Doctoring

It took forever for medical doctors to reckon that we should avoid doctoring our loved ones or family members. It has taken even longer for me to learn to toe the line by not acting as the doctor of myself. I suppose that most of doctors want the privacy when they get sick. By treating my own illness, I am further tempted to expedite the care by pulling strings within the health care system.

Which means that, over the years, I have been confusing my professional and personal roles, for example, by acting as a medical student and fetching medication from the drug trolley to treat myself at the same time. There was the issue of bias, the fine details of which I will spare you, except to say that I had previously thrown away my blood-streaked sputum instead of sending the specimen to look for tuberculosis. Whoa. All these years, I've made – or, avoided making – numerous diagnoses and given treatments for myself. I simply feel like a gymnast who has got more and more self-confident after performing a few apparently fabulous and flawless somersaults (in an empty auditorium, I confess). For my part, I simply can't resist the idea that I am doing a reasonable job of treading the fine line between offering objective diagnoses and being a bit personal. Such claim is insightful, reassuring, and completely wrong. I know.

That is not to say that our medical student who committed suicide recently had been treating herself. It would have been wrong for me, I believe, to fabricate and surmise what might happen to someone else I don't even know. I can't. After all, I don't even get the license to diagnose myself.