Let me start today's guest blog by saying that I in fact, have the opposite of the blog you are about to read. I have been blessed with an incredible Dr. who has always taken the time, asked questions, listened and made decisions based on how we both felt about what is ever going on. I have a couple of terrific Dr.s - I am blessed, BUT I am no stranger to the treatment of others from time to time and I hear the stories from almost everyone we talk to.
Waiting HOURS to see your Dr., rushed appointments, confusion & of course Dr.s who will NOT EVEN discuss Cannabis as an option.
It can be cold and uncaring experience at a time when we NEED care & compassion most. I have read several of Blains Blogs - a common thread has brought us together- some of his blogs I don't always agree with but there are people that do and we ALL need to be heard to solve this problem that has been going on for far too long.
Blain and I have exchanged a few e mail and he is always polite, interesting and expressive- and has a lot to say - that come with experience and he has it. He also has a flair with words.
M.D.? Medical Doctor? = Mental Defective? = Morally Destitute? Character Trustworthiness. Respect. Responsibility. Fairness. Caring. Citizenship. The Six Pillars of Character are ethical values to guide our choices. The standards of conduct that arise out of those values constitute the ground rules of ethics, and therefore of ethical decision-making.
Doctors! Who are they? The Canadian Medical Association represents the 67000 modern doctors practicing in Canada. To introduce you to my concept of what Medical Practice should be, I’m simply going to compare the conduct of the majority of those members, to that of just one man of character, a real
Doctor, still in practice at the beginning of the decline. His name was Dr. T.W.E. Henry and he was the local physician in Ft. Saskatchewan, Alberta where I grew up. At that time the town was about pop. 250 and we were a community who considered him next to Jesus for his Samaritan conduct, common sense and good advice.
Dr. Henry was the center of our social system, he was trusted above all others and he knew every secret and personal detail about every one of his flock. He was a part of every family in town and often if he happened to make a house call at lunch or tea time he would stop for a coffee or to share a meal and take the time to get updated on the family history. He was a skilled interrogator and asked personal questions in such a manner that he created a desire to answer because he would understand and never condemn.
One evening near Christmas I and my family were visiting and just as supper hit the table TWE got a call and he was needed by a sick child. 10-15 degrees below zero, snowing like hell, winds harsh and gusty, driving clouds of icy particles that skin your face like sandpaper. No bloody way I was going out in that! Not!
Blaine! Get with it! I might need a push and you’re it! Crap: on with all the layers, boots, scarves, gloves! All the bulky crap that make wading though powder snow like wading through a swamp and then the open door and Holy Shit its nasty out here. Naturally the damned car won’t start so I harness the team, hook up his runabout sleigh, load the old fart up grab the reins and off we go into nowhere.
You don’t really drive horses in a blizzard: you just sort of aim them and trust them to figure out where the center of the road is. You just sit there and squint and squint trying to pick out landmarks in the little gaps between white sheets of snow. Fortunately it was a straight 5 mile run and only took about an hour and a half to get to the destination.
Modern people have no idea what kind of rotten conditions a lot of poor farm families lived in the 50’s. This was one such family and they were toughing out the blizzard in a two room clapboards shack heated by two stoves, one in the kitchen and a barrel type wood stove in the main room. Unless you have felt it you cannot imagine the drafts in a shack built of planks, you don’t know how cold the air is inside a house with iced up single pane windows. Stand next to one and suddenly your arm is radiated with cold from the glass.
It was a little guy about three and he was sick, you knew he was simply by looking. I don’t know what was wrong but after a long examination by TWE he was given a tablespoon of some syrup, handed back to his mother and she was told that he didn’t think it was serious but he’d like that fever to break. “Take that goose grease you have on the front stove warmer, warm him up, rub him down with it then wrap him up in that flannel blanket and put him to bed. He’s already so tired he’ll fall asleep quickly. He should feel better in the morning but if he doesn’t give me a call and we’ll take care of it.”
We got ready to leave and the husband came over to TWE and explained they were a little short on cash, would he take a couple of chickens as payment. TWE simply told him “John you’ll need them more than I do right now. Tell you what you’re good with a hammer and saw. Come over when the weather gets good in the spring and I’ve got a back porch that needs some repair. What do you say to an Even Steven deal?” John simply looked at him and I thought he would cry, but he just swallowed hard, nodded his agreement and shook TWE’s hand. We left
That was one example of his character at work: it is also the reason why he represents the best aspects of the generations of his predecessors. His position
as a respected and admired man of character made him worthy to bear the title
Doctor Once again to stress: The Six Pillars of Character are ethical values to guide our choices. The standards of conduct that arise out of those values constitute the ground rules of ethics, and therefore of ethical decision-making.
Cannabis has been prescribed by
Doctors, Medicine men, Shamans for now 4800 years. For 4750 of those years this medication was freely prescribed by a person of trust who had the best interest of the patient in mind. The witch doctor was trusted because he knew every aspect of his patient’s life. He was part of a tight community that no longer exists, and his reward was not financial gain at patient expense but a position of respect and trust far above that of any other profession. The current crop of medicine men, and I call them that because they do not deserve the title of
Doctor, are simply skilled technicians who lack the moral and ethical quality to earn the respect they are granted as physicians.
From that point in the past, we fast forward to the present and it is only men of my age has the knowledge of what the title
Doctor Represents in terms of how it is earned and expects little from his current Physician. We knew a Model for Comparison and there is no Expectation of Samaritan acts that demonstrate the qualities inherent in the 6 Pillars of Character: Trustworthiness. Respect. Responsibility. Fairness. Caring. Citizenship. These have been lost by the Profession.
The Destruction of Ethical Medical Practice The practice of medicine has gradually changed into a commercially structured and oriented system designed to derive maximum profit. This was created from the sheer volume of patients that became available as a result of post WWII urbanization. Instead of a couple of dozen or hundred patients in his community, every doctor had a chance to bag any number of visits from the occupants of the hundreds of tenements surrounding them.
Appointments got shorter and further apart separated by many intruding and competing strangers’ entries into a doctor’s capacity to remember his diagnosis and previous treatment for the new volume of patients. Thus came into being the Personal Medical Record to serve as a reminder when a physician’s memory failed. The natural result was simple neglect to bother to remember Mickey Mouse details: a one minute skim of the patent’s last visit began to serve as the entire content of a physician’s knowledge of his patient. There began the complete lack of empathy now apparent in the profession at large and its absence was accompanied by the eventual loss of all character from the profession. That is simple fact.
A modern day patient with any problem needing medical attention assumes that when they make an appointment with their physician they are going to see a
Doctor. They are not: they are making an appointment with an M.D. (Medical Doctor) a university graduate who had the minimal qualification to join a College of Physicians with lack standards and qualify to open an office.
His first act after qualification to practice was not to do Samaritan work at the local shelters, but rather, a call to his lawyer and accountant and to approve the creation of his new practice, Dr. False Front, MD, Inc. Shyster and BeanCounter Consulting already had the necessary plans approved, the forms got filed and the fees got paid. From this point on the man across the desk; the MD in the modern medical office, presents himself as worthy to wear the honorific title
Doctor and expects all the respect and trust due him for a title based on
Character. He is actually talking to President CEO of the TYMAR Corp acting as the sucker mechanism for the
TakeYourMoneyAndRun machine.
To clarify the difference between a
Doctor and
President, MD, only one simple comparison is required. Imagine wandering down a deserted wasteland road and encountering a man with a severe wound needing medical help. His wound is not fatal but without treatment soon will be if not helped. How would each react to that situation?
I think:
The
Doctor would stop, assess the situation, accept the man as a a patient, pack the wound, stop the bleeding and then arrange for his care until recovery.
The
President, MD would stop, frisk the man to see if he had the cash or credit to pay for treatment, if not kick him in the ditch. It would probably never occur to him to call an ambulance to get charity involved. That would take too much time and he already had a cash customer waiting for the sales pitch. “Sorry. I can’t be bothered guy, die in peace.
If I am disillusioned it is rightfully so. The machine has no recognition of the patient, only his symptoms are used to maximize the medical billing opportunities and tap them all. Office visits = Prescriptions benefits = repeat = referral to higher priced care of specialists= over-reliance on technology= excess testing = everybody happy and rich = CMA.
The
President, MD across the desk does not know his patents, has no idea how they live, or anything about them beyond their ability to pay and the chart details of the last visit. They do not want to know or be bothered by their patients outside of Office Hours. They move in invisible circles away from the common herd,
superior circles by virtue of greed! Away from the place of business they do not exist and cannot be found. They have no addresses, unlisted home phones, and undisclosed and rigidly guarded e-mail. They long ago abandoned house calla and after hour phone calls are answered by recorded direction to go to emergency.
Suddenly the majority of these 67000 MD’s fly in the face of common sense and are balking at allowing Medical Cannabis, and its benefits, on the basis that they don’t have sufficient knowledge of the long term harmful effects of smoking it.
Bullshit! They discount 4750 years of testimonial evidence passed down by all the preceding generations of real
Doctors who freely advocated it for its curative power and lack of risk in its use.
Bullshit! Today’s Doctors all claim to honour what was the primary tenet of the Hippocratic Oath
: “FIRST, DO NO HARM”. Nobody reveals that this guiding principle has been removed from the
Hippocratic Oath Modern Version and has not been replaced by an equivalent prohibition..
I find it interesting that given the respect they are sworn to hold for their predecessor’s intelligence, in another part of the oath they dismiss all the traditional knowledge that Cannabis has shown no harm from occasional or even lifelong use. They swear:
“I will respect the “hard-won scientific gains” of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow”. To claim harm for a product
all preceding generations of doctors recommend is to hold their collective intelligence in contempt. To dismiss all of it in favour of the
hard-won scientific gains of last 50 years of billing possibility
experts, who don’t even know who their patients are, is probably the grossest display of the lack of simple common sense I could have imagined from any profession.
They have completely lost touch with the populace they are supposed to be serving. I hear no outcry from the medical ethics experts:
Where are they? because the ethical deficiency list is horrendous! I could keep on ranting forever but I don’t have to. Following is a simple listing of the components of Character from
Making Ethical Decisions
: The Six Pillars of Character Simply reading the I
ndex is enough to awaken almost anyone to the manifold shortcomings of the Profession. It seems every little word harkens memories of little things noticed that didn’t add up until now
Character: •
Trustworthiness - Honesty
- Integrity
- Reliability (Promise-keeping)
- Loyalty
•
Respect - Civility, Courtesy and Decency
- Dignity and Autonomy
- Tolerance and Acceptance
•
Responsibility - Accountability
- Pursuit of Excellence
- Self-Restraint
•
Fairness - Process
- Impartiality
- Equity
•
Caring •
Citizenship Can you smell the rot too? Blaine Barrett
To read more of Blaines Blog >>>
http://goan-smee.blogspot.ca/You can e Blaine here:
thesmeegoanguy@gmail.com 
