Category → venting
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 or drib) were originally made?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 …….
The Problems We’ve Never Gotten Round to Fixing
Congratulations on surviving the first decade of the millenium and oh what an amazing decade it has been for healthcare, we have seen the advent of a slew of drugs including statins (lipitor) which have lowered our cholesterol, given us hard-ons that last longer than hangovers from the night before(viagra) and breath easier (the new generation of once a day asthma meds). We’ve also managed to make advances in medical imaging that have made it such that any cancer any where can be detected far earlier than ever before thanks to the wide spread distribution of PET and SPECT scanning and yet there’s still one aspect of healthcare that we have continued to fail epically at no matter how much is spent on it.
And (surprisingly) it’s not exclusive to Kuwait. I’ve seen it in hospitals in the UK, the States and even Thailand and Germany, infact I’ve yet to see any hospital find a way of fixing it……… the food sucks balls ……..
Lloyd Grossman ….. if he can’t do it no one can ……The man plays guitar, dresses like Steve Jobs and cooks!
You go to any hospital anywhere and try the food there ….. it always tastes like cardboard wrapped in turd sprinkled lightly with rabbit droppings ……..
and it’s worse ….. it CAN’T BE FIXED, 3 different chefs and fifty million pounds in the UK tried to fix the problem at NHS hospitals(Yes, the list includes Lloyd Grossman of Spaghetti Sauce fame) and gave up halfway through the 5 year program.
What’s even worse is the the food not only tastes like puke from last nights party but is also far worse for you, in two different surveys of hospital food 18 of the 21 NHS hospitals tested were found to have food had too much salt, too much fat and not much of anything else. Infact, 86 per cent of meals contained too much salt, 67 per cent too much saturated fat and 52 per cent too much fat according to Food Standard Agency guidelines.
Oh and don’t you go calling it prison food ….. it’s far worse ……. Dr. Edwards (Bournemouth University, NHS Food Services Czar ….. yes, they had to employ one things were so bad) did a side by side comparison and found that prison food is far more nutritious and is made in a far cleaner environment than anything served in any NHS hospital…….
Infact since the advent of this millenium (2000) 2,600 people have died of malnutrition in UK hospitals (I’ll be quick to point out that alot may have died because they simply can’t digest the food from extensive surgery or other malabsoprtion problems, but still I’m pretty sure that bad food plays a role) and although we can’t make the same claim in Kuwait, I think it’s because we simply don’t have the statistics.
Our problem in Kuwait is probably that nutritionists and dietitians aren’t given the freedom required to change/fix things after all if you look at places like Dietcare, Nutrition and Care and other places, their food is edible (albeit quiet pricey) but quiet healthy.
So perhaps we should add better food to the list along with a cure for cancer, AIDS and a flying car …………
Have a good year everyone ………
Super Secret Hoo Hoo Smelling Samurai death blow
I love sushi, you love sushi, we love sushi. We also love to travel to places like New York, Denver and Houston (well maybe not Denver …… but the rest …….) and once we get there we all tend to go for something exciting, novel and a wee bit different …… namely sushi.
But what do they put in it? It all tastes the same …… a bit smelly while going in but finishes off quiet nicely I think we could all agree ……
Does that yellow tail, nigri rolled, sumomaki ridden tuna actually contain tuna or is it the McDonald’s version of the real thing filled with tons of corn starch and what not……
Although many people would probably try and find out online or by simply asking the chef, very few people could actually come up with a clear cut litmus test to find out where their sushi comes from, you’d think that scientists would have the answer, but the PhD toting crowd are probably far too busy schlepping their secretaries while thinking about their students ………
But thanks to the genius of two girls trying to think of a final year school project we finally have the answer.All they did was order sushi from every where they could, take a sample of the tuna used in making it and send it to the international barcode of life consortium (or IBOL) ( a group of people who will trace any given tissue sample back to it’s species origin and tell what it came from (e.g. saliva that came from a specific dog bite etc) the consortium was originally founded to help track things like the trafficking of endangered species, but their technology can be easily used to trace back any raw meat anywhere in the world ……. kind of like a biological GPS).
It took these two 19 year olds (Kate Stoeckle (left) and Louisa Strauss (Right) to tell all you people that you’ve been eating killer fishies …..
The people at iBol then analysed the alleged Tuna and came up with some rather erm …… interesting findings; for one thing …..almost 30% of the sushi places that were sent off for analysis didn’t use ANY tuna and used everything from makerel, to endangered species (T. maccoyii) (so basically you and your girlfriend or for the more lonely of us, fat ugly porker of a friend were munching on the marine equivalent of a baby seal paw) and even fish that have been banned for being toxic (they were even banned in south american countries where cocaine comes in regular or lemon scented varieties) and potentially fatal.
What’s alarming is that the two girls weren’t allowed to submitted as their end of year school project and were told that it “lacked and form of logic” and did not fulfill the assignment ……. which sound a wee bit like the attitude people havein good old K-town, namely, if it isn’t something I would do or think then you’re wrong ……. now go back to twiddling your thumbs and let me gawk at the hot patients ………
But forTUNAtely (hehe ,,,,,, tuna ….. hehe) people far smarter than their school teachers managed to recognize their talent. The two 19 year old girls were recently accepted at Johns Hopkins and are due to start their legal drinking, pot smoking, jello shot infested college lives very soon.
The motto of the story is that rocket scientists aren’t the be all and end all of discovery and innovation. Most of the people reading this are probably very well educated, highly knowledgeable and have probably made numerous attempts at fixing things where they work …… but the problem lies in trying to recognise talent as opposed to degrees or senriorty because when talent is put in the right place and given the right tools that’s when you get innovation and that’s when you’ll stop hearing about people needing to spend 3 days waiting on a slip of paper from a ministry or crazy doctors who know nothing better than to prescribe adol an a weeks worth of Heroes and How I met Your Mother.
At the same time it’s also very hard for me to imagine any Kuwaiti hospital without at least one or two people who seem to have a slew of degrees and became heads of departments then sat back and let the whole place turn into that scene from Gangs of New York.
….. and here it is to refresh you memories …….
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 …….
Stop Calling it a Disease for Fucks Sake ……..
You’ll never have a local community ans I really have no business writing this, I’m not in your shoes and could never imagine being in them but I figured a good kick up the backside (no pun intended) might help you savvy up and do something.
I could never be a great doctor, I could be a safe one, competent one, funny one but never a good one …… and that’s because I never know when to shut up.
Over the past two years I’ve seen a disease or a defintion of one raise it’s ugly head from the depths after it was quashed back in the 70′s by men and women far braver and more enlightened than I could ever be. Way back then some people, mainly in the medical community tried to formulate some kind of disease based on a broad definition, namely wanting to fuck, dress or sound like anything but your own sex. These people were the American Psychiatric Association (or APA) and they are the ones responsible for THE book on psychiatric disorders known as the diagnostics and statistics manual or DSM.
The way that modern psychiatry works is actually quiet interesting in that it has pretty much been standardised into a check list of symptoms for each condition and has all the conditions marked out in a book (known as the DSM) and every couple of years since the 1950′s there has been a new addition of the book with a new list of illnesses based on discoveries and reviews by committees formed and funded by the APA. The last version of the book with a deifintion of gender identity disorder was the DSM III back in 1970 and back then (as is the case with many ignorant bigots now) there was no clear difference between criteria for gender identity disorder (man in womans body/ woman in mans body) and sexual orientation (liking the hoo hoo or the pee pee or perhaps both).
Thankfully gender identity disorder was thrown out thanks to lobbying by many people in the field but more importantly people in the community who understood the implication of labelling sexuality as a disease and all that remains of it is a vague vestigial definition 4 lines long in DSM 4 that no body reads.
After all, where should the line be drawn when diagnosing someone with a disease and what diagnostic value does it provide? what is the mechanism involved? Chances are there aren’t any answers to these questions because there is no disease….. people have preferences, I can’t live without the hoo hoo, some of us can’t live without the dongle, other still wish the had one, but how does that kill anybody?
Unfortunately, as the APA began to formulate the next edition of their yellowpages of psychiatric illness and disease, they decided it’s high time they re-introduced gender identity disorder and form a committee of “experts” to do it and interestingly enough not only has the committee been charged with the task of making the windows 7 of psychiatry, they’ve also decided to formulate criteria for childhood and adolescent gender identity disorders.
Now, many of you might think that defining and trying to identify things like if your child is gay/straight/bi/likes new kids on the block is a good thing, but I’d argue that in your heart of hearts you really don’t care and you’ll love them just the same. Alot of people would also argue that you can save them, but that would only be true if it were an actual disease rather than simply a harmless preference similar to ones preference for alchol or a particular flavour of icecream. And some will argue that there’s nothing wrong with trying to “catch and treat them early” ……. chances are there is ….. people like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health wouldn’t know how to treat a head ache if you put panadol in their left hand and a cup of water in their right ….. like many ignorant bastards all they do is try to brainwash the young.
So if you are like me, these people and 9,550 others who can’t shut the fuck up and won’t let their kids be stigmitised and treated like leopars by a bunch of fuddy duddies and crazy teachers (not all of you are crazy ….. but some …… ugh ….) let your voice be heard and send these people an email …….
Boom Boom Pow
This post is based on a white paper I wrote some years back and is an attempt at talking about something a wee bit more serious, far too long and far less entertaining that titties, hoo hoos and mens naughty bits.
Despite public opinion we’re not half bad at managing a good serious car crash with multiple injuries, we’re infact pretty good at it statistically speaking. We tend to do pretty well in those because we apply a basic set of principles to them and tend to analyze them in a systematic fashion starting with the patients throat (airway), breathing and blood flow/loss (circulation) moving on to their neurological status and any evident disabilities and ending with the extremities(arms and legs) and external injuries. The so called ABCDE of trauma.
Our problem lies in minor or moderate traumas; trauma like a boy slamming his head against the front seat, or a fat person who’s seat belt was worn wrong and broke some ribs. If your patients breathing, talking and screaming then chances are that the ABCDE’s go out the window and you end up doing a couple of x-rays, routine bloods and observation, maybe a written police note to prove that it was a car accident and it’s for this reason that horror stories occur and don’t tell me you’ve never sent a patient home until you’ve checked everything because if you do you are either a liar or have not seen a patient in the past 15 years.You never hear stories about the guy who came in unconscious and was treated, you hear them about the guy who came in with a cut in the forehead, had it stitched and went home, to bed and never woke up (yes, I know it’s called a lucid interval)
So ultimately what I’m trying to say is that we can never be too careful when dealing with trauma patients and victims of car crashes. And where does the solution lie? In a zero percent doctrine that would put more strain on the system and end up in people having to get cat scans from head to toe and being subjected to enough radiation to kill spider man? In a centralised trauma center in which no doctor will want to work because they aren’t paid enough? or in hiring in trauma people from abroad who have never seen a car embedded on a lamp post after travelling at 180 Km/h in an effort to catch a glimpse at that sweet young thing with tha purty eyez ……
I sincerely doubt that any of the above will save lives. Having spent an admittedly short amount of time observing how minor traumas are managed and how accidents occur in this country here’s what has come to light:
1) We need to apply some thinking when patients come in through the door. similar to the ABCDE’s mentioned above but with a little more logic added maybe
2)Preventing traumas is cheaper than fixing the corned beef hash that comes in as a result of one.
However, there is a solution to our little problem that seems to be killing and maiming people in this country in a far worse manner than AIDS, cancer or the swineflu and it lies in looking to the past and recognising the work of one of the first real public health promoters in history; Dr William Haddon and medical doctor who was also a road safety engineer and his ingenious haddon matrix in 1970.It’s based on four different factors (the victim, the car, the environment and the social awareness within the area) over three different periods of time (pre-event, while in the crash and just after it) and it doesn’t take a health guru or ballisitcs professor or an expert hailing from Germany to come up with a worth while plan based on it.
The Victims:
Looking at the victim/passenger/patient the first thing that comes to mind is actually making them sit an exam and pass it rather than getting their cousin/uncle/father to help them pass it, most of us tend to need a little help when passing the driving exam in Kuwait and that is not a good thing, another thing is that most of us think that wearing sunglasses at sundown is a requirement when driving, this while increasing your sex appeal also tends to make you blind and make it more likely that you’ll crash. Making people use cumbersome fiddly hands free devices may sound like a good idea but in actual fact it’s probably more distracting than just picking up the phone and saying that you’ll call them later. Other good ideas include a mandatory seat belt and child safe seat in the back (i.e. the minute your kid is born the ministry should make it a requirement that you buy one or better yet receive one from them, it’s relatively cheap and makes sense).
The Cars:
In terms of vehicular factors we’re actually doing pretty well, most modern cars (thanks to our addiction to BMW’s and Mercs and Porsche’s) come fitted with anti-lock brakes, airbags, side airbags, seatbelts and flame retarded petrol tanks and piping as well as over-rev limiting mechanisms and collapsible dashboards; we do however have problems with bad lights, poor passenger numbers (12 people crammed into a toyota-taxi circa 1986) and lack of any regular mandatory inspections or part changes (don’t say you go to every service, most cars aren’t even fitted with the right tires or the right disc brakes for our weather and we bearly change them often enough, most people wait until the car stops or the world ends before they actually try and change anything). It’s funny how many people get stopped for the odd Chelsea sticker or window tint and how few are stopped because their rear lights aren’t working or because they honk the horn so much they end up distracting other drivers.
The Playground:
We also need a way on analysing the events such as CCTV on the highways and ring roads that show us how the crash happened and where the traffic is and perhaps even allow for ambulances to see the crash before it’s called in and while we’re on the subject our roads are just too damn curvy with twists and turns that make you feel like you’re in a ride at Disney world.
And how many of you actually rely on road signs, they are too damn small to read and even when you get close enough to read them they are often confusing (we’ve all missed that wretched turn into avenues as a result of a plaque the size of an A4 piece of paper!), Our roads also need to be designed with reserved ambulance routes, locked if need be …. you can use RFID tags on the damn ambulances to open them so don’t tell me there’s no way it would work! We use fucking magnetic tags to get into parking lots ….. use the same thing to block up a special lane…….
Society Vs. The Speed Junkies:
But by far the biggest and most daunting task ahead of us will be social awareness, not because or restraints such as money or organisation, but because we’re going about it the wrong way. SPEED CAMERAS DONT STOP PEOPLE FROM SPEEDING! Our bright young people love their fast cars and mating rituals and can afford to pay speeding tickets. The best way of preventing speeding is to provide a safe environment for it …… and yes, I mean a race track. Lets face it most people would love the idea of having a track day every week or an event such as Gulfrun or the like every two or three months (if it worked it Bahrain, it’ll work here ……)
Another thing we could do is provide basic life support (CPR, etc) training to laymen and laywomen, making it mandatory for everyone will never work but making it more accessible (i.e. annually at the work place or during their last year of high school….. if they can play Nintendo wii they can call 777 and give CPR) and giving people stickers and certificates that say that they are qualified will definitely get people coming in droves (lets face it people love sticking things on their cars (Fake M’s on their BMW’s and other things) and getting to say that they are qualified in “Basic Crash Management” or something to that affect will definitely seem attractive to at least 4 in every 10 of our lemming like youth.
So there you have it, it might not be the best plan in the world but it certainly beats two faced speed cameras, pictures of dead people and a mandatory FBI-esque earpiece on every driver.
If you actually read through this and enjoyed it please let it be known as I am/was planning a second post on how to systematically treat crash victims with minor/mild injuries.
Ink.
Happy Eid …….
oh and Yes, I am a fan …….
You’ve gotta love tattoos whether it’s the “fake” ones that come with bubble gum packs that you lick and stick, hennah tattoos or the more traditional type, tattoos have often been seen as a fashion statement or a form of self expression. Personally I’ve always been a fan of them for various resons, namely the fact that that they just look cool no matter how you slice it.
They’ve actually been around since the 5th centruy BC and were found on human popsicles that date back to that era, and have been used in darker times to identify prisoners of war and by doctors (well …. witch doctors) for everything from fertility to acupuncture) and is still used to mark out areas for radiotherapy and to fashion nipples in breast reconstruction.
By and large tattoos have had a bad name …. for the most part people tend to associate them the unsaviory which is rather unfortunate and pretty darn wrong as a couple of plastic surgeons from poland came to find out in their european study.
Dr Antoszewski and his team conducted a suvey within their community asking why people got tattooed, when they got tattooed and whether they have more than one and the results are quiet interesting. For one thing most men get tattoos rather than piercing first where as (for obvious reasons ….. i.e. their mother wanted cute pictures of them) most women tended toget pierced first and for the most part people tended to get on average 3 tattoos over their life time. Also, most people were motivated by trying to express a certain aspect of their identity rather than pee pressure (a close second) where as most people got pierced ’cause of peer pressure. They also found that whether it was tattoos or pieced hoo hoo’s social background and drug taking/risk taking behaviour were not as closely linked as other surveys had shown, meaning that the image of a coke snorting, herion mainlining, toothless disease vagrant is dieing down in tattoo culture. Granted few rocket scientist get them but since when did rocket scientists have a sense of style or identity; they;re usually the annoying kid in class who kept breaking the curve and had his mother check his homework.
Another survey conducted by a dermatolgist, Dr Armstrong hailing from Texas Tech asked people why they wanted their tattoos off. For the most part people tended to get rid of tattoos because they’ve experienced a major shift in their personality such as finding God, a change of lifestyle or risk of social stigma given their current jobs, they also found that women tended to choose to keep their tattoos for them selves and pick areas that are hidden by clothing while men tended to want to chow them off picking their arms and for arms as the site of choice and that people tended to get rid of their tattoos about 20 years after they get them done.
And yes, unfortunately like most surgical procedures tattoos and piercings tend to harbor a risk of HIV, heptitis C and various other infections of the skin and do require care after the procedure to prevent things like keloids and scarring but I’m quick to point out that those risks are fairly minimal thanks to regulation of the industry in most countires and the introduction or sterile tattoo equipment.
It’s very hard not to think that tattoos are more so associated with our over all need for self expression that we’ve come to enjoy these days, just take a look at ur social networking sites, twitter and blogs, we’ve become people who like to scream it loud and proud and tattoos are just one more medium. Another thing that seems evident from these studies is that alot of people tend to regret tattoos that aren’t associated with personal meanings, in other words you wont regret a tattoo that means something to you (well you’re less likely to hate them in 10 years time)
Gaydar.
Yes ….. another sex-ed post ……. not as raunchy as most would like but there you go ……
We’ve all watched Will and Grace, The L-word and Queer as Folk and have borne witness to that magical 6th sense known as the Gaydar and although many of you might think it was just an urban myth or something as simple as seeing if the guy gets a manicure or the girl chooses to let moustache run rampant …… think again …..
The gaydar is probably best defined as the ability to pic out or discern the gender of a person with a relatively high accuracy. It’s been studied by psychiatrists (finally made themselves useful), gender studies experts and even neurologists and the results are quite interesting. For one thing thanks to the work of Ambady, Hallahan and Conner (Currently tenuring at Tufts I believe) we can now say hand on heart that if you showed a one second clip or even a photo of a person to a group of gay and straight men and women, gay men are by far the most likely to guess the gender correctly while straight men wouldn’t know a gay man if he bought him a beer and gave him a quick rub down ……
Which means that the so-called gaydar is actually one of those things that you need to learn, practice and hone. Unlike sexual orientation (which is one of those things you are born with); you actually need to work at it and learn it and the reason why gay men are better at it than say, gay women or the straight population is because gay men need it to “survive”. Thanks to societal pressures and the fact that it is/was largely considered taboo gay men have had to get really good at it to prevent a beat down, loss of their jobs etc …..
Having said that various panels, questionnaires and studies have been conducted to analyze exactly how the thing works and to this day they cant say that it depends on hair, behaviour, skin color, appearance or anything else. But they can say the it’s a type of intuition or impulse which means that it relies on a preconceived idea and is therefor hotwired over time.
So it’s not something that requires active thinking but is rather something that we do subconsciously by taking in the person as a whole. Kind of like the type of thing you’d do when picking out a friend on your first day of school. You talk to them but you don’t know why you do it exactly.
The problem with this type of hotwiring is that it’s labile and isn’t 100% efficient … it’s also easily lost if not used enough (which explains why straight men are crap at it). It largely depends on the following:
- experience: whether you’ve actually seen or are exposed to people of varying sexual orientation, and if you, yourself are comfortable with yours.
- mood state
- Stereotypes you may have with regards to clothing, a lisp or say pink hair.
- Predispositions: do you want the ride that fine ass? or hoo hoo?
So when all is said and done it’s kind of one of these things that does exist, but you have to work on ….. alot. You also have to clear your head for it to work right and you pretty much have to go out there and let that freak flag fly!
But there is an important question that none of the studies mentioned above tries to address and that point is probably the most important and interesting of all; as homosexuality becomes more socially acceptable will the need to hone this skill dwindle? Will that sixth sense shrink like a residual organ and be left a useless remnant of it’s formal self?
Could a Liberal Society kill the gaydar?
Only time will tell ……
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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