The total uselessness of medical missions.

Saturday, April 12, 2008. My mother had volunteered me for a medical mission organized by her church group at our parish. Being her good little boy, I agreed to go so that she won't be pahiya to her church lady-friends. I arrived there fashionably late by ten minutes, expecting the other doctors to already be working. However, it was only me and another doctor who were present. The others would arrive later. Hrrrr...

At around 8:30, the patients started coming in, and the ANGER began.
First case: sipon at ubo. Next case was also sipon. Third case? Take a goddamn guess. PURO SIPON!! The weird thing is, parents of these kids wouldn't actually give a crap about the colds if there wasn't a medical mission nearby. I was so reluctant to give medications for something that was going to go away by itself. Worse, I saw a few adults and kids who went there even though they had been advised earlier by their OWN doctors in REAL clinics or hospitals to be admitted, or have x-rays or other diagnostics done. What. The. Hell.

Medical missions are counterproductive in many ways. Aside from the tired old reason that it fosters a hand-out mentality, it is a wasted effort, gives a false sense of satisfaction to the organizers, gives no long-lasting good and it diverts funds away from other, better out-reach projects. The angrydoc will elaborate.

There are better ways to do outreach programs that will have a more longer lasting impact. For example, doing a deworming program will give 6 months of benefit for the children. Add some health education and donate slippers and footwear, soap and get some access to clean water and THERE will be real, long term benefit. The deworming and health education can be done on a single day, with the same amount of effort as the medical mission and it will be shorter AND easier. The access to clean water will have to involve the community but that will also take care of the hand-out mentality. We teach them to take what they need, not wait for it to be given.

Shit! Medical missions are the lazy way out. A way for orgs to smugly say that they provide service however fleeting and minuscule the benefit is. Somebody please shoot me if I ever get invited to another medical mission.

Holy f*ck! I suck!

Holy fuck! I do not rule!I totally suck!

Whoa, that's like, so unfair, dude!

S is one of the GPs I used to work with at the rat-hole clinic I go to. She later went to the Laguna office of the clinic to work as the examining physician/ GP there, leaving me and J and C as the GPs for the Quezon City branch. I later learned from one of the GPs of the Laguna branch that they were earning 300 pesos more than us QC branch GPs. I didn't give it anymore thought because I assumed that the Laguna branch was earning more than the QC clinic.

J got a text massage from S yesterday telling her that she had found out that she was getting PhP 300 less than the other GP. She was getting the same rates as we were while the other GP was getting a lot more. She was pretty upset and wanted to find out why. At first, she thought that the secretaries were stealing from her. When she confronted them, she found out that the owner of the clinic, M, was the one who told them to give the other GP a larger PF. The reason was that this other GP had to come all the way from Las Pinas.

Syempre nakakapikon yun para kay S di ba?

She does the same amount of work but for less cash only because she's from Laguna. That's like, unfair dude. Poor S! I texted her and told her to not report for work until they gave her her due. Let's see how they like that! Ha. She texted back and told me that if they didn't fix this, she was leaving.

Poor S. I understand how she feels. Our boss, Doc G also understood how she felt but he wasn't the one who determined the salaries. M did.

M is really a kuripot monkey. We had to pull tooth and nail to get him to pay us a higher PF this year. He only raised the pay because nobody wanted to go work for him. His rat hole clinic has a hard time getting staffed because of the really low salaries.

Sige lang, there's karma. If there's one thing I know, people will always get what's coming to them. Maybe not now, but someday.

Bad service at KFC! HRRRRRR!!!

I was having a pretty good day at the rat-hole clinic I work in until lunch when the forces of shit conspired to destroy my good mood. The dumbass girl at the counter took my order and laid out the food in the plastic bags for take out. When she went to follow up on my order, I checked the bags to see if everything was there. Hmm, no spoons and forks. I asked (nicely) for the kubyertos and the shit-face woman then told me in her fake apologetic voice that they were out of plastic utensils.

As steam began to rise out of my collar and come out of my ears, I asked shit-face how I was going to eat the food.

"Papano ko kakainin yan?"

"Sir, wala na po spoon and fork."

Idiot! As if repeating something I already knew would make it less irritating.

"PAPANO KO KAKAININ YAN? "

"I'd like to talk to the manager."

The moron manager, no doubt cowed by my manly man-anger declined to speak to me and rushed to the store room to find utensils. Meanwhile, I tried to melt Shit-face the Cashier Girl with my gaze of death. Didn't work. Damnit, it never does!

Shit-face gave me a number and I sat down fuming. Moron the manager then came and told me that utensils were on the way from their Gateway branch. I unleashed hell on her dishonest ass-face.

"Miss, yung cashier nyo gave me the food without telling me na wala na kayo spoons and forks! Ano ba naman klaseng serbisyo yan?! SINASAYANG NYO ORAS KO E!"

Eventually the utensils came (from Chow King pa!) and I went back to the clinic. However, I did wash the utensils before using them. I somehow got suspicious of how clean they were after that little scene I made at the KFC branch.

I'm still furious.

This wasn't some poor harassed person who forgot an order. They deliberately didn't mention to their customers that they had run out. Totally unacceptable! Is that KFC branch so desperate for sales that they were willing to inconvenience customers? The least they could do was suspend take out orders until they could get utensils from wherever. After discussing it with my GP workmate, I decided to write a complaint to the KFC brass. However, when I got home and tried to look for their corporate site, there was no feedback or complaints section.


Fuck you KFC.

Aaaaargh! I fucking hate my life.

My Easter Sunday has been ruined. A few days ago, I was asked by my boss to find some GPs willing to go out of Manila for an Annual PE for a company. The gig was going to take 3 days so I had to find two people willing to stay near the site for 3 days. I asked around and found three doctors willing to slave themselves for the smallish payment. I sent their numbers to the boss and waited for his reply. I sent it THRICE and still no reply. Religious obligations (naks!) pushed the issue out of my mind until this Easter when the rotten sonofagun texted me asking who the MDs for the job where. He was texting me using another number.

SHIT. What happened to all the text messages I sent?! He changed his number without telling me!! Gawdamnit! I was sent scrambling trying to find out if they were available. Since I'm ranting about this shit, my recruits weren't available. They had waited and waited until they got fed up and took other jobs. I actually had a hard time believing all of them found jobs so quickly. I suspect they just got pissed off at us and decided they weren't interested.

SHIIIIIT. Fucking asshole shit!

I wasn't the boss. I'm just an employee. Why the hell was I being asked to do this?! What the hell, man?!

Anyway, I'm going to that job tomorrow. My poor friend J. will be manning the clinic alone tomorrow and then will go to the out-of-town shit job for the next 2 days while I'll be at the clinic alone.

AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!

Fuck, I googled someone.

I finally went and did it. The one thing I swore I would not do, because it would mean I had finally hit rock bottom. I did it in a moment of weakness and now I feel ashamed of myself.

I googled someone.

She was my crush for the longest time but we lost touch after school and I haven't even thought about her until a few days ago when we former classmates met for dinner at that shitty mall in EDSA. I was cool, or so I thought, until she walked in and made beso to all of us. Holy shit.

She was beautiful. More than ever.

After a few days of trying not to text her or call her, I was feeling depressed. I was so down that not even calling my best friend a "gay fag" helped. So, in a moment of extreme weakness, I googled her name.

I typed...


What?! Do you really think I'd tell you what her name is?!

Do you think angrydoc is a loser? Leave a comment.

Introduction

As a doctor, I was taught to have unconditional positive regard for all my patients and to always affirm the value of each person. However, working as an in-house physician in a clinic and diagnostic center here in Manila has sometimes made me forget about all those high sounding crap taught to me in med school and wish that I could wrap my hands around my patient's neck and squeeze to my heart's content.

My duties in the clinic involve seeing general medicine cases, such as the common colds, a lot of urinary tract infections and many many sexually transmitted infections. I also see some patients that need follow up such as hypertensive old people but I often just refer them to the specialists since they get their income from the number of patients they see. My second set of duties include doing pre-employment physical examinations for all the clients that the clinic has. I see the client-patient, do PE and later classify if they are fit to work or not depending on the results of the laboratory tests and chest x-rays. This duty takes up the bulk of my time and absolutely requires no brain power.

What it requires though is patience. Lots of it. Whole heaping piles of it. A fucking shitload of it. Everyday, I am plagued with at least one little shit-face who manages to make my temper rise and swear that this would be my last day in that place. Everyday I get to see people who make me rethink about going to pathology or radiology where I don't have to deal with people.

Please don't get me wrong, the vast majority of my patients and those I see to do pre-employment PE to are good people and I am oftentimes satisfied and happy that I was able to provide a service to them. It's just that some of them have a real talent of making me want to go Chuck Norris on them and destroy them with a round house kick. To the face.

This blog will record my daily frustrations with my patients, the people I work with, and other dumbass people or situation I encounter here in Metro Manila. Most probably, I will also be writing about my own dumbass deeds since I do end up getting pissed off at myself often.

Let the anger begin.