I think I am probably the only medical student in the face of the planet who doesn't really believe in conventional medicine. Although I understand its importance, a lot of the time I find that conventional doctors cause more harm than good. Unless it's for my yearly physical or an I-can't-fix-it-myself problem, you won't see me spending too much time in one of their offices.Don't misunderstand me though. I will not under any circumstance say that traditional medicine is a pseudo science nor that it doesn't deserve to exist; however, I feel that preventive medicine and alternative medicine are the way to go. This is one of the reasons why I want to be a nutritionist: I believe that this is where our health ends and begins.
Anyway, today I had to go fix a mistake on my schedule for the summer semester, which by the way started yesterday. This morning I woke up not feeling like myself though. The 30 minutes it ususally takes me to get ready turned into an hour 15. The two breakfasts I eat before I am even out the door were just one and I felt like my head had been used as a bowling ball and my body was just tingly all over-in a bad way. I had witnessed Ivan go through this very same thing last week so I knew it was THE COLD.
Going to school to take care of anything is a process. Everything takes hours and hours and hours and to this day I'm not sure if this is due to understaffing, incompetence or negligence. Either way, I had to go take care of this problem because as unenthusiastic as I am about taking yet another Physics course, I must. So I went, cold and all.
After 5 hours going from line to line to line, my body was killing me. I told the woman "look, I've been here for 5 hours. I'm hungry, I am tired and I'm sick. All I need is for you to add this one class to my course load so I can go home, make myself some soup and have some honey with lime. That's it." The woman looks at me like I am retarded and tells me to go to the drugstore next door and get some medicine. I said "thanks but no thanks. I don't believe in self medicating", so she says "get a prescription from either of those guys over there (pointing towards these guys who have been "doctors" for a whole three days)". Once again, I said no because I am not SICK, I just have a cold and all I need is soup, honey, fluids and bed.
Well, apparently my position about what goes into my body might have offended a few doctors and some doctors-to-be because what began as a simple "please help me add a class so I can get soup and honey" conversation escalated into a discussion about why I want to be a doctor if I don't believe in cold medicine.
Frankly, that was the most retarded argument I have ever had.
I've always thought that really smart people probably lacked something somewhere. I used to lean towards emotional intelligence but it's ocurred to me today that really smart people, in this case doctors, lack common sense and ingenuity or if at some point they had it, they probably lost it along the way. Maybe that's what happens when you take too many Chemistry courses and not enough anthropology...
4 comments:
Hola que tal?, como estás?, interesante el blog, nos leemos, saludos,
JD
... well my friend, if you ever find yourself in need of a cooperative open minded patient to run all sorts of nutritional experiments on at no cost whatsoever let me know and i'll volunteer ... we can have deep free ended discussions about dead poets and what not ... or even pour cough syrup down a drain in front of the medical school for kicks ... the possibilities are endless ... take care of those diamonds ... Peace Health and Lotsa Love from LoWa ...
That's the biggest problem in North American mediicine. We tret the symptons and not the problem. We feel pain, we mask it with painkillers. We sleep too little and stress too much and eat crap that that gets pased to us thorugh our car window and want a pill to make it all better so we can keep going. Take some time to learn more about what you eat and getsoem rest and you'll feel exponentially better. I take as few pills as possible and am healthier than most of the pill poppers I know (including my wife). You fight the good fight and let the loonies have their candies.
I think a lot of people assume that all doctors must be good people who want to help because that's the only reason they would enter the medical field, but that's basically like saying all mechanics must be honest and decent because they only reason they would enter the automotive field is because they want to solve your car troubles. I don't think intelligence and morality go hand in hand. I've seen a lot of doctors over the years who are basically drug dealers with an MD.
The last place I worked, several employees kept calling in sick with a doctor's excuse signed by the same doctor. One of my supervisors was a part time deputy, so he called in an investigation. The doctor and several nurses got fired when they discovered they were selling prescriptions and medical excuses.
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