Category → Drugs
I need to Get This off my Chest ……..
This post is fat too long which is why I never published it. Please try and read it …….. pretty please ….. all 6 of you who still visit this site.
You’re first day in medical school: 3 subjects for 1 year, biology, physics and chemistry, mostly rodents, reptiles and Schiff bases ……. stuff I can’t remember anymore ……. nor will I ever need ………
Your second and third year in medical school: You’re finally seeing a human body for the first time, you see the parts (anatomy), the mechanisms (physiology) and the witchcraft (biochemistry).
You’re fourth and fifth year: you go through diseases through pathology and microbiology but barely see 20 patients a year …… half the time you don’t know what they are doing or what you’re doing to them just taking a history (interview) and physical exam ………. forget the diagnosis …. that’s miles off.
The final year: you read and read and read and read …… then realise that you’ve barely seen enough to know how to recognise what you’re reading if a patient even had it.
Graduation day: You’re happy! YOU ARE DONE! but what now? where do you go from here? you’ve passed, you know your stuff ………. but don’t know what to do next …….The reasons why you went to medical school in your first year are forgotten and you’re not all that inspired, you want to treat people …. but that’s it …… you don’t even know how to prescribe yet …….
That’s a summary of my medical “education” and as most of you can tell, I’m not exactly satisfied by it. Now, I’m not an educator, I’m no teacher. They need to inspire, to have that ability to make you trust them enough to guide you; they have to have that gift that lets them build a mental structure in which information can be stored and eventually made useful. Sadly, few of mine did and looking around at the new batch of interns from both Kuwait and abroad few of them seem inspired. Don’t get me wrong, they work hard, right to the bone, they have skills but not the useful ones.
How many of the young doctors you see/meet actually make you feel comfortable, know how to ask the right question at the right time, know how to tell someone they have cancer or that a persons father died minutes ago?
How many of the doctors reading this (if any …… ) actually feel a sense of awe at what they do? how many of us actually enjoy reading about how IV fluids (drip …. or drib) were originally made? Or how the inhalers (Ventolin) we use evoloved? or why we tend to wear green or blue or green scrubs rather then white or grey ones? Or who the first open heart surgeon was and what he did to get there? How many of us were taught the ethics behind palliative care? Contraception? and experimental treatments? or how clinical trails evolved and the difference between that and standard treatments?
Medical history isn’t the reason why you go into medical school, it isn’t how you save lives, but in that third year when all you know is the Krebs cycle (the gearbox of your metabolism) and the anatomy of the Brachial plexus (nerves in your arms) you need to feel inspired by people who’ve done it before you. You need to find a reason to read, to debate, to analyse and to understand and during that final year, you need to learn why trying out new treatments for MS and charging people for it is unethical and why the current mudeer is a douche and why patients blame you for cancer rather than try to understand it…….
You don’t learn these things in textbooks on surgery, rheumatology or internal medicine, and contrary to popular belief you won’t learn them by parading the hallways in your new white coat and seeing 50 patients in the emergency room ….. you learn them by reading the ethics, the sociology and other humanities that underpin our profession.
Kuwait University and others like it have the ability to reshape education and inspire us. The reason why they can is because unlike other institutions it was built from the ground up to educate us, other institutions need to attract research grants to survive,we don’t.
We also have experienced faculty, there are people currently teaching who were there when stomach stapling came to Kuwait and can tell us how they tackled it, who they dealt with mistakes made during that first cases, the second one and the third. We have people who saw Viagra become the drug du jour and who saw the eradication and rebirth or tuberculosis in Kuwait.
We need to reshape our education and have graduates who can debate, discuss and be knowledgeable in our field without feeling that reading ethics 1 day a week is a waste of time.
Maybe then we’ll stop hearing about how doctors who “don’t know my name’, “don’t spend enough time with me” or are “too brash” or “shyif nafsa” and maybe then doctors won’t get slapped around so much.
I’ll leave you with the quote that he read to me one afternoon years ago and introduced me to the sense of awe , the need to read on medical finance, history and ethics; humanities presumed dead by our colleagues and up and comers (yes, student ……. you’re not my colleague yet …..). It was by John Cardinal Newman who described a university as a citadel built with the purpose of:
‘raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principals to popular aspirations, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political powers, and refining the intercourse of private life.’
I only hope that I can one day see this in our local University who’s faculty and students should expect more from each other …….
Seeing Eye Dogs are soooooooo 2k9 ……..
I fucking loved daredevil growing up (I even like the movie …… which isn’t exactly the best Hollywood has to offer), one of the main reasons I like him is ’cause he never relied on anyone when he became blind, no seeing eye dogs, no Bengali guides (don’t lie I’ve seen it at least 6 times at outpatients …….. a blind old man/woman with a Bengali to show him/her the way), all he needed was his kickass Cain that was also his weapon of choice.
But daredevil wasn’t your typical blind person, he had the power to see sound and hear heartbeats and stuff so it’s not exactly fair to compare grandpa or grandma to him and yet I can’t help but feel that the blind among us haven’t exactly benefited from many of the advances in our field, we know how to prevent (well …. slow down) blindness in some cases but have never really found a cure for it ……. the best we could come up with was/is “go buy a dog and let him drag you around …….. oh and make sure you don’t step on his doo doo ……. ” and if you couldn’t afford one or in most cases can’t take care of one then you had to buy a Cain and trip and fall and fall again until you learned how to use it.
But thanks to the boffins in the US army and Brainport inc we finally have a solution …… or at least a better one than “Here’s a stick good luck and don’t poke any one with it”. And no it doesn’t require stem cells, a 16 hour surgery or a hundred billion dollars all you need is a tongue and a pair of glasses……..
It consists of 2 parts glasses and a plastic lolly pop you put under your tongue. The glasses have a camera that will take a picture and transmit it to the lolly pop which in turn transmitts the electrical signals to your tongue. The pattern of the signals tells you that the thing you’re looking at ……. well ….. looks like. It’s not super accurate yet and the current model only has 400 sensors but the “final production” model should have 4,000 sensors.
And if anyone is interested (I’m sure one person reading this must know at least one blind person) the brainport website is this and the cost to buy the device and train someone is around 18,000 pounds …….
It’s been a while
How have all of you been?
No new babies? No recent marraiges?, apologies for snubbing you all, I’ve been a little busy growing older and maybe a little more mature, thankfully the bald spots (yes there’s more than one) havn’t really grown despite my new more mature and (dare I say it) improved self……. Yes, I am a little less lurid, a little more sane and a little less angry,,,,,, don’t ask why ….. it just happens sometimes and is becoming a trend (mark has lost his shwarma fetish and has adopted a healthy life style, why can’t I decided I don’t want to write for free anymore and would rather spend my time sampling a new cereal everyday and filling my days with Bio-shock 2)
This will probably be my last post for a while but it’s only my second post in which I actually talk about my self …… being self centered is great, no wonder most of the Kuwaiti public do it 24/7. It’s therapeutic ’cause you get to complain and think that your opinion counts ……….
Having said that there are a couple of posts I’ve been meaning to write including my penis farts one, the prostate cancer needs no cure one and why it makes no sense that taking out your stomach will cure you of diabetes………..
Tee Hee – Keep Running you Dumb Dumb Sheep
I’ve finally given up …… sod it ….. I spent the summer trying to give my self buns of steel and pecks that scream ‘SPARTAAAAAAAAAN!’ and I’ve spent Ramadan running on a goddamn treadmill or cycling in one place like a fucking idiot and what do I have to show for it …… fuck all …… Not only has my largess not changed but I’ve managed to make myself even more revolting to the opposite sex the sweat marks that grow as you walk/jog/have a heart attack along the local walkway/mamsha/
And after all my hard work and the hard work of countless 13-60 somethings running around at the local walkways (mamsha) science has only just found out that exercise doesn’t really do anything for you whieght. A recent study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine revealed that if you take 50-odd people of varying age who are over weight (BMI of 30 ish) and put them on a strict (witnessed by study organisers) aerobic/cardio exercise plan for 12 weeks, you’ll be lucky if they don’t gain 3 KG, in-fact the only weight loss that was noted came from about 5 people who lost between 2 and 3.5 KG then gained it back the week that they stopped. This means that our worst nightmares have come true …… we could have been watching family guy enjoying machboos diyay and instead have been running around like headless chickens……. damn you science …… damn you to hell ……
Having said that the study does advocate exercise for the overall health benefits and there have been other studies that say that although you won’t loose any weight when you exercise; you may find it easier to keep the whieght off if you do. So the trick is to starve your self, while watching family guy, loose the weight, then go buy yourself a treadmill and never use it.
Then there’s the other rocket scientists trying to figure out why we never loose weight no matter how far we run, or how fast we go. Apparently, it has alot to do with your energy balance (and I don’t mean karmically, although having said that, Karma may explain why my love handles have grown a second set of love handles …….) meaning the amount and type of food you eat BEFORE you use the treadmill for the first time and end up falling flat on your face snapping you nose runnig to the poly clinic (this is where the exercise come in), Where the doctor will refer you to the local casualty, who will do an X-ray and won’t know how to read it and refer you on to an ENT doctor at Al Sabah Hospital who will tell you to comeback and see him at his private clinic when the swelling goes down ……
Having said that ,there is a rather robust study that seems to support the fat burning role of exercise, the man even devised formulas to calculate how much you’re expected to loose ….. so perhaps there is some hope for the running, walking and cycling masses …… ‘course the only problem is that he only did it on healthy runners who’s metabolism is geared towards fat burning …… fucking pullock …….
And on the Other side of the Spectrum ……
both in economic and physical terms. Continuing on from the last post and the one before it, today’s post is actually based on some newer and possibly more accurate data on Kuwaiti crash victims (Yes, Rosseneri or Rossenneri or Rossineri …. I mean us ….. no need to fret or throw a fit …..). Kuwaiti drivers are a unique species indeed we drive fast and tend to have a rather unique body habitus in that we’re either stick thin or rather rotund/fat/fit/obese/steroid laden and 300 like.
We as a nation tend to stereo typically drive fast, break fast and turn fast. We also tend to be chubbier than your average person (that not necessarily being a bad thing, alot of people tend to enjoy a bit of meat on their significant other), however it does tend to pose a rather interesting implications on how likely we are to survive in a car accident.
With that in mind I spent the last week looking for good statistics on fat people in fast cars and believe it or not there are actually some doctors who spent time writing papers on the subject and observing injuries on the fat, thin and younge (sadly, none of them were Kuwaiti despite the amount of car accidents we have in the country no one has bothered to do any in depth analysis on the effects of speed, car type, or body build in Kuwait …. so this was/is the next best thing) but fear not both studies concentrate on a similar population.
The frist was conducted in Florida and used data from about 30,000 crashes and divided them up into men and women then fat, thin and average. They also included passengers and divided them in a similar manner and based on their figures if you were a fat or thin man who was driving you were very likely to die in a fast 2 seater even if the air bags were deployed (about 1 in 100 give or take). However your risks of dieing were no where near as bad as women’s (about 40% higher) and were less if you were short fat person or a ten year old weighing about 70 kg in the passenger seat and before you say that these figures are subjective and based on improper data collection, they went on to replicate these results in crash test dummies by strapping weights onto them. What fortunate is that young fat men and young fat women were less likely to die if they wore their seat-belts (they were almost as good as the average 25 year old drunk or under the influence of drugs …… no really ….. read the article …….)
What’s interesting is that the other study conducted purely as a biostatistics study (no influence by trauma surgeons, ER staff or laymen or any companies, completely funded by the public) came up with almost the same conclusion. They found that women (and to a slightly lesser extent, men) required more care, sustained more major injuries and had more injuries that were undetected than the national average.
So surprisingly we are doing something right, wearing seat belts (despite the discomfort, ruffles shirts and 2 seconds delay involved in doing so) is actually probably the only thing that is guaranteed to save you (well not you , cause you’d probably be dead ….. your family and friends ……) alot of grief.
Another interesting thing is that none of the studies try to see how many people in the obese population sustained minor injuries and they only mention that the most deadly combination is a fast car and a thin short person, nor do they factor in driving proficiency when stratifying men and women…… i.e. they don’t blame women drivers …….*
So in conclusion, I’d like to apologise for boring you with this rather mundane three parter on road traffic accidents and how/why we can prevent them (the readership fell quite sharply, so did the hate mail) but it is a subject that is quite near and dear and something I think people might want to read up on, especially people in healthcare; all three who actually read the blog…………
*Yes, eleventh street; it was a cheap jab and meant to be joke…..apologies ……
…. Just go Buy a Car …..
Following on from last weeks post the next think I’d like to talk about a minority we have in Kuwait ….. the pedestrian …… usually of bengali ethnicity, often with a lack of linguistic skills or clothing, lets face it the rest of the damn nation have a fear of using their legs to cross the road and with good reason …… who would want to sweat in the 150kd track suit ……..
Thanks to their inability to wait till the road clears and our inability to account for a fast moving dark figure in front of us at 2 am. Bengali’s and street cleaners account for possible 70% of all pedestrian car injuries and while most of this injuries tend to look minor (either a broken foot or arm and a bleeding cut wound) a fair number will have a secondary injury that we can’t really detect unless we’re more thorough when we examine them. (and by we I mean people in the medical community, usually a trainee or an assistant will be first on the scene, so this post is mainly for the people who read this, this and this as well as the people who write in them.
Pedestrians are funny creatures, specially bengali ones because when they are hit they tend to flail around and smack them selves on the hood and the bumper leading to more injuries. They also tend to have a very low threshold for pain and rarely if ever know how to speak Arabic (and you can forget about English) so nine times out of ten what you get in the casualty is a person who was hit by a bumper, slammed himself onto the windshield, broke the glass against his face and flailed around rubbing the shards of glass in subsequently falling to the ground and possibly being left there for about an hour or two before being brought into hospital and if you’re fortunate enough to have received the patient right after the accident then your are just as likely to receive your fellow country man or woman who has just hit him and will probably complain about how he needs as many x rays, pills and drips as the bengali does and will take up most of your time simply because he or she wont stop shouting at you or the nursing staff.
What’s interesting is that if you go purely by numbers (which is what the european health and safety network did) most of the pimary or secondary injuries you will see will occur either in the head or the legs. and of those most will be occult facial fractures that won’t swell up for a day or two. Very few will have actual brain injuries ’cause you skull can literally take a good kick from a premier legue footballer (about 9 Kilonewtons) and still not crack where as a baseball thrown in the right direction (0.8 Kilo newtons) will burst your cheek bone open and the same goes for your legs you’re more likely to hurt a joint than a bone and are more likely to hurt a nerve than a joint but how many of you woh have been through a car accident have actually been examined for knee joint injury or numbness? Very few doctors do it ……
Another thing that people tend to forget is that a pedestrian is 3 times more likely to hurt is chest than his abdomen and yet if you ask most general surgeons (you won’t see a trauma surgeon ANYWHERE in kuwait, all of them work as general surgeons for lack of a formal department or training) they’d be more concerned if you told them you didn’t order an abdominal ultrasound than if you didn’t order a chest x ray, they’d still want you to order it but will probably rubbish it off.
It’s things like ignoring facial fractures and loose teeth, not looking for joint damage and looking for fractures instead and ignoring rib fractures that lead to the horror stories like the guy who was in a car accident got his ankle fixed and never got his chest checked out. Three months later he was still in pain turns out he had a rib fracture, the reality is that ribs heal themselves for the most part but still ….. I’d like to know if I cracked a few …..
So the take home message here is that pedestrian car crashes which look minor usually are and do not required active resuscitation or ABCDE’s as was mentioned last week. But that doesn’t mean that they should be neglected. Pedestrians differ from major trauma’s in that they are more likely to have joint and tendon damage than to have fractures and are more likely to have facial fractures than skull ones. Another thing to bear in mind is that patients who have been hit by a bumper in their torso and are more likely to have rib fractures than abdominal bleeds, however if they are unstable then chances are your problem is in the abdomen oh and never forget there are 2 different types of injury to look out for, primary (car Vs. Human and secondary Human Vs the thing he fell onto after the car hit him/her)
All this information and more is available here in a report written by Dr Jikuang Yang of Chalmers University, Gotenburg-Sweden.
Flirting ….. the New Six Pack …..
I’m not saying that all women are the same or trying to make it sound like people are superficial, it’s all supposed to be tongue in cheek so enjoy.
Now before all of you go out and cancel your subscriptions to platinum and decide to double that second portion of pancakes at early bird, please bear in mind that the title is almost a complete lie. For the most part (apparently) women tend to be inherently attracted to a more or less mixed bag of people so in a technical sense that six pack is worth it depending on what/who you’re aiming for. However increasingly it has been recognised that an overall muscular build is not as ….. significant (not exactly the term I’m looking for but what the hey) as other things are.
It’s interesting how dynamic our tastes as humans are, they are influenced by everything from music videos to advertising, to the weather even and clothing. And in the case of the fairer sex it also seems to be influenced by that spontaneous bleed they all seem to have once a month or so.
For the most part women tend to go for men who are taller (relative to the general population), with more husky voices, good rhythm (an ability to dance without looking like you ass is one fire or are trying to get pepper spray out of your eyes), and are generally speaking at or above average height. This is thought to be more of a subconscious thing and is largely attributed to genetic selection rather than an actual active preference for a particular type of male.
Interestingly, muscular build and masculine faces (big jaw, a “roman” nose or a widows peak) don’t tend to play that much of a role in our mating process, i.e. being built like Sly in rocky 3 won’t really give you an edge if your bald, short and with a voice that’s akin to the war cry of a pygmy in heat.
Flirting on the other hand does, and unlike that six pack and pecks the size of salad plates at Applebees, flirting doesn’t really require all that much work or the use of cow testosterone and growth hormone, all it requires is well …… being a cheeky bastard and perhaps one or two drinks to bring up the Casanova in you and help you find one good thing in your perspective mate.
Infact flirting in many recent studies has been found to be far more important than all the above put together especially when women are ovulating (half way between that period and the one due in 2 weeks time). Flirting also seems to be dynamic and dependant on how masculine your face looks; in other words the less chiseled that jaw of yours is the more likely your are to score and the more muscular you are the less likely that flirting will actually increase your chances. As with most things human the reason why this seems to be the case is largely still a mystery but it’s thought that at some subconscious level masculinity and muscular build is associated with less commitment and an increased likely hood that the fucker has one two or three people on the side.
Having said that flirting, unlike built bodies, long hair, a husky voice or a 12,000 dollar watch is very hard to quantify and very variable. It’s actually a very complex type of behaviour and can vary from just looking at a person, to the way you talk to the way they talk to other people in the room so it’s very hard to objectively score someone in terms of flirting. The way most studies do it is akin to the selection process for star academy and is probably just as useful.
So the take home message this week is that if you have a six pack good on you, learn how to dance without looking like a pollock and maybe try to come up with something better than “halla wallah” or “i3yoonich naar” and for the humans among us it may be a good idea to try and work on the same ……..
Rather Wretched Things ………
Hiccups.
On of the oldest annoyances in the world (right after your mother in-law and the sibling that should have been shot at birth). Hiccups aren’t all that much of a mystery really. They’re just a reflex that we never use. Think of them as an knee jerk reflex (the thing that happens when the doctor hits your knee with a mallet) that happens with your respiratory muscles (diahpragm) and throat (well a fair chunk of it anyway) when one of two nerves in the area are stimulated (the Phernic nerve or the Vagus nerve, which supplies a whole slew of areas from your mouth to your asshole literally. It’s the only structure that goes through your heart, stomach brain and rectum. Not in that order)
Interestingly hiccups work in the exact same way as amphibian breathing (the way that frogs breath) which has lead many experts in the field to assume that it’s just a residual impulse from years of evolution which like the appendix and tail bone serves no real purpose other than to support Darwinians all over the world.
Knee Jerk Reflex for those of you who’ve never been to a real doctor.
Video also demonstrates how to provide evidence for child custody suites …. that kid is staying with his mom.
And while many of you seem to line up at your local poly clinic claiming that your 5 hours of hiccups are abnormal, most cases can’t even compare to poor old Charles Osborne who had to bear with it for over 65 years.
Treatment of simple hiccups is non existent. All you have to do is stimulate those nerves into stopping and the best way is to shock them into rebooting. For example, stand on your head, drink ice cold water, or if you’re a sadist you Can try searing hot water, eat some icecream and forget about it or spray vinegar into your nose.
But long standing (1 week) hiccups are a little more challenging. For one thing they usually point to something a little more sinister such as kidney failure (because salts such as sodium and potassium build up in your blood and that makes the nerves more sensitive). Note I said one week not two fucking minutes. If anybody shows up at a hospital claiming kidney failure after an hour of hiccups s/he’ll be giving informed consent to me taking one of his kidneys to sell on the black market. If it’s under a week it’s easy to treat.
Another group of people who tend to suffer from hiccups are people on chemotherapy (for obvious reasons).Three in ten people on chemo-therapy will suffer 2 weeks of hiccups straight. For them the only option is to sedate them and try to give drugs that will slow down nerve impulse. Another option (yet to be approved by the FDA is an implantable nerve stimulator that acts like a switchboard bypassing the hiccup reflex).
And ofcourse as with all things medical if all else fails do something unexpected, shocking and stimulating. With this in mind a rather smart (well in a House MD* kind of way I suppose) daring and hopefully gentle and small handed colleague from the Department of Internal Medicine, Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa, Israel. Decided to stick a finger up a poor 60 year old mans backside and massage him into stopping. Lets hope that Dr Odeh was gentle with the poor man ……. then again the guy may have faked the hiccups just to get some action ……… 60 year olds make the most needy of all of us ……..
*Rest assured, there is a House MD bashing coming …. right after Dr. Foz’s and the penis fart post ……..
oh and DO NOT TRY THE VINGEGAR THING OR THE FINGER UP THE BACKSIDE! ONLY TRAINED PROFESSIONALS CAN PULL THAT SHIT OFF.
On Peeping Toms and Single White Females.
You’ve gotta love Facebook, not only has it helped us get in touch with friends we’ve missed over the years, given us a chance to kill countless hours while on call (or in some/most cases waiting for the work day to end) and assured us that we are “the 3rd most likely to succeed as voted for by our friends” but it has also given Peeping Toms a veritable buffet to pick from. Personally I’d be flattered if someone were to follow me around obsessively, if only they could do it without wanting to cook my naughty bits and eat them ……
Now, to be categorized as a stalking victim a person has to report at least two different intrusive behaviors, which had to last for at least two weeks and also provoke fear, (so ladies, unfortunately you have to put up with that drooling mess at your local Starbucks for at least another two weeks (or was that four). This is a legal definition, not a medical one. From a psychiatric standpoint 5 patterns of behaviour have been identified:
- Rejected stalkers who pursue their victims in order to reverse, correct, or avenge a rejection (e.g. divorce, separation, termination).(We see these almost every Ramadan People)
- Resentful stalkers who pursue a vendetta because of a sense of grievance against the victims – motivated mainly by the desire to frighten and distress the victim.(Basically wife with cheating husband and husband with cheating wife get a divorce …. then things get wierd)
- Intimacy seekers who seek to establish an intimate, loving relationship with their victim. To them, the victim is a long-sought-after soul mate, and they were ‘meant’ to be together. (minjibir feech ….. 7abaitich …. waits for you near your house, steals your panties etc)
- Incompetent suitors who, despite poor social or courting skills, have a fixation, or in some cases a sense of entitlement to an intimate relationship with those who have attracted their amorous interest. Their victims are most often already in a dating relationship with someone else.( In all fairness, the bastards should man up and grow some balls)
- Predatory stalkers who spy on the victim in order to prepare and plan an attack – usually sexual – on the victim. (The potential rapist)
Interestingly most of us will admit to think about some of the above (we’ve all had that office crush, wanted to know more about a certain person or tried to talk to a ridiculously attractive person of the opposite sex and failed miserably at it) but the distinction between our morbid fascinations and those of a stalker is that we don’t act upon them and we realise that it’d be weird to fish through office trash looking for used tampons and cigarette butts.
Another thing that baffles me about stalking is the demographic which seems to attract stalkers. These poor people aren’t to blame, the fact of the matter is that their the people who should keep an eye out. The vast majority (70-90 % depending on what you read) of victims are women followed by homosexual men. Most are pretty well of (economically) and usually have a job that involves being in contact with the public (bank tellers, psychiatrists, doctors, receptionists, Barber and ofcourse rockstars) and (adding insult to injury) many victims have had a history of childhood sexual abuse.
Unsurprisingly many stalkers are often triggered by a previous relationship that they may have had with the victim, the nature of the relationship and how it ended have very little relevance.
Oh and don’t even think that the fact the you’re young, well dressed or are sexy (aren’t we so full of our selves, pouting and pausing for profile pics) , have tight buns, are “well ripped” and “shredded” or (…….. ok I’m getting carried away here …..apologies) has anything to do with it. For the most part age (cases have been reported where the victims were between the ages of 2 and 82), attractiveness and clothing (or lack there of) are just about as relevant to the whole relationship (yes, it is classed as a relationship by psychiatrists …. unfortunately) as the weather on the day s/he decides to steal your undies. (The fact that you may have had children with the stalker however, does tend to make it more likely that s/he chances after you)
Your typical stalker and peeping tom is usually male (but maybe female in about 30% of cases) between 16-40 (though juvenile stalking is now on the rise ….. crazy little fuckers), living alone, no social skills, poorly dressed with a previous criminal record and in 51% of cases some sort of mental disorder (schizophrenia, bipolar etc). …….. now if that doesn’t spell out the p-e-r-f-e-c-t c-a-t-c-h then I don’t know what does …… why you people fraternize with the crazy fuckers and confirm them on facebook is beyond me …….
Now, alot of you may feel that a little bit of stalking isn’t a problem, that having that girl or boy who can’t wait to see you every morning or who keeps writing comments on your FB wall is a good thing ….. the fact of the matter is that it isn’t. In most cases you’ll be lucky if it ends at him/her being pissed off at you and chastising you at work but in some cases (42,% thats 2 in 5 cases people …… ) stalking leads to violence and harassment …… which I’m assuming most of you never counted on ……
In the vast majority of cases the harassment may begin as an unwanted phonecall or a bunch of gifts every couple of days and in many cases escalates to being violent and in the vast majority of cases sexual.
So the next time one of you decides that guy you’re looking at on facebook seems pretty ok, or that you can’t stop thinking about that girl you saw the other day be very careful ….. you might be biting off more than you can chew ….. and you never know when you might be looking through someones dumpster for a lock of their hair ……. you sick, sick people …….
Put me on ice and serve me on the rocks ’cause I just can’t take this crap anymore ……..
Yes, this one is going to be a rant I’m afraid …. and a rather nasty one ……
So I was in-line at the local polyclinic (mustawsif) attempting (3rd attempt) to get a doctor to sign my swine flu form (the irony ….. a doctor waiting in another doctors waiting room, and I wasn’t even sick) after a rather pleasant trip to one of our neighbouring countries (see twitter for details*).
You’d think that I’d have been pissed off at the nurse from the first attempt who told me that I couldn’t get it signed because my civil ID belonged to a different catchment area (a lie, hospitals work on catchment areas NOT polyclinics and the form doesn’t say anything about that anyway), or the doctor who told me that the swine flu service was part of the infection control and vaccination service which was only available in the mornings (this is how a so called pandemic is handled in a 24 hour polyclinic), but the thing that annoyed me the most was the fact that all these precautions seemed to be a waste of time.
For one thing all they did was check my temperature (something that varies with swine flu and is not linked to the infective cycle of the virus, meaning just because you have a fever it doesn’t mean that you’re going to infect those around you), another thing to bear in mind is that most methods used to test for the H1N1 (swine flu) virus aren’t very accurate (the Center for Disease Control in America have been quoted as saying that the accuracy is in-fact unknown at this time ….. very Bush-like it must be said)
And don’t even get me started with the scare mongering that’s going on; both the WHO and the CDC (Center for Disease Control) have lumped both the suspected and confirmed cases together (I suspect that our boys are doing the same, sadly infection control was never my forte), giving people the impression that the fourth horse man is abound and that famine and pestilence are about to ensue. The fact of the matter is that microbiologists still don’t know how likely it is to spread or how far it’ll spread ( this one thinks it’s unlikely this time round but isn’t sure, this one can’t decide, and this one keeps changing his mind, and this one doesn’t care ’cause he thinks it wont kill anyone)
There is also no clear cut method to test for it which the WHO recommends. They have in-fact listed five different methods for us to choose from without advocating one as standard and confirm that in some of them are of UNKNOWN accuracy (false positives, false negatives etc), so even if we assume that our lab confirmed 18-24 cases did turn out to be positive we don’t know how accurate the tests are……. crap on a stick ……. I mean granted lab tests trump thermometers at polyclinics and the airport (temperature for swine flu is about as useful as dumping a person in water and seeing if they float, they aren’t even mentioned in the WHO diagnostic guidelines but are in the CDCs) they are still no where near 70% accurate (the best test on the who guidelines has a sensitivity (or specificity…. I forget) of 50-70%.
Besides we’ve yet to have any fatalities ……. so to some up we have 24 cases which have had some sort of testing done (none of the Kuwait Times articles or the WHO literature specifies which test was used to “confirm” the cases, the most accurate one (requiring cultivation in rodent embryos) takes two weeks to do …… ) which might or might not be accurate and is only used on people who have a high temperture if/when they show up 3 days after arriving in the country and if/when they also have a high temprature the second time they show up…….. and of all the people who were positive we’ve yet to see a single fatality ……. either we have George Clooney, John Carter, House MD and the cast of Greys working at the MOH or we have more than a couple of false positives. (For those of you who think I’m kidding take a look at how the NHS reacted to the outbreak in Wales, more than 90 people were told they had swine flu and begun treatment/isolation/investigation only to find that none of them had it.)
And wouldn’t it be a better idea to combat the pandemic by giving out a vaccine for it? Yes, you read right; there’s a vaccine in production (Kudos Novartis)…… lord knows when we’ll get it though……
So with all this in mind I’ve decided to make like a sea monkey and freeze myself for the next couple of years, then wake up having missed all the bedlam that comes with swine flu, avian flu, foot and mouth disease and what ever the media has in store for us next summer. And while some of you think I may have gone crazy there have been numerous experiments and cases involving freezing and defrosting dogs, pigs and even humans with varying degrees of success. At best I’ll end up saving myself a fair chunk of grief and at worst I’ll end up being a walking zombie (See the story about the dogs, some of them became zombies); either way I wouldn’t have to wait in line 3 times over 2 days to have my temperature taken by some gumpy who would order a pregnancy test for a woman bleeding from a cut wound on her brow ……….
* A shameless plug ….. apologies …..
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