Whew! Just in time. UD was madly enjoying reading this story, and wanted to share it with you, but wasn’t finding any connection to universities until, toward the end of the piece, bingo!
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A medical ethicist at Northwestern University has a great comment:
[This was] a cheap excuse to have a laugh at a powerless person’s expense.
UD has long been interested in the theme of cruelty. This story seems to her a very pure instance of the phenomenon of cruelty.
June 24th, 2015 at 4:32PM
Let’s see, M. D.’s are the folks who want to check your tee-tee, poo, boobs, and what-not. Pre-colonoscopy you’re anxious; may be a coral reef growin’ up there. So you let yourself get hosed, and the next you know you’ve been volunteered to play the fast-asleep straight man in an adult “Our Gang” skit. I’m gettin’ too old.
June 24th, 2015 at 11:33PM
Jack/OH, you think that’s bad. I went to get a colonoscopy at a teaching hospital. I’m lying on my side, procedure gets started, and in walks a bunch of med students. Of course, they all have to take a look, and comment on what they’re seeing. And this went on for over ten minutes. Talk about compromising positions, I wonder what they had to say outside of the room….
June 25th, 2015 at 11:16AM
@Charlie
Yeah. I had a, um, urinary procedure a few years ago– and the check-in nurse asked me if I was willing to participate in the surgical teaching rounds. I said, ‘Sure, why not.’
It was interesting. Some students were considerably more ‘forward’ (and more knowledgeable) than other ones.
June 25th, 2015 at 7:24PM
As a caregiver and a patient, I understand the importance of interns learning from watching and doing, but cut them only a little slack. Some of them really do need to be taken down a notch, but so also do a lot who have finished their internship. This incident is an ‘I don’t even’. Seems some medical professionals acquire sociopathy if they didn’t already have it in the first place.
Always question your doctors and do research on your own, and don’t allow them to put you down or treat your questions and/or objections as if they were the product of a silly person.
June 27th, 2015 at 1:58PM
felonious: Yes – in this case I’d say the person had sociopathy already.