we would have absolutely preferred to do it in any other country but that simply wasn’t an option.
I'm curious about these treatments. I can imagine that some prescription drugs may be available in one country and not the other, but as for medical treatments, I can't think of any examples.
Quasi-experimental autologous stem cell therapy for an extremely rare disease. There are no approved treatment options elsewhere (for Canadians — there are a handful of countries that do the procedure on their own citizens but not foreigners) unless the patient is on the verge of dying, or you get accepted into a clinical trial.
Russia is, as you might expect, willing to roll the dice for enough money.
We actually did the treatment right as the war broke out, which made travel very difficult due to various airlines changing their policy on Russian airspace on an hour to hour basis.
Makes sense. The experience sounds like straight out of a blockbuster thriller. May I ask if it's been effective?
The developed countries, especially ones with public healthcare, are admittedly slow at incorporating cutting-edge scientific knowledge in their treatment protocols. It might be a good idea to legalise the administering of fringe methods and treatments as long as this is done at the patient's personal expense. ..Then again, should there be collateral damage from an experimental treatment gone wrong, counteracting treatments for that would inflict undue stress on the public system.
Pretty effective. It’s not a 100% cure but day to day living and getting around without assistance is possible now and before the treatment it was not.
It is fairly well studied on multiple sclerosis so it’s not that exotic a treatment, but there just aren’t enough patients out there for some of the more rare autoimmune conditions to have sufficient research done to satisfy the approval processes in Canada.
If you are interested in more details on the procedure, this is basically what it was
https://www.mssociety.org.uk/about-ms/treatments-and-therapies/disease-modifying-therapies/hsct
The one example that came to my mind is an American woman I once read about who was told she had untreatable cancer. She had first refused treatments for quite a while, for some reason. She ended up going to Turkey, where they put her on a strict form of ketogenic diet as well as administering chemotherapy. She eventually became completely cancer-free and had been so for two years at the time of that article. (Sorry, I don't have the source at hand for this.) I guess that would fall broadly into the same category with OP's case, as some forms of cancer have been shown to need glucose to advance - yet this isn't a part of the official treatments in most countries.
Not an expert at all but there are some apparently severe side effects of ketogenic diets in cancerous mice including persistent weight loss past any usually plateau point and a serious wasting disease. There's probably a reason it isn't an approved treatment for people yet!
And that's if this isn't just an outlier situation. But some people will, if they have the means, try anything they can, because hope is both necessary and exploitable.
Sure, there's always a reason - most often lack of extensive enough research that responsible governments can in good faith deem a treatment safe for most people. Well, most male people at least (only recently did it become mandatory to include women in medical studies intended to reflect population scale effects). In fact, let's make that white males (including genetic diversity probably still isn't mandatory). But yes, in principle, it's a pretty good reason. Hence the slow adoption rate I mentioned above.
There is also a reason for why certain treatments aren't researched as much as others. Large studies using human subjects over long time periods are extremely expensive, and the money must come from somewhere. As of yet, you can't patent a dietary regime and sell it to people at a high markup, at least not in a fool-proof way. And if a condition is very rare, as in OP's relative's case, the chances to profit from finding the cure are slim.
I would worry genuinely given the results in mice about whether or not it should even be studied in humans as a practical useful treatment. However, you're absolutely correct about medical research. I do think that has been very popular too market diets and "lifestyles" (or worse "cleanses") at a huge markup, even if they don't work in the slightest. But obviously I'm not a doctor nor an expert in any particular rare types of cancer or in this type of medical research. I don't think that doctors as a whole would avoid recommending something because it isn't profitable, but I do think they'll avoid recommending it if there wasn't enough evidence to show that it is effective or if there's evidence that it's actively harmful, which can be conflated with some of those cost issues as you mentioned.
In the specific case, the ketogenic diet cause some serious medical issues in the rats, including them being incapable of stopping losing weight, which is not a great thing for a cancer patient generally speaking. But now of course I am realizing that I should be afraid this will be marketed as the next new fad.