Just a few weeks ago I preformed outpatient surgery on my own infected finger. I must admit, it turned out perfect and saved me a few bucks.
Well, Rob, sir, you're no primitive on taxpayer-paid medical assistance.
I have known, in real life, primitives rushing to a hospital emergency room for things such as this, and I suspect a good many of the primitives on Skins's island have done likewise.
I'm not slamming the practice of medicine, a truly difficult and much-needed thing; I am however slamming this popular notion that ONLY physicians can handle things that I've observed averagely competent people can do.
And I've always been particularly skeptical of--sometimes even hostile to--medical professionals who suggest a pill will solve a problem. First-hand, up close, observation of the family, that sort of thing.
When I had that woman's problem about three years ago, I was prescribed penicillin and a pain-killer (that damned Percoset). Well, a pain-killer doesn't solve a problem, and perhaps even prolongs it. I had the prescription for penicillin--which solves a problem--filled (at Walgreen's in the big city), but threw away the other one. Penicillin took care of the problem; the pain-killer would've just covered it up.
This is based upon an experience I had as a freshman in college, and for the only time in my life suddenly got afflicted with ballooning blood-vessels at the end of the alimentary canal. I went to the student health center, where I was instructed to use certain creams and suppositories and given a prescription for some pills.
I endured this all summer long; not a pleasant experience for a kid just starting college (I started college in the summer, not the autumn). I was examined so many times that summer (being 12 weeks, I imagine, probably 6 or 8 times) I lost all inhibitions about pulling down the pants and bending over. It's not an experience I've had since that one summer so long ago, but I suspect to this day, if I had to, I could still pull down the pants and bend over with sheer ease and grace and nonchalance.
I was always given prescriptions; they alternated between some sort of really tiny pill, a "controlled substance," and some sort of really big pill (Darvon, if the memory serves me correctly). The roommates used to comment and make jokes about my going to the medicine chest, and coming back from the medicine chest, but as I can't hear, all I know is that they were comments and jokes, but not what they were.
Towards the end of that summer, I got really desperate--I was a college kid, and I wanted to have some fun, but couldn't--and so went back to the remote Sandhills town whence I had come, to see the old family physician. Upon learning of the problem, the physician instructed me to drop the pants, bend over, and he would take a look.
He took a look, and then took a long slender glass rod with something on it (silver nitrate or nitric acid or something like that), and jammed it in there.
Problem immediately solved, and apparently permanently solved; I have never since been bothered by such a thing, and one has to remember two long stints of being a desk-sitting governmental bureaucrat, which breeds these things. Never, not once. And that was a long time ago, when this was done.
In fact, since Sigmund Freud proved so long ago that circa 80% of all neuroses and psychoses are based upon poor bowel management (the other 20% based upon faulty female or faulty male plumbage), I have been wholly and enthusiastically--even if it eats up taxpayer dollars--of a massive public health program, like the innoculations of yore, a mass haemerrhoidectomy for primitives.
Line all 5,000 of them up--maybe all of them aren't haemerrhoid-prone, but most of them seem to be, and of the ones who aren't, well, it won't do them any harm--have all of them drop their pants, bend over, stretch, and a physician walking down the line, carefully inserting this glass rod with silver nitrate or nitric acid or whatever.
It improved my life and outlook considerably, making me a better person, and so I imagine it would do that for some, if not all, of the primitives too.
