Most people think highly of their doctors. They want their doctors to be objective, scientific, distant, and at the same time caring, compassionate, and sensitive. In short, they want doctors who are more holy healers than human beings.
It makes sense that people want this from their doctors. When you are lying on the exam table with the doctor probing your anus, vagina, penis, or other shameful organ, you want to believe that the person doing this to you is pure, healthy, honest, competent, and doing what is best for you. . You don’t want to think that the doctor is a pervert with a degree and license to abuse.
Well, I’m afraid I have bad news for you. I’ve been to medicine and I know it.
Put yourself in the shoes of a doctor. At one point, he or she was just like you, a layman. They went to kindergarten and elementary school and did what they were told, learned how to take tests and get expected answers, and got high marks as a result. They kept doing this until they entered medical school. They were selected for their grades and test scores.
For some jobs, applicants must take personality tests to give some indication of their character. Are they antisocial, are they honest, would they steal? You would like to know this about employees before you give them a job. However, for those who apply for the medical job, there is no such character test. Applicants are selected through academic tests. And these people will be entrusted with human lives.
Would getting high scores in chemistry, physics, or math make you a great doctor? Of course, no. Does knowing physiology, anatomy, and biochemistry make you compassionate? They can make you a good physiologist, anatomist, or biochemist, but they have nothing to do with compassion. In fact, since most medical sciences rely heavily on cruel animal research, torturing and killing millions of dogs, cats, monkeys, rats, and other animals each year, there is nothing further from compassion than the field of medicine.
In fact, medical education is deliberately designed to desensitize lay people to blood and guts so that they can become doctors. Dealing with sick people, some in severe pain, anxious, fearful, helpless, requires a cool head. It’s important for doctors to stay calm when everyone else is on edge. In the real world, of course, you must learn to be calm and collected in a crisis. Since the medical student is not selected on anything other than test scores, the fact is that most students cannot live up to this ideal. If all you had to do with patients was get their medical history in writing and run a test on what medication to give them, it wouldn’t be a problem for doctors, especially if the tests are multiple choice, as they are at the school of medicine and medical license tests.
But healthcare requires different skills and personalities than simply taking multiple-choice tests. That is why medicine has so many specialties for students to choose from. Medical school takes four years to complete. The first two years are textbooks and labs. The last two years you can try different medical specialties for a few weeks or a couple of months, to see what suits your taste. Some people like the thrill of a crisis. Usually they go into emergency medicine. They enjoy the adrenaline rush of a heart attack or a car accident. They don’t like to see people slowly die from chronic illnesses and drug side effects. They prefer medical speed to long-term commitment. Come on, get a patch and get a referral to another doctor for follow-up.
Others who are shocked by stress undergo surgery. Imagine the rush you feel when you open a stranger’s chest, blood spurts everywhere, nurses hand you tweezers to stop the flow, machines sound faster on the patient’s pulse and breathing, the nurse takes the dripping sweat from the forehead, the anesthesiologist notices that the patient is in cardiac arrest and, at the same time, remains above the fray in his external behavior, making dirty jokes with the nurses and talking about time-share complexes with the anesthesiologist. What a job!
For those who prefer to be more like the doctor of yesteryear, there is family medicine. You get to see children, fathers, pregnant mothers, the elderly, the whole gamut of humanity and with all kinds of problems. When the going gets tough, just send them to another specialist. People can trust you and tell you their life secrets. This is light medicine, a great specialty for quiet people.
I remember a family doctor I went to for a checkup when I was 30 years old, at a point in my life before I entered medicine and when I still believed in getting routine checkups. He did a full exam, including a rectal exam to look for an enlarged prostate and other signs of inflammation. I did not expect it. “Drop your pants and crouch down,” he told me. He was a tall, blond, handsome doctor, about 6’4 “, single, but apparently straight.” Is that really necessary? “, Asked.” Yes. “So I leaned in. He put a small condom on his finger, I poured some vasolin into it and he got in, while I frowned in disgust.” What is your sex life like? “He asked as he paused in inside to get your bearings. “Okay,” I replied, a little annoyed that you don’t even take me to lunch.
Not long after I was admitted to medical school. Before classes started, I volunteered at a local low-income health clinic, hoping to gain more experience. They dressed me in a white lab coat, called me a “medical student” and in no time I was doing a pelvic exam on an 18-year-old woman. The doctor did the exam first and then instructed me to search for the cervix while slipping my gloved hand uncomfortably into the strange woman’s slightly smelly vagina. My lay days were ending. I was already being given access to people’s bodies.
Some guys would have been envious, I suppose, as long as the pus didn’t quench you. Imagine what kind of guys become gynecologists. They tell women to get naked all day, all kinds of women. Then they can put their fingers inside their vaginas, anus and feel their breasts. They want their patients to feel like experts on women, even though they’re only men and never had a period, wore a bra, or some weird guy probed their vaginas.
Of course, this specialty has a downside. What would having to examine sick, smelly, smelly vaginas every day would do to your sense of women? When your wife becomes loving, do you reflexively seek your glove and lube?
While most gynecologists are men, urologists are not mostly women. Women are willing to have a strange doctor examine their genitals. But most men would feel strange if a female doctor examined their penis. Of course, it feels strange for a man to also taste your penis. What type of man is drawn to urology and a lifelong specialty of dealing with penile and prostate problems?
The same can be asked of proctologists. Imagine, as a medical student, if you found it exciting to work on the rectum and colon. What would it do to your sense of humanity to see butt all day, year after year?
As you can see, choosing a specialty can be difficult. If you are truly an idealistic person and you came to medicine to end suffering, a bit of disappointment and pain awaits you. I know of a rheumatologist who could no longer bear to watch her patients slowly die, unable to do much to alleviate their suffering. She decided to change her specialty and become an anesthesiologist, so that all her patients would be rendered unconscious and she would not have to meet them personally.
Those medical students who do not fit any other mold and who are a little strange often become psychiatrists, escaping blood and guts in search of the mind. Psychiatrists who are a basket case themselves often feel great emotional relief and increased self-esteem simply by listening to other people’s problems throughout the day, making psychiatry very therapeutic for the physician. This is an especially attractive specialty for medical students who enjoy LSD or peyote and who stayed high for most of their basic science training. They can really get into people’s twisted fantasies and hallucinations. But watch out for the power-hungry psychiatrist. They can call him crazy, lock him up, and keep him drugged out of their mind for the rest of his life, if they want to.
In fact, doctors have all kinds of powers over the public. They are licensed to practice on people with drugs and surgery. As a doctor, you can accidentally kill a patient, or make it look accidental, and get away with it if you can prove it was a standard medical procedure. And you can even bill the services to the deceased patient’s estate. That’s power. This power is attractive to some people, which is why they became doctors in the first place. Of course, as in politics, anyone who is drawn to power is precisely the type of person who shouldn’t get it. People who grow up and want to be called “doctors” all the time and have the power, money, and prestige that our culture gives to the medical profession are not necessarily the best people to treat patients fairly, sensitively and fairly. with the interests of the patient in mind. . These doctors do not attend to the health needs of their patients. Patients meet the energy needs of their physician.
Along with the power of medicine comes money. Above all, medicine is a business. You are in the business of treating disease, which means that your doctor behaves better when you are sick, not when you are well. This makes the doctor, like the auto mechanic, invest in your breakdown. It means that the doctor is committed to disease and treatment, and is the enemy of health and prevention. If you went to medical school to help heal humanity, this sad fact about the basic and underlying financial momentum of medicine may be enough to get you out of the profession. Made me quit. It also made me realize that if you want to be healthy, you have to stop doing the things that make you sick, like going to the doctor.
So the next time you try it, keep in mind that the person doing the test is no different from everyone else. They are not necessarily saints who swear poverty to treat the sick and help prevent disease. They are not necessarily mature, objective and impartial people who can distance their personal feelings from their work. They are just normal people who have been granted a license to practice with you. They have the same perversions, prejudices, stupidity, self-interest and petty lives as the rest of humanity, but they are drawn to the lucrative and powerful business of disease.
Say “Ah!”
