You couldn't make this up

[mint]

Went with OH to the hospital today for him to see the anaesthetist before his operation next week.

Walking up to the main entrance, we saw a man with a stethoscope draped round his neck out on the pavement having a fag.

Wish I had my camera with me to take a picture.

OK, I accept that anyone could be a tobacco addict but you'd think that he would have a fag sneakily out of sight of possible patients?

I said to OH, be aware that that could be the man to administer your anaesthetic, palpate your abdomen, listen to your lungs and generally advise you on how to look after your own health.

[AnOther]

[quote user="mint"]I said to OH, be aware that that could be the man to administer your anaesthetic, palpate your abdomen, listen to your lungs and generally advise you on how to look after your own health.[/quote]

And being a smoker makes him less qualified to do that how exactly ?

I wonder if your opinion of him would fall further if you saw him driving a sans permis car ?

Daft I think covers it !

[mint]

[quote user="AnOther"][quote user="mint"]I said to OH, be aware that that could be the man to administer your anaesthetic, palpate your abdomen, listen to your lungs and generally advise you on how to look after your own health.[/quote]

And being a smoker makes him less qualified to do that how exactly ?

I wonder if your opinion of him would fall further if you saw him driving a sans permis car ?

Daft I think covers it !

[/quote].

I don't think it's daft at all, Erns.

Smokers smell, their clothes smell, their hands smell, their hair smell.

I have given up on the best hairdresser in town because his fingers smell of yuck.  So does his breath.

I am asthmatic and any whiff of smoke can send me into a coughing fit.

[NormanH]

The hospital in Béziers has staff smoking in front of it!

The saddest though are the people on chemotherapy with a portable drip in their arms, wheeling the stand outside for a crafty smoke

[AnOther]

[quote user="mint"]Smokers smell, their clothes smell, their hands smell, their hair smell.

I have given up on the best hairdresser in town because his fingers smell of yuck.  So does his breath.

I am asthmatic and any whiff of smoke can send me into a coughing fit.[/quote]

No argument to any of that at all but the question was how does it make them unqualified to do their job ?

[Lehaut]

My wife visited the anaesthesiologist at our local French hospital before an op. Don't know if he was a smoker, but he was very crossed eyed. So much so he took quite a while to replace the bar holding the paper roller for the bed as he kept missing the 2 inch hole with the 1 inch bar!!

I jokingly quipped to my wife that I hoped he had better aim with body orifices!

I lie not.

[AnOther]

I think I'd go cross eyed if penetrating rusty sheriffs badges was what my day consisted of, hell I might even take up smoking !

[Théière]

I know a number of doctors and professors who smoke and I ask them why someone so clever still can't stop ingesting toxin's that may kill them. Don't get a sensible answer from any of them but they are very competent in their chosen fields but do smell.

[Gardengirl]

Smoking doesn't disqualify a medical professional from being good at what they do, however having somebody who smells of cigarettes carrying out possibly intimate procedures isn't what many of us might choose. I can't remember any medical professional I've come across smelling of cigarettes and I've met many; by the law of averages, a proportion must have smoked, but presumably took pains to camouflage the fact - I only remember disinfectant-type smells.

I have seen medical professionals outside main doors of hospitals smoking - an awful example for people arriving for appointments, and I found it distressing to have to walk through smoke when heading for the lung cancer ward when visiting a close family member recovering from a lung cancer operation. She never smoked in her life, by the way.

[andyh4]

quote user="mint"

OK, I accept that anyone could be a tobacco addict but you'd think that he would have a fag sneakily out of sight of possible patients?

unquote

So here would you suggest he should have had the sneaky fag?

Somewhere inside the hospital? And so contaminating the air for all of the patients. Perhaps not.

So just round the corner at the McDo's - Ah no, not allowed.

So he gets in his car, and drives around enjoying his fag - and to an extent endangering other road users since he has one hand off the wheel for an increases period of time. And then his bleeper goes off because there is an emergency, but of course he is no longer just outside the hospital.

Sorry Mint but nicotine is very addictive and all the while governments continue to make it legal, there will be people from all classes and all professions who need to get their fix.

[Chancer]

Back in the days when rubber gloves were only worn by those doing rectal examinations and even then not by all I had a dentist who was a heavy smoker, he had nicotine stained fingers and they were big also like Walls sausages, he would stuff them in your mouth whilst placing the X-ray cards doing fillings etc and the taste of the nicotine would make me gag.

The thought of it all these years since still makes me gag.

A bloomin nice chap though, probably the best dentist I have had who went on to be a Customer when I started my first business and then a friend.

In fact its just as well that the gloves were only worn for the nether end examinations as they were so expensive in those days  that they re-used them, maybe for doing a bit of dentistry on the side [:-))]

[Pickles]

[quote user="Chancer"]In fact its just as well that the gloves were only worn for the nether end examinations as they were so expensive in those days  that they re-used them, maybe for doing a bit of dentistry on the side [:-))][/quote]

Do you mind please? I am just about to have my lunch and now have to spend half an hour brillo-padding that image from my mind ...

[NormanH]

[quote user="Lehaut"]My wife visited the anaesthesiologist at our local French hospital before an op. Don't know if he was a smoker, but he was very crossed eyed. So much so he took quite a while to replace the bar holding the paper roller for the bed as he kept missing the 2 inch hole with the 1 inch bar!!

I jokingly quipped to my wife that I hoped he had better aim with body orifices!

I lie not.[/quote]

It was more serious last week in the case where a young woman died in childbirth and it was discovered that the anaesthetist was drunk. Further investigations revealed that there is no real way of checking that staff in an operating theatre are fit for work except for peer pressure...

I quote it with reluctance from the Daily Mail so WB will believe it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2794310/drunk-belgian-anaesthetist-killed-british-mother-caesarean-told-police-need-vodka-don-t-shake.html

[mint]

[quote user="AnOther"]

No argument to any of that at all but the question was how does it make them unqualified to do their job ?

[/quote]

It's about credibility and perception.

Would you take diet advice from a dietitian the size of a bus?

Or pay a personal trainer whose belly hangs over his belt?

Or send your children to a school where the headmaster speaks like a footballer?

Or have a holiday in a naturalist reserve where the staff are fully clothed?

It's because these people are in the health business that they should at least appear to heed their own advice.  It's just unprofessional conduct, in my admittedly old-fashioned thinking.

Why did people pillory John Major so much when Edwina Curry ...er....bared all in her book?  Because Major was on this massive PR exercise of rebranding Conservative politics after the discovery that sleaze permeated the party and he had his vaunted "Back to Basics" campaign.  If you are talking about back to basic morals and conduct, you had better not be caught out!

So, there it is............professionalism, setting an example, giving an appearance at least of NOT preaching what you yourself aren't prepared do.

Might all be now unfashionable but it's an ethos of caring that is at stake, caring for your patients and of course caring for yourself.

[AnOther]

And all because some poor s.od who lacked the will power to quit was seen smoking a fag probably in the only place available to him, jeeze !

How would you feel if a smoking doctor refused to treat you because you were overweight and ill because of it or a tea total doctor refused because you were a lush ?

BTW I'm a non smoker and hate the habit !

[mint]

[quote user="AnOther"]And all because some poor s.od who lacked the will power to quit was seen smoking a fag probably in the only place available to him, jeeze !

How would you feel if a smoking doctor refused to treat you because you were overweight and ill because of it or a tea total doctor refused because you were a lush ?

BTW I'm a non smoker and hate the habit !

[/quote]

It was meant as a light-hearted dig at a representative of the medical profession.

Even I won't say that not giving up is "lack of will power" because I do think that many smokers would give up if they could.

So, OK, he had to have a smoke but I would have thought it more discreet and respectful of his patients to at least leave the stethoscope indoors?

[YCCMB]

At least you could see the bloke having a crafty fag. I would rather be treated any day by an addicted smoker than an addicted drinker. The latter perhaps don't smell (in fact, many take pains to ensure they don't), and they certainly don't hang about outside hospitals necking a bottle of alcohol...but at least you can smell a smoker and know he's probably damaging his own health. Drinkers are often behind the wheels of cars, in control of machinery or indeed of medical equipment, and there's no outward sign. But nevertheless, they may be sufficiently impaired by THEIR habit to kill you.

[NormanH]

Did you notice the story I linked to above Betty?

[YCCMB]

Indeed, Norman, and I saw it on the news. IMO,. it goes further, though, in that drinkers - regrettably - IMO - aren't stigmatised like smokers.

I remember a hundred years ago reading a letter to a newspaper or magazine where the writer complained about feeling intimidated by groups of youths "hanging about on corners, smoking"

A reply said that the writer would prefer any day of the week having to walk past a gang of youths who had been smoking, to having to run the gamut of a group who had been drinking.

Nicotine is an addictive drug. It can kill you. It can even harm people who don't indulge in the habit of smoking. However, as I said above, drinkers are quite likely to harm themselves, but more importantly they can do terrible harm to other people, perhaps even kill them, yet rarely are they pilloried by wider society with quite so much hatred as smokers. Have you ever seen the headline "Smoker beats up wife"?

The pages of forums such as this one used to be fairly full of people wearing their excessive alcohol consumption as a badge of honour. Indeed, many cite "cheap wine" among their reasons for enjoying life in France.

Not too many weeks ago, I acted as designated driver in France for a group of friends, one or two of whom literally refuse to go out to a restaurant or to visit friends if it involves driving "because I can't enjoy(sic) a drink if I have to drive". Sensible, in one respect. However, nobody seems to question the fect that such people have developed a dependence on alcohol so strong that they would rather not socialise than not drink. But when they turn up to a restaurant, they can (if they've got someone to drive them, or even if they haven't) drink as much as they like, whilst quite possibly sitting amidst any number of smokers who have been obliged to curtail their habit or refrain from smoking because the law no longer allows them to indulge their habit in a restaurant.

Until you've driven home a respectable older gentleman who is absolutely incapable of holding himself upright unaided, and helped peel him off the floor twice before shoehorning him into your car after LUNCH, because he "likes a drink" and doesn't know when to stop, you may not realise just how unpleasant and embarrassing it can be.

Smoking is for idiots..and I should know, because sometimes despite my best efforts I am one. But IMO so is drinking. Yet a half-cut surgeon can operate on you, or a half-cut anaesthetist can over-sedate you but the checks and balances that are in place to stop that from happening are often sadly lacking. Are they any more intelligent than their smoker colleagues? I'd say not.

[mint]

Drinking and driving..................oh dear,  I am now transported right back to the time in the early 90s when I was research assistant on a project for the Centre of Safety Studies in the then Poole Institue.

Met lots of people, parents, spouses, children, grandparents, etc who'd lost someone due to drunkenness.  Because, don't forget, the victims are sometimes the ones who are drunk and are doing the driving.

It was our job to produce bereavement literature for putting in coroners' offices, CRUSE, meet up with CADD (Campaigne Against Drinking and Driving) and it traumatised me, nevermind all the bereaved.

I don't know how alcohol has become such an integral part of all our lives.

I, too, used to volunteer to drive so that I wouldn't have to drink, glass for glass, on a night out.  Like you, Betty, I'd be told, but how can you enjoy yourself without drinking?[:-))]

The only way to be allowed to drive would be if I said, don't worry, I'll have a drink after I get home.

I don't find drunk people in the least bit amusing.

[Chancer]

As someone who has been a drinker all their life I can identify with all the above.

Worse still as someone who has now been teetotal for 4 years it haunts me to read it and it haunts me to see people whom I must have been exactly like.

I really dont enjoy socialising with drinkers anything more than one or two social drinks, I cannot stand soirée arrosées, fêtes, or even just " a good night down the pub" as I once would have called it, it makes me humble and hypocritical in equal measure to see I world that I thought I new so well through different  eyes.

At least I didnt hurt anyone else either physically or through a broken Relationship through alcohol but I certainly hurt myself.

[YCCMB]

And Chancer makes another important point. After a few cigarettes, the smoker remains the same person. Smellier, maybe, but otherwise unchanged. After a few drinks, you often get a person who thinks they've become wittier, cleverer, more erudite, and, bizarrely, more attractive to others. All without losing their sense of reason, ability to complete complex tasks, and mental agility.

Yet the amount of disdain that can be injected into the phrase "He's a smoker" seems entirely absent form the often -used " He likes a drink"...

[Patf]

Judy Finnegan got into  trouble for pointing out that the girl in the footballer rape case was drunk.

But there does seem to be more public disapproval now of girls and women drinking too  much on their nights out. Some feminists say "why shouldn't they?"

You don't hear so much criticism of men getting drunk tough.

[Hoddy]

In the films when I was young in the baddies wore black hats, now they light a cigarette.

[AnOther]

I'm not sure when 'enjoying a drink' turned a drinker into a de facto drunkard, bore, and letch, nor do I recognise any of those characteristics amongst any of my circle of friends or even the people I regularly socialise with but I guess

there is little logic to prejudice.