Science in general is leaking
awe; which to the
field is comparable to a
leaking nuclear reactor. Medicine, a
facet of science, is losing its
respect--a facet of awe.
The
human body is not an
easy thing to deal with when something
goes wrong, but
truth to be told, having
both parents with
experience in the
medical field has actually taught me to have
less respect for
doctors and
hospitals than I might otherwise have.
Not that the
people, the actual
people who work their
asses off like my mother just trying to
do some good, deserve
anything but thanks. But just like
The State has
impersonalized and
depreciated the value of the
people it claims to
serve, the
medical field--and oh, gods, the
medical INDUSTRY--have to a
large extent lost sight of what's
important about
being a caregiver.
Doctors who
treat people like
lumps of meat or
interesting machinery, to be pulled apart, inspected, prodded and
humiliated,
make me ill, and I've run into
more of them than not. My
husband's view is that, whether or not these
doctors know it, what they're accomplishing is nothing more than a
molester would accomplish. They are not
improving life,
acting in its interests--hell,
holding it sacred--when they strip down your
child or your
wife and
poke around. And on the
few occassions when this
has to be done, the simple fact of
routine keeps the doctors ridiculously
sheltered from the
unholy implications of what they're doing, preventing them from
at last being sympathetic to the
agony--mental and physical--that their patients are in. It doesn't
count if you're a doctor. Bull
shit.
The
medical industry has a slightly different problem, for instead of
glorifying cold-steel science, they of course glorify
money money money. My mother, an
Emergency-room nurse with over
thirty years experience, was recently
forced to take a class, on her own time, in "
Customer Satisfaction". If she did not
take the class she lost her job, so she took it, not being made of money and all. But she was
horrified at the things they were
teaching at the class, and in the middle of it, she even stood up and
cussed out the "instructor". She told him
something like this: "I've been a
nurse since
Vietnam, even
before. I know
what it means to be a nurse. I do not 'serve
customers'. I do not deal with '
clients'.
I take care of my patients. Someone comes to me
ill, in
physical and emotional distress, and I act with
both my knowledge
and my
human instinct to try and relieve their
distress." She was
so offended at the "We're taking their money, so let's
provide a good service" attitude that she
walked out of the class.
My mother and I are
big fans of
Patch Adams.