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Showing posts from January, 2021

Living with an Alcoholic Sucks

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It's easy to sympathise with an alcoholic. As long as you don't have to live with them. My experience with one was short but traumatic enough that I had blocked it out completely from my mind for some time.  "Vic" was my father's home nurse for a while but calling him that would be a disservice to home nurses everywhere. His only goal in life was to get as drunk as possible. He figured that working under a doctor would provide easy cash.  The problem for me back then was cash. I had little and was cheated out of months of pay by certain places. I had to work long hours almost all days to get by. There was no one else at home to supervise.  2 weeks after starting work, Vic said he wanted 40k per month as salary, which is the same as I earn today while on Covid duty as a government doctor. Once I made it clear that that wasn't happening, his behaviour began to get progressively worse.  He would ask for money to get groceries in the morning before I went to work

Don't Believe What You're Told

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  What do you do when 2 senior doctors have differing views on a particular topic? A) Go with the doctor who looks older. B) Go with the doctor with more degrees to his name. C) It doesn't matter to me because I'm a junior doctor. D) Go review the literature for yourself and draw your own conclusions. If your natural inclination was anything other than option D, I'm afraid your education has failed you.  Taking things at face value I recently had one of my juniors tell me that a big reason for coronavirus spread was via hair and feet. When I asked for a reference (since I hadn't read anything like that), I was told "That's what the doctor here told me so it must be true". There were no replies after that.  One must always find a balance between being a skeptic and having an open mind. I searched for any evidence to support this claim and have not been able to find anything special thus far (anyone reading is free to point me to any evidence backing this up