Doctors

Doctors

I recently watched a documentary about brain surgery. It opened with a surgeon cutting the crown off the patient’s skull, somewhat like removing the top of a soft boiled egg, and poking inside with a probe and scalpel, rather than bread soldiers. Up to this point it may not have been very aesthetic viewing, but it was not in any way worrying; this is after all what surgeons do. Then the surgeon turned to the person next to him and inquired, “Tell me, what is the problem we’re trying to sort out, exactly?” I have known teachers go out to face a class without having prepared a lesson, and it rarely works well; but at least it is unlikely to prove fatal, or massively debilitating.

I found this particularly disappointing since I have always exempted surgeons from my general antipathy to doctors. Doctors as a whole seem to me to operate mainly on the level of the shaman: ask a few questions and then wave Magic Pills over the patient until they admit that they are better, although there is now, presumably when the Drug Budget Event Horizon is looming, an increasing tendency to blame a virus which can’t be treated and advise just staying in bed. I never felt that this kind of treatment required a doctor; I could with the aid of a pharmaceutical handbook do it myself, were I allowed to. But of course any drug strong enough to have any actual effect now requires a prescription. I’m not old enough to remember the halcyon days when anyone wanting to feature on the last page of an Agatha Christie could go into a chemist’s, sign a false name in the poisons book and walk out with a pint and a half of arsenic and a bucket of strychnine “to get rid of moles in the lawn.” But I am sufficiently decrepit to be able to remember when chemists instead of meekly handing out triple-shrinkwrapped pills on a doctor’s order, spent much of their time making up ointments and potions from a collection of raw ingredients, to suit whatever symptoms the customer complained of.

I confess to not having too much luck with doctors. At University I took my splitting headache to visit the College doctor. He diagnosed dandruff in my ear. I was told afterwards that he was a total lunatic who continued to hold his position only because he was an alumnus of the College and consequently loved by the Dons, who probably took their own headaches and/or aural skin complaints to Harley Street. I eventually took mine to a dentist who became the first medical practitioner to cure dandruff pain by extracting a tooth. My next GP spent nearly a fortnight organizing tests to find out what was causing the crippling pain in my chest. When I turned up he refused to run the tests because I admitted the pain had stopped, and he said he was not going to waste time (and money?) looking for something that was clearly no longer there.

In fact the only real relief I got from a GP was when as a child one removed fully three kilos of wax by syringing my right ear with a jet spray which probably doubled for removing graffiti from the surgery wall. In fact the reason for so much coming out may have been that half of it had leapt from my left ear in sheer panic at the buffeting being passed through my skull. Years later, after another build up, I returned for a repeat dosage. The new and much younger doctor looked at me pityingly, and as if I had asked to have my blood let into a basin said, “We don’t do that any more.” Instead he gave me a prescription for a bottle of useless eardrop liquid, which was incapable of dissolving the sugar on a cheap biscuit.

But in spite of these experiences with the medical profession I had retained my faith in the efficacy of surgeons, though it was slightly tested by a friend of mine at University who was reading Surgery in the short intervals available to him between parties and Rugby matches. He got a Third. A veritably charming young man, he would have a perfect bedside manner, but I always felt that, whilst I could cope with the country being run by someone with a Third in Politics, if lying on the table awaiting an operation, I would prefer the surgeon to be not my old rugby playing friend, but the one I never saw because he always stayed in cramming for a First.

Not of course that that will happen, because surgeons don’t do operations any more; they perform procedures. I suppose this may be a prestige thing, as in schools where the teaching of kitchen skills in my lifetime has advanced from Cookery through Domestic Science to Home Economics, and was last seen trying to earn an honest penny as Food Technology. But I think it more likely that it is another attempt to fool what used to be known as patients, but now are known officially as NHS Service Users, at least until they die - which of course they don’t do, only pass on, leaving a slight ambiguity as to whether they have ceased respiration or merely been transferred to a bigger hospital in the next town. No doubt a few elderly NHSSUs, terrified of the prospect of an operation, can have their blood pressure kept down by being told they are merely to undergo a procedure, which sounds rather like they may be about to have their toenails clipped. Until they find themselves in the Procedure Theatre. And in walks the man with a Third in Procedury.