Is being stupid a requirement of the marketing business, or just "highly desirable".
I went into a petrol station today, the girl ahead of me wanted to buy a big bag of chips. She was told the price was $5.30 but there was a special offer: two for $5.00; not surprisingly she took the offer.
If I can't be a public health doctor, maybe I should become a judge. I came across this quote from Judge Chesterman of the Queensland Supreme Court[1] while looking for information about the legalities of one of our PBL cases:
The first respondent is criminally insane. Because plain speaking is now discouraged he is described as a "forensic patient" for the purposes of Ch 7 Pt 7 of the Mental Health Act 2000 (Qld) ("MH Act"). He has been confined in an asylum (an "authorised mental health service") since about 1997.
1. Adult Guardian v Langham - [2005] QSC 127; [2006] 1 Qd R 1; BC200503132
I had no interest whatever in going into public health but after a recent lecture I may reconsider.
Apparently public health doctors don't have to be insanely politically correct all the time like the rest of us: lots of statistics to show that people who smoke are "stupid" and that "being fat isn't just unattractive, it is very unhealthy".
We got our first real patient visit last week. Two observations relative to the enormous amount of "practicing on each other" which we have been doing:
History-taking is much harder especially if your patient's disease is affecting their cognitive functions.
Physical examination is much easier. Finding (even quite a large number of) abnormal signs is much easier than listing the inordinate number of things which a bunch of basically healthy medical students do not have.
You have to feel a bit sorry for the people giving lectures next Tuesday and Wednesday.
They are giving lectures in biosocial theory of health ("definitions of disease" and "models of illness") which is the area of our curriculum furthest from the interest of the typical medical student. Your typical medical student's response to biosocial theory is, depending on the density of the language, either "why did they take an hour to say the bloody obvious" or "huh? what was that?".
To add to their handicap different ableness, Tuesday and Wednesday are the lightest two days we have had so far this year. These lectures will be either the only thing a student has that day or, worse, the only thing they have at St Lucia that day but with a requirement that they attend clinical coaching at one of the hospitals.
OK. I feel sorry for them. The question is, do I feel sorry enough for them to drag myself out of bed in time for an 8am lecture before I rush off to the hospital?
Medicine has a long year: we start early and finish late. For the first five weeks we were pretty much the only students on campus (excluding a few stray postgrads) and had free reign on all the resources.
Now the other faculties have started and we have to queue up for food in the ref, PCs in the library etc.
It is however occasionally amusing to watch students from other faculties walk into our lectures by mistake. A picture of a prolapsed rectum leaves the average arts student in no doubt that they are in the wrong place. The other day we had four seventeen year old males walk into a lecture, seat themselves, look up and see a still from "Jenny gets her period" (an educational video for intellectually disabled girls approaching puberty). They actually bounced off each other at the door.
I arrived in Brisbane on the 1st of January. Since then my bike has had eight punctures, seven more than in the previous four years of riding. Same bike. Same rider. Same tyres until puncture number four (when I replaced them with something newer and more knobbly).
I went to "skills session" run by TROHPIQ on Saturday.
Not part of our course, just a bit of fun. We spent the morning putting plaster casts on each other, suturing pigs trotters, and cannulating and intubating simulators.
I did OK on the first three, but if you need an airway in a hurry, find someone else!
