WILTIMS #116: Cheers!

Today was rather mellow since I was in the lucky quarter of the class that had no lab or clinical session this afternoon. So, to supplement my musings for today, I have a couple of overflow points from yesterday's post.

Yesterday I went out with members of the Policy and a Pint club. As the name implies, this is a group that goes out to a local pub and discusses medical policy. The topic yesterday was single-payer and socialized medicine as compared to the US health care system, pre- and post-Obamacare. It was a smallish group this week, but we even had a resident Canadian to weight in. It is one of the highlights of attending medical school that I am surrounded with intelligent, concerned citizens who can respectfully discuss contentious issues and choose to do so at their leisure. Also, free beer.

Secondly, yesterday's topic in History of Medicine was on the role of the marginalized in medical education. Though I presented lots of fun tidbits, I never really broached the bigger point. In all of history, the ability for medical students to learn has been reliant on the bodies of the poor, lower class and subservient peoples. Gladiators were the subjects of Galen; murderers were the cadavers of Harvey; slaves were bought on their deathbeds for dissection in early southern medical schools.

Though we'd like to think that this trend ended alongside the slavery and indentured servitude that enabled it, that would be wishful thinking. My medical school has two major teaching hospitals, a large private hospital in the suburbs and a large urban public one in the city. As is common all over the country, teaching opportunities are fewer in the affluent and correspondingly litigious private hospitals. Thus the best learning experiences are often found at the grimy public hospitals, where the patients are overwhelmingly poor and of minority ethnicities. We still exploit the exploitable in order to learn and we have a ways to go before we fix this inequality.

TIL: If you use the phrases "touch yourself" and "make it rigid" in any context, you will overwhelm even the best resistance to juvenile humor.

You cannot have a diagnosis without impairment. Hearing voices is not a disease unless it causes dis-ease.