[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:17:21 GMT ]
Now that we have lived in the area for a couple of years, finally something is happening and places around me are becoming mine.
The grocery store close by, the amazing M-market of Laaksolahti, has been "our grocery store" for some time now. Beside it, there is our waffle cafeteria combined with a tea store, and next to that resides my hair-dresser. Our mall is the one in Leppävaara, and I got two libraries: the big one at the mall and the small one on the way to the grocery store. Next to our school. Or what would be our school if any school-aged people lived here. There's our beach by the lake and our forests all around.
I like it. I have not really felt "home" this way since I was school-aged myself.
Now if there only were "our" health care center I could work in. But unlike in the case of the the big library, I do not seem to be able to feel that health care centers catering for fifth of the city are "ours".
Posted in Plain English | Tags life, life | 1 comment
[ Posted by Janka
Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:08:45 GMT ]
If you want to have placemats on your tables, you should have them.
If you don't want to have any, you shouldn't.
If you want to have some for celebrations and not for everyday, that's fine.
If you do not want to have them but get them because that's what people in your social class do, that's just stupid and conformist.
And here comes the punchline: if you'd like some, but don't get any, because people might think you got them just because you thought you should because that's what people in your social class do, that's stupid and conformist too.
(Thanks to the guilty parties -- you kno who you are -- for initiating this line of thought.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags unsolicited advice | 3 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 12 Jul 2010 11:43:49 GMT ]
Well, so much for writing a blog weekly while trying to adjust to a new job and writing a PhD thesis at the same time.
Since people always ask the question, here is the answer.
Working at a basic health care center has been fun. A lot of that is, I suspect, because of the unit I am at, which is small, has an ethic of doing things sensibly instead of what stands in the book, has a team leader with a brain in his head and his feet solidly on the ground, and has gotten away with ignoring a lot of the most crazy city standard ways of doing things by being some sort of a "pilot unit" for changes.
Patients are mostly nice. Their agenda regarding their health and what should I do for them is not always parallel with my idea of the same, but that's life. It is not all "eternal flu and complaining granmas" as the prejudice seems to go; in fact the way the work is orgnanized results into there being relatively little of that unless you happen to be the walk-in nurse or doctor for the day.
Contrary to another nightmare, I am also allowed a fair amount of control in how much I work. I make my own daily schedules, deciding how many patients I see, etc, and while I am nowhere close to the numbers my more experienced colleagues are able to handle so far no one's complained -- actually quite the opposite, I have been told to make sure I won't overdo it and take enough time to think while learning.
Speaking of learning, I find the tutoring system for beginners at the location excellent. We have a consulting doctor dedicated to answering questions from new colleagues, and she actually answers her phone pretty much always, and at least knows who knows if she doesn't herself. She also come to where we work to consult me and another beginner for an hour weekly, for less urgent questions. So we are well covered.
Downsides? It's gods-damn hard work, compared. Yes, I know, over-worked researchers constantly worrying about whether their contract is continued, yadda-yadda, etc, are going to be offended by this comparison, but truth is, writing my thesis full-time is a vacation. As another downside, this particular unit is in the arse end of the town, and the commute is a killer, so it won't be a permanent solution. That's about it.
The blog will now return officially to unscheduled random ramblings and sermons of Life(tm).
Posted in Plain English | Tags Salt mines | 2 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:42:03 GMT ]
So much for weekly.
Short answer to those who were eager to know: it has been surprisingly fun. Longer answer follows.
First and foremost, it is surprisingly tiring (yes, even expecting it, surprisingly tiring) to stay sharp and think eight hours a day, five days a week. A break and going back to something I have a routine for after the first two weeks was a life-saver (possibly literally, though not for me). Sleeping is essential. Sticking to an exact schedule and daily routine helps a ton. All that jazz.
Doesn't a researcher think all day, you might ask -- after all, it is the paragon of thinking professions? But no, a researcher doesn't. She thinks a lot, and frequently she thinks of complicated and/or muddy things, but she also takes breaks when she wants to, loiters with coffee chatting with workmates, listens idly about their projects, brainstorms lightly, reads interesting sciency stuff. This is all brainwork, but it does not require constant concentration. And most importantly, when the researcher's brain keels over from the load, she goes to menial tasks like routine proof-reading or filling out some idiotic forms or reading email. Or -- gasp -- surfs the web and chats on IRC or takes a walk.
As a physician, you have appointments and if your brain dies two minutes before the next one starts, you had better reboot it fast, because you cannot tell the patient to bugger off, you are not feeling like it. Things happen, sometimes according to a planned schedule, sometimes without, but they will happen regardless of what you want to happen at that particular moment, and you will deal. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes with frustration, always with help available from colleagues, but you will deal.
And, here's the thing: I'm loving it. When I work at the Salt Mines, my mind is on the work. I listen and look and poke and read and think -- of the work, of the task at hand, and nothing else. It is a delightful feeling. And I learn something every day, which is another lovely thing for a learning-junkie like me.
But it is hard work, tiring work, for me. 40 hours a week, currently, is a bit too much. In the long run, the work had better become easier, more routine-y, less absolute-concentration-required, or there'd better be less of it, or this is not what I'll be doing for the rest of my life.
Hey -- haven't I said this before?
Posted in Plain English | Tags Salt mines | 1 comment
[ 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 | 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
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
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
