I know I often have very little optimism for the future intelligence of the human race, but I can't really help it: I face the barrage of the fullness of human stupidity on a daily basis.
A woman had been coming into our clinic quite regularly over the past few weeks wondering why we weren't "helping her". She had been tired for a few months, exhaustedly so. Doctors had already done some preliminary bloodwork which showed... nothing. So I asked her, how much are you sleeping per night? To which she answered that she was getting four hours a night, because she recently had a baby (not that that is an adequate answer; there are plenty of women who can get a decent 8 hours of sleep total, even while breastfeeding). I pointed out to her that anybody, not just new mothers, would be utterly exhausted if they had been functioning on that little sleep for months on end.
Apparently, that wasn't a sufficient answer for her. Nope, she demanded more investigations, more doctors, more answers. To which I demurely declined and suggested instead she should try to figure out some way to get more sleep. To which, as always, she said she would look for a second (third, fourth, fifth) opinion, and left, since I wouldn't automatically aquiesce to her demands.
There are, of course, the myriads of people coming in wondering what those red itchy spots are on their bodies, which, to their amazement, I point out are mosquito bites. I am not sure how we got to a point in Canadian society that we no longer know what mosquito bites are, what they look like, and what to do with them. Clearly, we, as a nation, need to go camping more.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Is it possible she was trying to get sleeping pills prescribed (the kind to which one might get addicted), or is that kind of stuff over-the-counter anyways?
I guess you could say that such things are one of the down-sides of a "free" healthcare system.
Post a Comment