Posts Tagged → medicine
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 or drib) were originally made?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 …….
Roxannne …… Put on the Red Light…….*
I wasn’t going to post this originally and expect a rather negative response ….. for the most part many of you will think I’m being sexist, making fun of women or mean to degrade them …… this is largely untrue …. I’m only shedding some light on a topic rarely discussed and have the utmost respect for most people regardless of their gender …..
Some days most days I wish I was him …..
Hookers, whores and call girls ……. perhaps I can sympathize with them because my calling involves largely the same hardships; we both work odd hours, are subjected to a fucked up system with rude and crude clientele or patients and rarely (if ever) get any thanks for it. Infact for the most part both medical staff and prostitutes get named and shamed in the papers regularly despite the best efforts of many working in their respective indutry(ies).
Like working for the Ministry of Health, prostitution subjects workers to violent people, those who are lurid and ofcourse the scorn of society for what is viewed as wrong, perverse, arrogant and generally rancid task that ought to be banned or at least regulated. And prostitution holds the same false stereotypes as healthcare does in terms of economic yield as everyone assumes that you’re making a boat load of cash …….. No I don’t drive round in a Bentley ……. and yes my daddy promised me I’d be rolling in it once I got through medical school ………. It’s been a while and the money still hasn’t started rolling in ……
Despite what most people think and the moral views held by our society prostitution is infact on the rise and although I have absolutely no data to support this a trip to your local casualty coupled with a 3 day trip to any given Dubai/Bahraini hotel would argue in my favor far better than any statistics ever could (and before you ask I’ve yet to pay for sex …… although it’s been a while ……. maybe I should book that room at the Grosvenor …… oh wait my salary means I can’t afford it ….. damn ….. wish I taught English lit. ….. at least I’d enjoy teaching kids Bukowski and getting slammed by the Students Union for it ….. ).
Ofcourse our fair ladies of the night are thought to be disease ridden, filthy, slime cunted and addicted to heroin. THIS IS GARBAGE; the industry is pretty darn healthy as the CDC (American Centre Center for Disease Control) recently revealed that the prevalence of HIV in the industry is far less than that of the general population (another stereotype put to rest); this ofcourse is based on a very limited study and does not take into account prostitution as a result of human trafficking and other illegal and largely inhumane activities which should be banned for the sake of both our industries …….yes, I do have a heart and a moral imperitive; though I rarely choose to act upon it ………
I’ve also always found it interesting how clients relate to prostitution and how they feel about it; most people I’ve talked to seem to mirror what most studies have concluded. They say that it’s because it’s easier, less complicated and you get exactly what you want from the relationship namely some fun, drinking and dancing and none of the drama everyone is afraid of essentially none of the maintenance and all of the benefits of a fun ride (no pun intended). I’ve personally always loved the drama that comes with a relationship; the fights, the making up, the going out to restaurants that nobody else goes to for fear of seeing someone you know …… fucking brilliant …. especially the fights ….. I could never keep a straight face and would end up laughing through the whole thing ….. explains why the longest relationship I’ve had lasted 2 weeks ….. I digress ….. apologies ….
I also think that there’s also a need for female contact that many people in our society lack, this makes social development skewed and by and large leads to a person going for a paid discreet type of thing rather than an awkward courtship which most people won’t approve of in the first place. Then there’s also the simple excuse for going to a hooker ….. “she’s fuckin’ hot and I’m fucking horny” …….. This is especially true of my married bretheren who seem to think that they have to cheat on thier wives as a requirement after a certain age …… fucking idiots don’t know when they have a good thing going ….
But then again some reports seem to say that most prostitutes tend to hate their job, want to kill themselves and have suffered some form of childhood trauma. I suppose that’s another thing that it has with medicine, we all hear about the good doctors who honestly enjoy their work and those of us who are abused by it and just want to die or kill the bastards who come in sick everyday …..
At the end of the day I doubt that anybody would be happy about or enjoy the idea of prostitution being on the rise but unless and until we become more mature in the way we handle relationships with the opposite sex its just one more thing we all know exists but never talk about (making it one of many industries that’ll never have health and safety standards, moral ones or any form of sanctioned regulation ……)
And anyone who thinks that prostitutes deserve to get raped, beaten and drugged up should just have a conversation with one of them at their local casualty …….. you can’t help but salute our working women for the shit they have to put up with day in and day out ….. from the law, society and the four year old adults they serve day in and day out.
*Yes, sting is infact the shit ……
This Job Will Get to You in the End ……
This profession kills us all …… the lucky ones at least. The stress of 7 years of having useless crap shoved down your throat when all you want to do is play Superman is enough to kill anybody (Yes, even Rambo). The reason why I refer to those killed by this noble profession as “the luck ones”* is because some, very few end up giving those damn patients whats coming to them ….
Take Herman W Mudgett for example, born in May 16th 1860 to a Levi Mudgett and Theodate Page Mudgett of Gilmenton, New Hampshire, he managed to last just about until he got his first job before he cracked.
Herman was first introduced the wonders of the human body when he forced to touch a real skeleton at the doctors office by a bunch of bullies at the tender age of 9, he had described the experience as mesmerising and fascinating (or words to that effect). Some-one should have spotted the psycho back then.
Mudgett at the time he qualified (I think)
He enrolled at the University of Michigan and qualified from their medical school in 1884 and that’s when the fun begins. His first gig was at “Dr. E.S. Holton’s drugstore” in Inglewood, he eventually managed to buy the store from Dr Holton. Holton agreed to sell him the store if he let Mrs Holton live in the upstairs apartment for free. She was killed by Mudgett(or Dr. H.H. Holmes as he was now known) the day her husband died of cancer. Mrs Holton was the first of over 20 victims this serial killer managed to kill during his lifetime and like all good serial killers he had aspecific demographic he’d chase after; young females, usually brunettes.
His erm”office”
Mudgett had converted the drugstore into a hotel, a bunch of shops and his “office” which was divided into a hundred or so windowless rooms which served as his maze of death. He even had 2 furnaces running at the place to dispose of the bodies. Now that’s something I’d want to see on MTV Cribs.
Holmes was eventually convicted and executed (personally I would have just let the guy live for a hundred years and wallow in his own guilt…. but to each his own). He managed to kill over 20 people (including a bunch of kids), sell their organs + skeletons to the local medical school and even managed to pick up 3 wives along the way (he was married to two of them at the same time).He also managed to fake his assistants death for the insurance money. He had to kill the guy in the end though so I don’t think he technically faked his death so much as killed him to get the money …. not very crafty IMHO ….
Looking back on his story I can’t help but wonder how many of my co-workers have or are likely to cross that line and sincerely hope that I die before I get to open my own private practice (My “office” will have web cams and a giant ray gun …… I’d like to see them pull that off in SAW 6 !)
* Yes, quoting myself is rather vain …… apologies .
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