MIDWAY: Morbid medicine

I’ve seen people struggle through five gruelling years of medical school, additional three years of specialisation and later through professionally significant but otherwise glory-free years. Doctors aren’t just there to walk around acting like glorified, little mechanic tin gods. It demands a level of performance on a daily basis that is high and persistence to keep up with the latest advances in medical science. Doctors are just human mechanics and as much as I appreciate them, I will put up with the elitists attitude, they are so used to.

In the present day, everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to give you medical advice. Though hardly anybody knows, why? Everyone, of course, has some medical experience, no matter if they are as thick as two short planks. Consider everything from bruises to cramped arms, from constipation to open-heart surgery. No matter what may be ailing you, chances are there is someone in the vicinity who has had it, or knows someone who has had it, or thinks they know something about your condition from his knowledge accrued from the internet or just as a noble impulse perhaps.

They know what it’s like to go to bed with a bloated stomach after hernia surgery because your wife’s friend’s former boyfriend’s great uncle’s cousin went through exactly that in his early years and survived only because her great Uncle Sam squirted mushroom soup up his nose. So now you’re supposed to go get mushroom soup and squirt it up your nose.

Not that I have anything against medical stuff. I find it disgusting, but that’s beside the point. Let’s face it; there is nothing interesting about what lies under your skin. I am far more concerned about what the surface looks like. Blood grosses me out. There are many positive things in life to experience and not a single one of them involves blood and tears.

Getting back to medical advice, why don’t people just leave it to ‘doctors’? After all, they know real science, and more importantly, they are authorised to do the job that they do. Even if they morbidly misplace imuno-heparin in the emergency room, they are ‘doctors’. So let’s just trust doctors who provide out-of-hours care, when it comes to medical counsel.