Whilst surfing the web over brekkie this morning something caught my eye. Whilst out and about in California a few days ago, a couple of people saw what they thought was a Bigfoot. They’ve even got some fur from the beast which they intend to subject to DNA analysis.
An interesting article: there may well be Bigfoots in the USA. If there are, then they must be a seriously endangered species. Proving their existence could go a long way to setting up Bigfoot reserves and ensuring their protection.
And then I read the article some more. The bloke who claims to have found the Bigfoot fur runs a website. On this website he posts crackpot gibberish about UFO sightings, ghosts, conspiracy theory nonsense and no end of old tripe.
Why is it that non-loony people rarely report seeing Bigfoots or UFOs or ghosts? Having seen what I think may well have been a ghost myself, I know that my experience doesn’t mesh at all with what the paranormalist crackpots would have us believe.
And then I found that a good friend had posted something onto my Facebook page. The article warned us not to expect to inherit great sums of money from our parents. What with one thing and another the article seemed to think that most people won’t have great heaps of cash to pass on to their descendants when the reaper comes calling.
But realistically are people seriously waiting for their parents to croak in order to maintain financial solvency? I actually laughed out loud when the phrase “needy children” was used to describe the average man in the street. At forty seven (and a third) years old I can hardly be described as a “needy child”.
But apparently one person in ten is depending on an inheritance to pay their pension. Bearing in mind how much cash one gets from the sale of someone’s estate, and also bearing in mind the general cost of living, this one person in ten must either be the offspring of someone very rich or living in cloud cuckoo land.
Talking of cloud cuckoo land, my piss boiled when I read a comment on a good friend’s blog this morning. My friend is not well: she is looking at embarking on another course of therapy which will involve drugs and feeling very sick and nauseous. She is understandably nervous about the prospect, and is wondering if embarking on this would be for the best.
Someone has commented on her blog “…but I do think that we (the patients) have a RIGHT to say what we want, and When we want it, and how we want it. No matter what that IT is.”
I *so* disagree with the whole concept of “patient choice”. When a consultant physician (hospital doctor) proposes a course of treatment, it will be the treatment that in their opinion would give the optimum result. Any deviation from that course of treatment will (by definition) give a non-optimal outcome.
Those who advocate “patient choice” are often doing so to people who are ill, and are often a little confused and unsure. And these people find themselves having their confidence in their doctors undermined by those who (while are very well-meaning) have absolutely no medical knowledge or experience whatsoever.
“Patient Choice” works well in alternative (crackpot) medicine because alternative (crackpot) medicine is mostly all psychosomatic: it works because one thinks it works and if you feel that snake oil would be better for you than horse dung, then swapping treatment is fine. Neither works anyway.
But in reality, “patient choice” starts and finishes at the point of deciding what treatment to get. It is about deciding whether one is going to take sage and considered medical advice, or whether one is going to drink bleach for medicinal purposes on the advice of some old loony.
It should not be about picking and choosing what parts of proposed treatments one will and will not take, and then afterwards whinging that one is still ill….
I mention drinking bleach because there are those who actually regularly drink bleach for medicinal purposes. I personally think this is crackpot behaviour, bordering on the eccentric, but this really is “patient choice” in action….
No comments:
Post a Comment