Not my cup of tea...

Ok, bottom line...psychiatry just really isn't very much fun.  I don't like the subject matter, I don't like the approach, and I really don't like the patient population.  I don't like working with adults in general, and to work with this subset of the population makes me extraordinarily uncomfortable...I wish I could find an excuse to leave early every day.  I know, I know, psychiatric diseases are illnesses too.  I get that.  But I hate that there's nothing that I can do about them.  And I hate that they make frail 65 year old women threaten my classmate with physical harm, because even though I'm aware that she's not entirely in control of what she's doing / saying, it makes me angry.  I don't like when friends are threatened without cause, especially when they're going out of their way to try and be helpful, and my internal response is largely predicated on that.  To summarize: I wanna be back at Children's.

Another thing I find disconcerting about psychiatry: there is absolutely NO "laying on of hands."  There is no physical exam, no attempt to assess the patient in any way but via history and mental status.  At least the neurologists remembered how to use their stethoscopes.  I'm convinced that many of these psychiatrists couldn't pull off a full physical without a checklist, and that bothers me.  They specialize in an important area of medicine, but I feel like they neglect some of the most basic medical arts.  This is truly unfortunate...many of them seem to eschew understanding of the body to focus on the study of the mind, forgetting that mind and body are intimately interconnected and cannot truly be studied separately.  I really don't understand why the physical exam is so routinely shunned...it's a question I'll have to pose to the psychiatrists I work with.

Anyway, that's enough griping out of me.  Things could be a lot worse (I could be back on Ob-Gyn), and I'll survive.  I did want to mention one other thing before I sign off for Thanksgiving.  You may have noticed the story making the rounds in the press lately about a "paradigm shift" in the Catholic teaching about condom use.  Pardon my irritation here, but that is a gross misinterpretation (at best) and criminal misrepresentation (at worst) of Pope Benedict's remarks.  The mainstream media, assuming the best case scenario, completely misunderstood what the pope had to say.  His basic concept was that in some cases (an HIV-positive individual having sex out of wedlock, for example), it is the lesser of two evils to use a condom than to have unprotected sex.  What he said was that the use of a condom out of concern for a partner's welfare may be the first step towards a greater recognition of charity and the natural law.  What he did NOT say was that this was morally unobjectionable.  Please understand this: the lesser of two evils remains an evil!!  This is not a question of "good" vs. "bad"; it's a question of "bad" vs. "worse."  The example he used to illustrate his point is a simple one: it is less wrong to rob a bank with an unloaded firearm than a loaded one, because it reduces the chance of someone being hurt or killed in the process.  But using the unloaded weapon does not make the act of robbing the bank any less fundamentally wrong, NOR does it make it acceptable to carry an unloaded weapon to rob a bank.  As George Wiegel points out, the media's representation of this story does a grave disservice to the Church and to Truth, as it suggests that the moral teachings of the Church can become passe, can be changed on a whim.  The Church is not a democracy; its teachings do not reflect the opinions of some electorate.  Rather, the teachings of the Church are rooted in unchanging, unchangeable Truth and in the life of the One who founded her.  Unfortunately, the fallout from this episode promises to be spectacular. (Note: if you have any questions about the teaching of the Church on this issue or about anything I've written here, I'll be happy to discuss it with you insofar as I am able).

Anyway, those are my rants for the day.  Off to Virginia tomorrow to spend Thanksgiving with some extended family...should be a pretty good day :-)  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and until next time, peace and God bless!