Medicosapien

Consider this. You are travelling by bus. A mother and her child walk in. Her child has an obvious disease, with atypical facial features- say a broad forehead, a large protruding tongue, head tilted to one side, ears set wrong, a saddle nose, bent elbows or knees, missing a finger or two, with obvious behavioural abnormalities. They find themselves a seat and they sit down. Now, everyone in the bus stares at the child. It's just normal human tendency. But there's always going to be that one guy or girl who stares more than the average person. And that, my friend, is how you identify a medico. Our intentions are not wrong. But we can't help but look at the features and mentally go through the volumes and volumes of different books that we have studied,  trying to remember all those colourful picture palettes in the books that we spent hours staring blankly into, the tongue-twister-esque names for those diseases that we learnt fighting our sleep ( these diseases will be referred to as weird-named syndromes hereafter for the purpose of keeping it simple. If you are a medico, you will understand why), all in an attempt to diagnose what condition the child is suffering from. It's not a requisite, it's kind of an obsession. Especially because it's a real challenge. Most of these weird-named syndromes have the same features with the differentiating feature between two being a crooked little finger in one or an absent palmar crease in the other. Yes, we look for palmar creases too. Sometimes, we are just glorified astrologers. When the average layman wants to go talk to the mother and lend her his sympathy, all the medico is itching to do is ask the mother whether her child's urine smells like maple syrup or fishy. What does maple syrup smell like, you ask? I have absolutely no idea either, but I need my patient to know it so i can clinch a diagnosis of some weird-named syndrome. It's funny the things we could use for diagnosis. It reminds me of an episode on Scrubs, where JD and Turk sing a song. It's called Everything comes down to poo, where they go on to explain how, and i quote, "from the top of your head to the sole of your shoe, we can figure out whats wrong with you by looking at your poo". They have lines like "Our No.1 test is your No.2" and believe it or not, "All across the nation, we trust in defaecation". If you haven't seen that episode, watch it today. It's hilarious. Season 6, Episode 6. And what do you know, it's a musical too! Must watch.

So I came across this word somewhere- Medicosapien. And I thought it was just perfect. We are a different species. For instance, our sleep-wake rhythms (called circardian rhythm) has nothing to do with whether it's day or night outside, our stomachs learn to go long periods without food, our threshold for disgust is quite high- a layman gets disgusted to look at his child's poo when changing its diaper, we put our finger inside random people to manually evacuate their faeces. And we have lunch right after, too. We talk differently, we walk differently, we even think differently. We torture ourselves, mentally and physically, and weirdly, are happy to do it too. We've definitely been wired differently. I guess that's what makes us us!
To all the insomniacal psychomegalomaniacs a.k.a doctors out there, Happy Doctors Day! (I know it was a couple of weeks back, but in my defence, my blog didn't exist then.)

Stay hungry, Stay up. You're on call.