No Malice Intended

Doctors may have been arrogant and insensitive in the practice but there was no malice or ulterior motive. (Dunne Report on Organ Retention Scandal, 2006)

Clearly the blankpaige is on some kind of depressing downward spiral of rants. I promise I'll snap out of it shortly. In the meantime, is it just me or does everyone think that we didn't need a judge, a barrister, 5 years and €13 million to tell us what we already know?

Paternalism, benign or otherwise, has been the overwhelming feature of our medical profession since, well actually, forever. Our doctors enter college having been selected as the brightest and best of our children, they spend six or seven years being told how wonderful they are, and if they are really good they get to play at being really important consultant - an individual who has a higher intellectual capacity than most, is the best at everything he/she turns their hand to, and gets paid about 15 times the average industrial wage. (They are so intellectually endowed, of course, that they are unable to wash their hands properly, but that's another rant altogether!)

I once listened to one such doctor being interviewed on the radio about how difficult it is discussing intimate sexual dysfunction with patients. You see the problem is that while the patient may have been sitting (patiently?) in the waiting room for 2 hours, the clock sort of restarts for them when they are seen by the doctor. They take ages to 'warm up' and won't come right out and tell the doc their problem. Sometimes the 6 minute consultation is up before they even begin to hint at what the issue is. Word of advice to such consultants. In future don't have your patients sit waiting to see your 2 hours and then only give them 6 minutes of your time. Medicine is supposed to be patient-focused!

I had a particularly traumatic experience of one such Consultant. After sitting in wait for 4 hours on a hard chair in a public corridor for 'my results' to find their way from the lab to his desk, he burst out of his office and down the corridor. He interrupted briefly his mobile phone conversation to shout at me from some distance that generally speaking everything is okay but that I'd be unlikely to ever become pregnant. He didn't even break stride or pause for a reaction as he delivered this news in the most matter of fact manner. He had resumed his telephone conversation (meeting someone on a golf course in an hour) before he had even come to within the socially acceptable distance for conversation. I was too stunned to even react.

Had anyone asked I could have saved the State €13 million!