[Bushforlife]

If you rupture an abdominal aortic aneurysm outside the hospital, but make it to the hospital alive, the survival rate is less than 50%, due to the nature of the disease. So the surgeons who take these very ill patients to the operating room immediately save 50% of them. That's the rational viewpoint.

On the other hand, we have the irrational, conventional wisdom, emotionally charged sensationalist viewpoint: those surgeons kill half of those patients.

As a practicing physician for 25 years, I truly look forward to retirement. Our society's prevailing victim mentality that physicians are responsible for any bad medical outcome has led me to the point where I actually actively discourage any young person who wishes to practice medicine, including my own children. For those of you who subscribe to the "hate the privileged doctor class warfare mentality", I have this advice: Go Treat Yourselves.

[Beenliedto]

As a practicing physician for 25 years, I truly look forward to retirement. Our society's prevailing victim mentality that physicians are responsible for any bad medical outcome has led me to the point where I actually actively discourage any young person who wishes to practice medicine, including my own children. For those of you who subscribe to the "hate the privileged doctor class warfare mentality", I have this advice: Go Treat Yourselves.

I really think that you have missed the point here.

The poster was mearly trying to point out that sometime we direct our concerns about emotional issues to the wrong places.

Why focus our energy on guns, as opposed to many other far more prevalent causes of death... unless of course there's a political motivation behind it...

which, of course, there is.

No need to go defensive. No one's after you.

[Nataku X]

I've told this story on FR before... I'll tell it again... when I was 2 years old, my mother felt something was seriously wrong with me. She went to a doctor, who said I had the flu and sent me home. She went to the ER, who said & did the same. As this was on a naval base, my father dressed up in full officer uniform and marched to the ER with me and demanded they admit me. They finally did so--and took a spinal tap... the fluid was so cloudy, they didn't even wait for the results, they pumped me full of antibiotics and told my parents they'd know by morning whether I'd live or not... and if they'd waited one more night, I would've died.

So it was a misdiagnosis, but I don't blame the doctors, I blame people like my friend who ran to the ER for cutting her finger on an opened can lid and screamed until she saw a doctor and got a shot. Those cases make doctors quite cynical and deaf to a mother's true instinct.

[Texas Songwriter]

Hello Doc. I've practiced general surgery since 1979. Just recently retired. You get it. The folks need to consider that everytime we take an imflammed appendix out or a gall bladder, we have saved that persons life as compared to the preantibiotic era. Before antibiotics and vaccines people died of disease no one dies of today, or very few. As for retirement, I recommmend you get there as fast as possible. It is wonderful.

[John Will]

Probally the Reason why I am choosing chemistry.