Universally Sick of Being Sick
Doctors go to school for a very long time. Of course so do rocket scientists and clowns, but all indications suggest medical school is very difficult and a residency is unimaginably long hours for relatively little pay. Also, when doctors are finished with all of that schooling, they are nominally qualified to save lives, or at least make lives better. Doctors are one of the few professions that civilized society cannot do without. It is right therefore that doctors are well respected and well compensated. However, I am hard pressed to come up with a group of people that are more pompous, self aggrandizing and holier than thou, than medical professionals.
Doctors think that they should be able to charge whatever they want for their services, regardless of whether or not they do anything for you. If they do attempt to help you out but screw up, they think that they shouldn’t have any repercussions because … well, I’m still trying to figure out why doctors are the only people who think they should be allowed to mess up and blame others professions for daring to hold them accountable, but that seems to be how they think. In fact, for all of the “nobility” they’d like to associate with their profession, whenever anything that threatens their bank account (like, oh I don’t know, quality medical treatment regardless of ability to pay) doctors start acting suspiciously like everybody else, ruthlessly protective of their privilege.
In order to honestly evaluate doctors’ station in our society we need to draw a bight line distinction between the doctors whom have patient contact and general medical researchers. The 27-year-old graduate student who spends her days injecting rodents with pestilence trying to figure things out is different than the 37-year-old GP who prescribes “fluids” when I’m coughing up my spleen. Doctors as I am using the term are the people who don’t fix anything, don’t cure anything, and are generally whores of the pharmaceutical industry. It wasn’t too long ago that the people we now call doctors were called shamans.
Doctors are the priests of the physical. Just like your local clergy these medical ministers for the most part have no idea what they are talking about. They are schooled in all of the industry jargon and can give you their interpretation of what they’ve heard people with actual knowledge theorize about. Just don’t ask them to actually fix anything. Don’t ask them to actually explain why things work the way they’ve been told they work. My father is 60 years old. He’s smoked two packs a day since he was 16. He doesn’t have cancer or emphysema. Is he going to get sick? Am I going to get sick smoking half of what he smokes? They don’t have a damn clue. But they confidently tell me that I should stop smoking, almost as a reflex reaction, regardless of what I am sick with. They tell my father to stop smoking too, notwithstanding the fact that, again, he’s 60 freaking years old and has already outlived many non-smokers he knows. Yet for this paucity of knowledge doctors walk around as if they are God’s gift to your well being.
We need to take these piously pompous purveyors of other people’s knowledge down a peg. The length of their wardrobe makes no difference. Your family doctors should be accorded no more or less respect than your neighborhood butcher. They have been educated to provide you with a specialized service, namely easing your pain while other smarter people seek to prevent it. Do not let the jargon intimidate you. Go into their storefront, get your drug IOU, and move on with your day. Even when we are hospitalized, we must remember that these professionals are providing you a service. They are not benevolent angels who bless you with their care, rather they are trained professionals doing a job. It is okay to expect them to do their job well. It is okay to expect that they treat you with respect, to demand that they explain what they are about to do to your body for as long as you need to have the procedure explained to you. More than fair, it is your right as a citizen to expect that they will be held accountable for what they do should things go ill.
Perhaps if enough people regard doctors in their proper place, the notion that medical care should be made available only to those with private monetary ability can be exposed as uncivilized lunacy. Universal health care is not a liberal policy initiative--it is a requirement of the mythical social contract by which we all forego our natural rights to take what we want whenever we can. The shaman who hoarded all the medicinal plants pretty quickly found himself in need of them. Doctors supposedly have an oath to first do no harm. I’m pretty sure that looking at insurance cards before they decide on a program of treatment is a violation of that oath, and if it’s not, then what the hell is the point of taking oaths? A government that can put price controls on a side of beef is well within the scope of its police power to provide health care to all of its citizens. Any doctor who tells you differently should stick to writing illegible prescriptions and leave the pontificating to those who know what they are talking about.