F Minus by Tony Carrillo for August 11, 2011

This cartoon brought to you by: Socialized Medicine—we promised you cheap, not quality!

BO care……

Right – socialized medicine at its finest!

Reminds of an Army dentist I had to go to back in 1966. Pulled a perfectly good tooth and actually said: “Oops, wrong tooth.” Forever more, I was leery of going to an Army dentist.

Paging Doctor Practice, Doctor Mal Practice. Please report to the OR.

As MDs often say, “When in doubt, yank it out.”

And once again all the surgeons are male. This female doctor would like to comment that at the start of each surgery you would consult the schedule up on the wall with the patients from your department that are due for surgery, containing complete details as to the procedure they’re having done. Even if sometimes you don’t know ahead of time exactly what is wrong until you see the organ, yourself, you would do exploratory surgery to decide whether or not something should be removed.

The last I heard from Scientific American, the appendix DOES have a function; otherwise if all it did was kill people, we would have lost it completely eons ago.

Its purpose is to isolate a sample of gut bacteria, allowing the intestine to return to normal operation after severe diarrhea.

Since the doomed need neither, I’d say it’s a moot point.

By the way, it’s difficult to ascertain the gender of all the doctors.

My Canadian doctor (GP) did not have Norman Rockwell paintings of concerned doctors by the bedside on this waiting room wall. He had framed peer-reviewed papers he wrote for major medical journals. We even had a house call once. My son said, “I thought only Marcus Welby did that!” That’s socialized medicine. As he said, “I don’t think that I practice medicine any differently now that I no longer worry about being paid.”

Sigh.

im glad i don’t practice any more.