There’s an appalling advert for one of the adjunct health unions/associations/whatever where someone collapses in a restaurant and the doctor starts to call for various “technologists” (x-ray, CT scan, etc.). I don’t doubt their word that health care today is complex; still, call me crazy but if I collapsed somewhere I’d really rather have an actual health professional, a clinician, by which I mean a nurse or physician, at my side than someone who knows how to operate an ultrasound machine thank you very much. Remember, machines don’t “know” whether something is a concern or not – it’s people, actual humans, who make that determination.
A determination that all too often relies on over-optimistic beliefs regarding the accuracy of “tests”.
(But as neurologist and author Oliver Sachs once sadly remarked: They don’t give Nobel prizes to clinicians, only medical researchers.)
Worse, everything from the images and data we get from those machines not to mention the health information that’s flung at us from all sides is based on statistics. More accurately, a statistical approximation of “normal”. The normal person, whatever or whomever that may be. Another term, whether one is being statistically accurate or not, is “average”.
Now I don’t know about you but I’ve never met an “average” person. Everyone I know is distinctive, sometimes eccentric, often times interesting, funny and, well, different. People are a jumble of ethnicities, backgrounds, socio-economic and otherwise; their education and passions and hobbies and interests differ as does everything from their diets to their bad habits. Er, risky behaviours to the epidemiologists in the house.
So here we all are, contorting ourselves into bizarre shapes trying to fit into the statistical moulds they’d have us fit, from the not-so-benign lipid levels and blood pressure (for which drugs are available should one not conform to aforesaid norm) to clothing sizes and availability in everything from lipstick colours to food. Oh, yeah, tell me you haven’t noticed that your favorite kind of frozen chips appeals to you and six other people so it’s been discontinued.
From supplements to ideal weight, glucose and you-name-it, normal follows us around like some malevolent mosquito, buzzing in our ear and biting us in the you-know-what when we try to ignore it. Whether it’s Dr. Google or the news items on everything from your phone to your TV.
But when we’re feeling off, or sick or have had something bad happen what we want and need is a clinician: someone who knows how to set that broken bone, do that tracheotomy, or CPR and know just how much morphine to prescribe so we’ll keep breathing. Unfortunately, the spate of bad health news out there makes us all so nervous that all to often when we do end up at the clinic or the ER we’ve got nothing more terrifying than bronchitis or a particularly bad bout of cystitis. Not for us former generations stoicism; we race over ‘just in case’ for everything from a sore knee to a cough.
An American chap once disparagingly told me Canadian health care was simply dreadful. How did he know? Well, when he lived in Montreal he had a bad cold. One assumes in winter when people get those in cold climates. Then, late Saturday night he decides to head over to the Emerg because his cough was worrying him. Could he breathe? Yes. Was he running a temp? No. But he went anyway. And couldn’t figure out why the ER staff didn’t rush him to have tests and x-rays. Ah, d’you think you could have picked a less busy time? Of course not.
Where’s an epidemiologist when you need one?
* Not my line, though I wish it were. I read it in Gordon Clark’s column in The Vancouver Province on July 8. Laughed out loud as a matter of fact.