Ditch Doc

Apparently, we’ve also just discovered that childhood development is important. The previous idea was, of course, that children were just small, unready adults, to be seen and not heard, and to be shuffled off to the nanny or the boarding school as soon as possible. You couldn’t really do much with children below a certain age. But are we really saying that? This sort of thinking has certainly prevailed in some social classes at some times, but even the reference to nannies and boarding schools proves that we’re making generalizations from a pretty specific population. Are we suggesting that there were no mothers who bounced their babies and cooed at them? No fathers who chased their sons around the park? No fairy tales? No toys? Surely some of the aristocrats above would have tried to choose nannies who knew how to raise children, and not just small unready adults. So where did we get the idea that we’re just discovering these things? Is it that we’ve just started to write about them in the form of research papers? If anyone has any other ideas, I’d love to hear them.

If the redundancy of that title made you wince, read on. All of our profs have informed us that the need to treat patients as people, and not just disease receptacles, was largely forgotten with the widespread application of modern scientific discoveries to the practice of medicine. After cranking out a century’s worth of the sort of soulless doctors we’ve all encountered at one time or another, medical schools are finally taking steps to remind students of the inescapably personal nature of their profession. The expression for this new way of thinking is “patient-centred medicine.” It may be redundant, but it’s a step in the right direction. There’s still something missing, though. To be continued…

I hope I’m being simplistic here, but why, when Canadian doctors make such a phenomenal profit from healthcare, do so many of them react so negatively to the idea of a medical system that generates profit? Just a question.

OK, girls, here’s the deal. I doubt that King Arthur opened many doors for himself. But it wasn’t because anyone thought he couldn’t. It was because his subjects didn’t think such a glorious hero of battle should have to take care of such a mundane consideration as a door. It breaks our hearts that you should think we open doors to objectify you or because we think you’re weak. When a man opens a door for you, take it as it’s probably meant: as a gesture of homage to a being just a little elevated above his own dusty sphere.