Experience

Last night I learned how to suture on a pig’s foot. Surprising to me was that there is no great magic secret to it. It’s just like sewing except the needle is attached to the string. We learned four types of sutures and played with the stapler (which is good for shallow scalp lacerations). The best part was when the Emergency doc overseeing all of this told us to come and practice in his ER. I can just imagine the look of horror on my own face if someone with my level of “experience” tried stitch me up. I think the first time I do it on a patient I’m going to have to control my face and try not to look too freaked out. The last thing anyone wants to hear is “oops.”

I heard an interesting story while suturing that kind of goes along with that sentiment. The Stout Street Clinic here in Denver is run by students on Saturdays (though supervised by a doctor) for homeless people. A pair of fellow students had a patient come in for STD testing last weekend. As part of the interview process and getting a patient’s history, we’re supposed to ask about what the patient thinks about their illness or condition or tests being done, and so the students asked this giant bear of a guy why he thought he needed an STD test. The patient said that he had just gotten out of prison and had had unprotected sex. One of the students knelt between the patient’s knees to swab the guy’s urethra, and as the student was negotiating in his mind how exactly to do that, the patient asked, “You’ve done this before, right?” [Imagine their faces] According to my second-hand source, the student just said ‘yeah’ and took the sample.

Second test over with!!! One more to go (hopefully not followed by having to get carried home), and then I’ll be done with the human body block (i.e. anatomy).

Colorado Medical Society annual meeting

YAY Jackson Atlas Leach was born September 12^th, 2007 weighing 6lbs 12 ounces!!!!

Directly from dissection class, several of my classmates and I drove to Steamboat Springs for the Colorado Medical Society’s annual meeting. After three hours and most of the last hour spent discussing the highlights of European food, we arrived just in time for an amazing dinner at Mambo Italiano. The next morning, Governor Bill Ritter kicked off the conference by giving a little speech about health care in the state and nation. Since Colorado has the opportunity to lead the way in health care reform with the 208 Commission*, Ritter just emphasized the importance of cost, quality, and access. I was really amazed by how genuine and well-informed he seemed, and at the same time, he was in touch with the reality of the strangle-hold TABOR has on the state’s spending (power). Maybe not all politicians are the slime they seem to be on tv.

All the rest of the day, we (the Medical Student Component) attended presentations and discussions of the current medical situation and political climate. Lots of it was over my head, arm-waving legal mumbo-jumbo, but every once in a while I got a glimpse of a bunch of people who were concerned with the health care their patients (or future patients) were going to receive.

The next day, we voted on resolutions that were submitted by members. The Medical Student Component submitted a resolution to have health care recognized as a human right, with the hope that when you start talking about health care in terms of human rights, access for all people gets dragged into an ethical arena, rather than just a financial one. I heard an interesting counter-argument to the idea, stating ‘how could something be a right if it has to be provided for you’. However, if you think about what we call human rights, many of them already fall under that category- education (being the best example) and social security (taking care of old people, not the American check sense) just to name a few. Health care is already recognized as a human right by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights* article 25.

Long story short, the CMS lawyers thought that calling it a right created the potential for legal ramifications, i.e. lawsuits, so they voted the resolution down. We countered with an amended resolution stating that health care was a “fundamental societal obligation”, which basically says the same thing, but spreads the blame over all society for its failure to provide. In its new language, the resolution was unanimously adopted.

In my opinion, people are the same as animals, and I don’t think we have any special rights just because we’re capable of higher brain functioning. I do, however, think that “human rights” are a statement by our society about the kind of world we want to live in. When you look at it from that perspective, a lot of other concerns lose priority- price tags, profit margins, ideas about self-sustainment. A philosopher named John Rawls described a way to look at society “through a veil of ignorance,” meaning that, would you chose to live in a certain society even if you didn’t know what role you were going to get*.

Anyways, long ramble short, the conference was a really interesting insight into the political portion of medicine. I’m so glad I chose medicine instead of law, because even if takes decades for doctors to regain control of medicine from the insurance companies, there will always be the every-day patients whose immediate problems might be solvable. It will be interesting to see what kind of world baby Jackson will grow into.

If you want to read a little more about these things, here are some decent websites:

*www.colorado.gov/208commission/

*http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

*http://infotech.fanshawec.on.ca/faculty/jedicke/rawls.htm

On a side note, YAY Jackson Atlas Leach was born September 12^th, 2007 weighing 6lbs 12 ounces!!!!