God's Dandruff

Continue in low mood; it is what comes of spending long days alone, at home, ruminating on my own inadequacies.

My impending exam - the Fellowship, the exit exam, the big one... what it takes to be board certified, I think, if you're one of my Colonial brothers or sisters... dwells heavily on my mind. I've spent the last year pretending it was an age away; and know it isn't. I'm not sure where the last year has gone; it seems to have slipped away from me.

There must have been something on my mind (at least for the last 6 months).

Caught a programme on the Beeb a few days ago, about the birth of the NHS. 'Twas interesting, if only to hear the concerns of the (largely) middle class docs regarding the State control of medicine. That the doctor would no longer work for the patient, but for the state. That there would be no autonomy.That we would be told what sort of medicine to practice. Told what we could do and not do, say and not say.

While the GPs were against it, Bevan swung opinion through the influence of Lord Moran, President of the Royal College of Physicians; not by much mind - he only won re-election that year by 5 votes.It wasn't clear what role Surgeons had in all this, but I'm guessing that they too were amenable to having their throats stuffed with gold...

The objections seem to mirror those I see expressed by my Colonial brethren today, when threatened with Socialised medicine, and indeed they would seem to be (at least partly) valid... what was prophesied has indeed come to pass.

Is the NHS a good thing?

Fundamentally, yes it is.

I can't not believe that. People don't die because they can't afford to see their doctor anymore, childhood disease is a shadow of it's former self, and is only really coming back because of the gullibility, stupidity, superstition of certain sections of the populus, encouraged by the media.

Is the Continental system better? The American system? I suspect the practitioners thereof would tell you "yes", but, and I think there's some evidence out there to support this idea of mine, I'm not sure they offer better results per unit spent.

But maybe all that proves is that spending more equals better care... up to a point - see the way China works. But maybe I just don't know any better.

And a man can become little more than the sum of his ideas, his obsessions.

Get it right, and you're a genius. Wrong, a crackpot. We need to be careful about being defined by our own horizons, our own experience.

Consider the American tourist visiting the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Much impressed, she enquired of one of the Security Guards: "This place looks so old. Is it pre-war?"
With a haughty sniff, the Guard drew himself up, puffing out his chest."Madam", he replied, "it is pre-America..."

Does that fit a pre-conception? Should it? Is there any mileage listening to the ramblings of a man who thinks the height of comedy is a Gorilla drumming?

Thank you for bearing with, constant reader. Sometimes I just need to let the mind wander.

More sense soon.

(Or possibly just a picture of me in a kilt...)