Letters to the editor for Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Fix, not treat, chronic conditions

When it costs Medicare $25,278.70 for a short hospital stay that didn’t cure anything, you start to see how our whole approach to chronic conditions like COPD is wrong. The goal should be to identify the causes and eliminate them, not run up the tab with ridiculously expensive tests and ineffectual treatments.

Way back when, diseases were things you caught, not things you gave yourself. In that way I’m a very old fashioned 66-year-old, since my healthy diet has given me perfect health. That’s something anybody could do at any age.

Rich Dunn

Carson City

Lent has nothing to do with paganism

Regarding Rosalee Hinton’s, May 27 letter:

The practice of public penance using sackcloths and ashes predates Christianity as found in the Old Testament: Esther 4:2-3 and Daniel 19:3, acknowledging sins and offering God prayers and penance for same.

Matthew, 11:21 and Chapter 6, reminds his people that Christ said, “but you, who fast, anoint your heads and wash your face, so that you do not appear to be fasting.”

That does not translate to rejection of prayer and penance to God for our transgressions.

Christ, Himself, spent 40 days in the desert praying and fasting. His followers used Christ’s example to continue His work of salvation … including consecrating bread and wine into His own body and blood and instructing His apostles to “do this in remembrance of me.”

The Lenten practice of prayer, sacrifice and almsgiving for all sin has nothing at all to do with pagan practices. The King James version of the bible is one of many, breaking away from the Catholic (universal) church, which Christ instituted, meaning they rejected what the original church taught by either deleting or adding to the original biblical version.

Mary Santomauro

Stagecoach