Reasons I'm Leaving Emergency Medicine (number 7)

It's not M*A*S*H

It's not even close.

I first noticed this in medical school. Don't get me wrong... there were plenty of "Hawkeyes" and "Trappers", but the medical school administration at my rather prestigious school was in the avant of the new guard, and was politically correct from their perfectly trimmed toenails to their Ivy League pedigrees, from their smaller than advertised brains, to their tiny testicles and ovaries, and from their miniscule cache of common sense to their love of 'process' and 'protocol'.

My friends and I did have a few run-ins with these automatons. We had some mandatory touchy feely stuff designed to make us behave contrary to our XX or XY nature and it was widely panned by most folks in my class.

Then we had the proposal put forth by the 'student council' that encouraged us to turn in fellow classmates that we were concerned might have a substance abuse problem. Guess what... about 80 percent of our class had, as is commonly defined, a HUGE alcohol problem. Miraculously, and with some exceptions I'm sure, that 80 percent is now, hell, 8 percent... but the idea that we could rat on each other based on a suspicion ALMOST succeeded in becoming policy.

This was the writing on the wall. Now it's 1984 all over again only the jack-booted thugs carry clipboards. They are the Dr. Frank Burns crowd. Doctors by training... mousy, scared back-stabbers by default. They have won the battle of medicine with attrition by paperwork and incessant inane drivel that is picked up by the MSM and used to scare the population shitless.

Don't eat at McDonalds... don't use your cellphone... don't drive big cars because the planet has a fever... wear your seatbelts... wear your bike helmets... don't smoke... don't tolerate people who smoke... embrace all manner of dangerous sexual practices but check that cigarette at the door mister! Gay? SUPER! Sixteen years old and want an abortion? GREAT! No, we won't tell your parents. Think you may have been raped? You probably were... let's work on your recovered memories.

Trapper is not speaking up to tell folks that, despite their best efforts, there is precious little anyone can do to ward off the scary killers of medicine. The melanomas, the ruptured intracranial bleeds, the genetically determined heart attack, the rectal carcinoma, the leukemia, the lymphoma, the auto-pedestrian facial crunch, the acute traumatic fibromyalgia etc...

Dr. Burns is in charge of most hospitals now. He no longer really practices. He has the political heirarchy wired though, and they are all his clones. Hot-lips is in charge on the nursing side, and, in the military now, God love 'em, they rotate the CO position at all their hospitals between Doctors like Dr. Burns, Nurses like Hot-lips... scratch that... more like Nurse Ratched, and Medical Service Corps types (admin). This makes for a SUPER looking bit of fairness on paper but really, why is anyone BUT a physician in charge of a hospital?

It was true in the medical corps that the good clinicians paid their time back and busted out for the civilian world (there are noteable exceptions to this). The higher you go in the military medical corps the less you practice medicine. I thought this bit of silliness would be absent in civilian land. I was wrong.

The "Pros from Dover" have been tied to a stake, bound, and gagged. Dr. Burns needs to see you in his office now... one of your charts was incorrectly corrected.