Having one of those irritable moods today. Sudden dispair, and thinking about places. Where patients do as they are told, where there are no phoney made-up political titles, where people are not told that they owe a debt to the country (I pay my goddamn fucking taxes and tuition, thank you very much! And people with XX chromosomes don't, just because they produce children? What, have we turned into a child-producing factory? Hoorah for genetic engineering then! ). Where there are no ignorant non-medically trained top people trying to teach doctors what to do when prescribing drugs, where doctors are not trained to be a frickin' hospitality representative, where (as our dear Prof puts it) medicine is still a profession, not a haggling-market where GPs - instead of pharmacists - are forced to dispense medicines instead, just because no one feels that consultation is worth that much. (If you're so darned smart, go start from Snell, Guyton, Marks & Smith, Rang & Dale, Robbins, Harrison's, Kumar & Clarke, Bailey & Love etc and go get your own darned diagnosis. Oh, and while you're still at it, why not see the beloved chinese witch-doctor to treat that lovely fungating lung carcinoma too? Then sure, come back and tell us that the doctors' presciptions caused this. ) And I don't even want to get started on the polyclinic system.

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On a lighter note, something hilarious happened today. There was this decrepit-looking patient, non-ambulant and uncommunicative, sitting on a chair between his bed and the next. We proceeded to the next bed, drew the curtains and continued the rounds. At the end of it, one of the docs drew back the curtains and they continued discussing the case. Took me a moment to realise that, hey, how come the curtains are in the shape of the a sitting person? Apparently the curtains ended up draped right over the poor patient sitting up in the chair, and being uncommunicative as he was, he simply sat there in silence while getting smothered.