[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:35:25 GMT ]
There will follow now in this blog a series of (roughly) weekly posts about my experiences in general health care.
In order to be fully licensed as a medical practitioner in Finland (and in Europe in general), you have to work for about two years (three years in countries with less practical work included in work before graduation) "under the direction and supervision of another". Having been in research, I have put off that work. In the best case (everything I am going to claim should count will also count in the opinion of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Helsinki, bless their bureaucractic heats) I have about 9 months of full-time work to go; in the worst case, about 1.5 years. I will start on a 2 weeks in clinic + 2 weeks writing my PhD thesis schedule next Monday, with the intent to switch to full-time clinic for the remaining months in about August.
Obviously, I cannot write about any patients, and since I write under my own name, I can only write about colleagues and circumstances at the workplace in a very limited and general sense. If I write about a disease using example cases, details will be generalized to fit multiple real people I have met and/or changed to fit none, and posts will be delayed in time to break any temporal connection to actual patients. Also, I will not bitch about individual colleagues or other co-workers, though I will most likely say a word or to about the organization of general health care.
Posts will appear roughly half and half in English and in Finnish.
Enjoy.
Posted in Plain English | Tags Salt mines | 1 comment
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:43:58 GMT ]
Tänään tuli bussissa mieleen, että pitäisi perustaa seura. Sellainen nyt tulee tietysti suomalaiselle mieleen vähän joka toinen viikko, joten tässä ei ollut mitään uutta. Edellinen hullutukseni, joka meni jo ohi, oli Leppävaaran uskonnottomien seurakunta ja sitä edellinen luultavasti jonkun sortin yleishyödyllinen ompeluseura.
Tämä tämänkertainen hullutus olisi jonkinlainen Maailmanparannusseura Talkooväki. Se järjestäytyisi kerran kuussa tai niillä main tekemään talkoilla tärkeitä asioita, jotka muuten olisivat vaarassa jäädä tekemättä. Kyseeseen voisivat tulla esimerkiksi uupuneiden lapsiperheiden kevätsiivoukset, yksityisten maatilojen talkooluontoiset kausityöt (jos niitä vielä edes on; heinänteko nyt on ainakin lopetettu), yhden miehen yritysten inventaariot joita omistaja vaan ei kertakaikkiaan kerkeä, yleishyödyllisten seurojen postitukset (jos niitäkään enää on, kun mainokset menevät Facebookiin ja spammiboksiin), ojanpiennarten siivoaminen, leikkipuiston vekottimien maalaaminen, tai vaikkapa kestovaippojen askarteleminen haitilaiselle lastenkodille.
Rahaa ei olisi tarkoitus tehdä, mutta jos sitä jostain työstä saataisiin, voitaisiin ostaa vaikka niitä kestovaippatarvikkeita, ja joskus jos oikein riehakkaiksi yllyttäisiin niin yhdistyksen varoilla pullaa ja kahvia talkoisiin. Yksityiset, kaupungit, pienyritykset ja yhteisöt voisivat tarjota duunejaan Talkooväelle; vastaanotettavista päätettäisiin jonkunsortin huutoäänestyksellä.
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags yhteiskunta, yhteiskunta | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:09:08 GMT ]
Since this keeps on surfacing, for the hundreth time, no, sensible institution anywhere do not expect their medical professionals to take the Hippocratic Oath, or in any case to follow it even if it is ceremonially read.
If they did, it would put an end to half of family planning ("I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy"), all minor surgical operations performed by anyone else but specialists ("I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work"), and to medical schools as we know them ("hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage").
There are modernized "Hippocratic" and other Doctor's Oaths, some of them pretty nice. But they are not the same oath that was used by the Ancient Greeks.
Posted in Plain English | Tags lääketiede | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:09:52 GMT ]
Internetissä oli keskustelu siitä, että minkälainen ostoskassi on kaikista ekologisin. Että paperikassiko vai uudelleenkäytetty muovikassi vaiko puuvillakassi vaiko semmoinen oikein erityis-ekologinen kassi jonka saa tilata Amazonista.
Oikea vastaus on tietysti ei mikään yllämainittu. Oikea vastaus on se kassi joka sulla on jo. Enkä usko, että ei ole mitään kassia, takuulla on. Jos muka ei todellakaan ole mitään vanhaa koulureppua tai messuilta saatua mainoskassia, niin käytät ensin loppuun ne kaikki paperi- ja muovikassit joita sulla kuitenkin on kotona, vaikka et tunnusta, ja sillä aikaa kun ne kuluu loppuun askartelet uuden kassin vaikkapa vanhasta paidasta tai sen virkatun liivin purkulangoista, jonka muuten heittäisit pois.
Ei tarvitse ostaa minkäänlaista kassia, Amazonista tai muualta.
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags ekologia, unsolicited advice | 1 comment
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:38:25 GMT ]
You can hear it claimed-- or in any case read it on the interwebs -- sometimes by religious people, sometimes by young men who think selfishness is cool, that if you take a scientific worldview, there is no reason not to place your personal pleasure above that of everyone else.
I do not think that claim holds water. It is true that science itself cannot give you a reason for why you should value pleasure, or oppose to suffering. Pleasant and unpleasant are subjective, not directly measurable concepts. We can measure things that associate with suffering -- we can measure blood pressure or stress hormones, we can observe nutritional state and death, we can ask people to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 -- but the fact that we designate pain and suffering as unpleasant is, well, consensus based on personal observation.
At the heart of science is a set of core assumptions of how knowledge can be acquired. One of these is that personal observation is not enough to draw conclusions about external realities, but that to be considered true, the result of an experiment must be replicable -- that is, others must be able to say "yes, I did the same experiment, and I saw the same thing". Another is the so called "Occam's razor" principle, which states (among other things) that if an explanation is sufficient to fully explain a phenomenon, there is no need to, and indeed you should not, add to that explanation something that there are no consistent observations of.
If we accept the personal observation that pain and suffering are unpleasant and something we would like to avoid, I do not think there is any scientific way to claim that you should consider your pain and suffering any more (or any less) important than that of someone else. Science, first of all, assumes at its core that other humans exist; the whole idea of trying to contruct experiments that function the same regardless of who performs them has built-in the idea. Second, even if it did not, I think Occam would force us to conclude that the likeliest explanation for our perception that others like us exist is that they indeed do so.
In any case, given that other people do exist, it does seem to me that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that would suggest that our own pain and suffering are somehow more important than those of others. We can of course construct possibilities where it might be so -- maybe all the world is illusion except our own consciousness, say -- but by the Occam's razor principle these must then be discarded.
Science does not give you any reason why you should value the avoidance of pain, or the gain of pleasure. But given that you do value them in your own case, I think science does not give you any excuse to not value them in everyone else's case too.
Posted in Plain English | Tags filosofia, filosofia, tiede, tiede | 4 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:13:02 GMT ]
Alabamassa meni biologian professori ja ampui muutaman kollegansa. Lehdissä on railakkaasti epäilty, että "ampumisen syy oli viran epääminen".
Eikä ollut.
Se saattoi ehkä tuurilla olla ampujan päällimmäiseksi kokema motiivi, mutta syy siihen, että ihminen ottaa ja ampuu toisen ei kylläkään ole pettymys viran täytössä, tai tyttären menetetty kunnia, tai taloudellinen ahdinko, tai mikään muukaan motiiviksi kelpaava. Syy on jossain muualla: pääasiassa siinä, ettei suureksi käynyttä pettymystä ja ahdistusta pysty käsittelemään muuten kuin väkivallalla, ja pienemmässä määrin siinä, että käsillä on ase. Mutta pettymys ja ahdistus sinänsä eivät ole päällimmäisiä syitä murhiin -- jos olisivat, murhia tapahtuisi melkolailla enemmän.
Erilailla huvittava on Iltalehden raportti, että ampuja oli "tunnettu yliopiston kampuksella räväkkänä ja kantaa ottavana persoonana", joka "on muun muassa ääneen kritisoinut yliopiston päätöksentekoa". Jos sillä pääsee hullun kirjoihin ja jonnekin rauhalliseen paikkaan täysihoitoon, niin mulla ois täällä monta tulokasta.
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags psykiatria, yliopisto | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:55:26 GMT ]
I do not claim to know anything about philosophy or metaphysics or anything related, but I will now proceed to talk about it/them anyway. You have been warned.
Namely, following from the sidelines some more knowledgable people discussing things, I seem to notice that they think in dyads. That is, they ask questions like, are morals more defined by the society or by the individual? Are an individual's beliefs shaped by the physical world or the other way round? Is what we perceive as reality really physically real, or is it a social construct?
To me, the obvious answer to all of those and similar opposing concepts is "both". Depending on case, it could be more one or the other, and the questions are typically not even answerable in the general case.
But what's even more interesting to me that most of the amateur philosophers I listen to seem to always picture it as a question between two entities, while it seems to me that it is always a triad: the individual mind, the physical reality, and social interactions between individuals are all three involved and interacting.
Posted in Plain English | Tags filosofia | 6 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:22:02 GMT ]
One of the many diversions I have followed is the occasionally hilarious Failblog. I dropped it today, though, because I realized it annoys me more often than it amuses me, because of its tendency to label as fail 1) humor that I actually find funny, 2) whatever reminds someone of sex, and 3) fat people. Plus try and sell me t-shirts, which I admit are funny t-shirts, but I do not need more.
There I fixed it is better.
Posted in Plain English | Tags työtuhoseura | 2 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:48:46 GMT ]
Sleeping rocks.
That said, let's go on to a pet peeve.
I utterly frigging hate watching when people bang their heads into stone walls.
I mean; if you have tried doing or accomplishing something in a particular way for five times, and it has never worked, how realistic is the assumption that this time, if you just concentrate hard enough and invest enough willpower, or whatever, it will magically start working? If you have tried getting people to do something in a particular way five times, and it has not worked, how likely it is that if you just motivate them well enough or assume that this time, everyone will play nice with each other and do their part, they'll suddenly pull through?
Personally, I think the probability of the stone wall suddenly magically collapsing if you bang your head to it the sixth time is pretty close to zero.
So why oh why is it so hard for people to sit down and think what they could do differently next time to make it at least a bit likelier?
Grh.
Posted in Plain English | Tags ei näin, I dont want to play anymore | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:10:10 GMT ]
If I could get one of those change one thing in your body whishes that sometimes feature ladies' and teens' magazines, I would not change my physical appearance, but I would change my need for sleep.
I always joke that I am better at sleeping than waking up. People have told me that being good at sleeping, as in, mostly being able to sleep at nights, is a blessing and complaining about it is distasteful. I agree it is a blessing, and I actually like sleeping a lot. However, it would be nice if I did not have to do quite so damn lot of it.
I need something like 9.5 to 10 hours of sleep every night, or I will start accumulating a sleep debt. It is actually hard to know what the exact amount I need is, because there rarely are more than two nights in a row when I am not sleeping off a debt, but it seems to have stabilized to at about 9 hours 40 minutes with extensive testing over December and January, from lights out to ready to get up. And there's not much there in either end to get rid off, either; I fall asleep in about 15 minutes and it takes about the same from first becoming aware of it being morning to being wide awake.
Anyway, nine and a half hours every frigging night means everyone who is at the average 7 or 8 has 2-4 hours more in their every day than I do. I can tell you that I could really, really use those hours. I think it should be made a law that every adult's need for sleep be scientifically determined every five years, and those needing more will be allowed to work less for the same pay.
This is not made easier by the fact that I am also insanely sensitive to lack of sleep. Most people I know happily take away an hour from every night during weekdays, and catch up on weekends. If I did that, by Wednesday I would have (I have) ceased to accomplish a thing, and by Friday I would probably murder somebody.
In addition, I am terribly bad at sleeping during the day. No matter how tired I am, if I try to nap, I simply don't fall asleep. My mother says I've been this way since a very small child, which apparently was a pain; I sympathize but I think having to suffer about it in my adulthood is still a cruel and unusual punishment.
Whine ends here. Now, for more coffee.
Posted in Plain English | Tags life, self, sleep | 2 comments
