Obese man dies after 8 months in recliner, believed God would heal him
Posted: Nov 19, 2009 2:56 PM
Updated: Nov 20, 2009 8:08 AM
Tillmon Webb

GREENWOOD, SC (WIS) – Believing his faith would heal him, a Greenwood County man sat down in his recliner after an injury in March and never got up.

On Thursday, his wife explained why he stayed in the recliner until shortly before he died.

“The man totally believed in God and his healing,” said Ada Webb.

In March, Webb’s 550-pound husband, Tillmon, sat down in a recliner inside their trailer in Greenwood. Wearing nothing but a blanket, the 33-year-old didn’t move from that recliner for the next eight months.

“He couldn’t do nothing for his self and I couldn’t do but so much,” Webb explained.

Webb says Tillmon tore his ACL in March and drove to a doctor’s office.

“They were gonna give him an appointment, but they wanted $300 up front, and we didn’t have the money,” said Webb.

Webb says he returned to the recliner, picked up his Bible and became determined that faith would heal his leg.

“He read his Bible daily, he spent his full focus on God,” said Webb. “And he was literally waiting and praying for a Job miracle. If anybody knows the Bible and knows Job, he really and fully believed that God was going to heal him just like he did Job, because he said he couldn’t think of a better testimony to go out and to tell people.”

For eight months they had no visitors. Webb rarely left his side, and she tried to keep him clean.

“I couldn’t get him rolled over to use a bedpan,” said Webb.

Other than eating and reading the Bible, she says Tillmon posted sermons online and texted messages of faith through his cell phone.

“He wanted so much to get up and you know, he wanted to tell everybody what Jesus done,” said Webb.

Webb says Tillmon consistently told her not to call for help. She says Wednesday morning he was in so much pain that she finally called an ambulance.

Greenwood County authorities say they found Tillmon covered with sores, and that he appeared to weigh about 800 pounds. They say he was stuck to his chair, and they had to saw the recliner apart. They cut a large hole around the front door to get him out.

He died at the hospital.

Webb says she has no regrets about leaving him in that recliner.

“If I feel anything right now, it’s envy for him because I wish he had taken me with him,” said Webb.

“He couldn’t do nothing for his self”? “he wanted to tell everybody what Jesus done”? You can actually hear the inbreeding.

In 2008, Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioural economics at Duke University and the author of Predictably Irrational, led a series of experiments to determine exactly how people respond to financial incentives. Participants in the study were asked to play memory games, put together puzzles and perform physical tasks, such as throwing a ball at a target. When they performed very well, they earned a payout. Some subjects were promised a small bonus, about the equivalent of a day’s pay, while others were shooting for a much bigger reward.

Here’s what happened: For tasks that required no cognitive skill, such as repeatedly pressing the same key on a keyboard, performance improved when researchers upped the bonuses. But for tasks that demanded any intelligence at all (some participants played an electronic game of Simon Says), the incentives didn’t work. In fact, the bigger the bonus, the worse the performance.

Oops. It turns out that these giant bonuses the corporate executives like to reward themselves with are almost certainly worthless in terms of improving performance, and in fact they probably make their performance worse. In short, not only are the bonuses of Wall Street bankers outrageously offensive in light of their contribution to present economic woes (not to mention the fact that the taxpayers had to bail out their industry to keep it from collapsing last year), but that bonus culture might have even contributed toward the reckless and incompetent conduct that led to these woes in the first place.

Of course, we should not expect this perverse status quo to ever change. From the article:

Of course, many in the C-Suite already know that bonuses are bunk. In 2003, Harvard professors Michael Beer and Nancy Katz anonymously surveyed over 200 senior executives in more than 30 countries about their bonus plans. The overwhelming consensus was that bonuses had little or no effect on how their companies or employees performed. Many execs even admitted to low-balling expectations, to ensure everyone was eligible for a bonus.

And there’s the rub: You don’t hope for a bonus; you expect one. The first company to voluntarily scrap its bonus pool will undoubtedly watch as talent flocks across the street (right into the arms of Goldman Sachs, whose current $12-billion U.S. compensation kitty is the biggest it’s ever had). One might have thought a long and painful recession would have compelled companies to reconsider their most basic practices, but, this year, many will carry on as usual.

Goddamned bankers. I may not be a Christian myself, but I can see why Jesus hated them.

EDIT: here’s an excerpt from another article on the subject (this one from the CBC on November 4):

Chief executives in 35 of the top Fortune 500 companies were overpaid by about 129 times their “ideal salaries” in 2008, according to an analysis by a Purdue University researcher.

Venkat Venkatasubramanian, a chemical engineer, said he’s devised a new way to calculate the true worth of top CEOs based on equations found in chemical engineering.

His paper — What is Fair Pay for Executives? An Information Theoretic Analysis of Wage Distributions — was published Tuesday in the online open-access journal Entropy.

Fair pay for an average S&P 500 CEO should ideally be in the range of 8 to 16 times the lowest employee salary, according to Venkatasubramanian’s calculations.

By contrast, average CEO pay ratios were about 11-to-1 in Japan, 15-to-1 in France, 20-to-1 in Canada and 22-to-1 in Britain in 2006.

Since the 1970s in the United States, the ratio of CEO pay to the lowest employee’s salary has gone up to as high as 344-to-1 from about 40-to-1

That’s amazing. American business leaders continue to insist that stratospheric US executive pay is necessary in order to attract “top talent”, but one would be hard-pressed to conclude that US corporate executives are ten times more competent than their counterparts in Japan, France, Canada, or Britain. Is GM’s CEO ten times better than Toyota’s CEO?

On June 8 1959, a missile was installed into the USS Barbero (which had been temporarily established to be a “postal branch”) and 3000 letters were stamped and inserted as the payload. The missile was fired from sea and flew to Mayport, Florida, where the payload was deployed via parachute and the letters were collected and taken to Jacksonville for processing.

Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield remarked: “This peacetime employment of a guided missile is the first known use of missiles by any post office.” He predicted “Before man reaches the Moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India, or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”

Oh, those wacky 1950s people. But wouldn’t rocket mail be cool?

At age three, the children took part in a test of their self-control. They were left sitting alone in a room with several toys, one of which they were asked not to touch until an adult returned. Those who waited at least 75 seconds before playing with the toy were considered high in self-regulation.

Then at age five, the children participated in a similar exercise in delayed gratification that involved the choice between a smaller portion of a favourite food immediately or a larger amount after several minutes.

Compared with children who showed high self-control and were able to wait at least 210 seconds before diving in, children who were unable to wait at both ages had the highest body mass index scores for their age at 12 years, and the fastest increases in BMI over the nine-year followup, the researchers found.

“In essence, it appears that children with greater self-regulation tend to be leaner, smarter, and better able to get along with others,” Dr. Robert Whitaker and Rachel Gooze of Temple University in Philadelphia said in an editorial accompanying the research.

Ouch.

From the CBC.

According to this CBC article:

Downing as little as one alcoholic drink a day seems to increase a woman’s risk for developing cancer, according to a British study that looked at a million middle-aged women.

The study in Tuesday’s issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute suggested the cancer risks of alcohol may outweigh any potential benefits it has on the heart.

“These findings suggest that even low levels of drinking increase a woman’s risk of developing cancer of the breast, liver and rectum — and in smokers, cancers of the mouth and throat,” Naomi Allen of the University of Oxford, who led the study, said in a statement.

Low to moderate alcohol consumption may account for nearly 13 per cent of the cancers studied, the researchers said.

This dovetails with the EPIC (European Prospective Investigation of Cancer) study earlier, which came to similar conclusions. So stop telling people that a drink a day is good for them: it causes cancer, and let’s be honest here: there are far better ways to improve your heart health than to drink alcohol.

If heart health is your concern, here’s an idea: try a better diet and regular exercise. Regular alcoholic drinking is an absolutely ridiculous way of trying to improve your heart, especially since we have scientific confirmation of its considerable down side.

We all know the political controversies surrounding Darwin’s evolution theory (note that there is no scientific controversy, only a political one), and it may come as no surprise that Pope Pius IX attacked it the moment it was published.

For his part, Darwin wrote: “For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey … as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies … treats his wives like slaves … and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”

That’s a phrase which sadly rings as true today as they did in Darwin’s lifetime. In the last 8 years we have had the “privilege” of witnessing the rise of a socio-political movement in America which embraces the torture of its enemies, the clawback of women’s reproductive rights, and absurd religious teachings such as irrational fear of homosexuals, premarital sex, and any scientific teachings which threaten either religious doctrine or corporate profit.

It may be amusing at this point in time, with all of the bad news about the US banking system, to recall what some of the early American presidents had to say about bankers.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote to John Taylor and declared: “I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

In 1836, Andrew Jackson disbanded the second federal bank, declaring: “The bold effort the present bank made to control the government … [suggests] the fate which awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution.” Later, he said the following to the bankers themselves: “You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will”, which he did.

Henry Ford once said: “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

From America Revisited (1883) by George Augustus Sala:

“The bell-ringing nuisance is nearly as offensive in England as it is in America, and in both countries the practice is equally needless and wantonly indifferent to the requirements of those who need rest and quiet. Surely a man knows to what religion he belongs, and at what hour the services in his particular place of worship begin. Yet the sexton goes on tugging at his bell as though Christians had altogether lost their memories, and as though there were no clocks and watches in the world. Moreover, how is the churchgoer to discriminate between the different bells when they are all brangling at the same time? Here in Baltimore, a city of 300,000 inhabitants, there are about 200 churches. With the exception of the Quakers meeting-houses, all these churches are provided with bells which boom and brawl from sunrise to sunset, as though they were so many hotel gongs calling guests to theological meals.”

“The journey to New York took up a week. The carriages were old and shackling, and much of the harness made of ropes. We generally reached our resting place for the night, if no accident intervened, at ten o’clock, and after a frugal supper went to bed with a notice that we should be called at three the next morning, which generally proved to be half-past two. Then, whether it snowed or rained, the traveller must rise and make ready by the help of a horn-lantern and a farthing candle, and proceed on his way over bad roads, sometimes with a driver showing no doubtful symptoms of drunkenness, which goodhearted passengers never fail to improve at every stopping place by urging upon him another glass of toddy.”

This is how people travelled when they were well-off, like the mayor of Boston. I always think of anecdotes like this whenever I run into one of those pinheads who thinks that the past was a better time than the present.

Apparently, the real inspiration for Robinson Crusoe went a little bit crazy after his long isolation, and would periodically leave his home in England to live in a nearby cave. I wonder if he got any kind of royalties for his friend’s novel.