Doctor, doctor

When I was a little boy, my cousin Donna and I used to play doctor. It was a popular game amongst children then, and I expect that it still is. However, when adults play doctor, it is a different and very serious game.

Yesterday, the Herald had an item about what the Alberta government is planning to do to get a sufficient number of doctors to care for the citizens’ health. (Has anyone noted that we are not really citizens anymore; we are taxpayers, clients, and electors. Nobody wants our participation, just our goods.) Also, Alberta Health is extending from two weeks to three months the probation period for doctors from South Africa before they can be fully licensed. In the afternoon’s mail, there was a solicitation from Medecins sans frontieres.

Well, juxtaposition is a big deal in an English teacher’s life, so I took notice.

I have long known that Alberta Health has built and then mothballed medical facilities because Alberta doesn’t have enough staff to operate the operating rooms, as it were. And here was the Minister himself proclaiming that heretofore unacknowledged situation. Well, bravo! But what is with the SA docs? Well, here in “our Alberta,” we are not training enough women and men to serve our needs. It appears that it is too costly. So we recruit doctors from Africa. Hmm. Now here comes MSF wanting support in their noble and self-sacrificing work in Africa where there are not enough doctors to serve people’s needs. Sounds familiar.

But why has Africa such a shortage? Do they not train doctors? Well, they must do so, and do it well, because lots of them are recruited to work in Alberta where we have mothballed facilities due to our unwillingness to pay for the medical training of young Albertans. Oops!

So, to deconstruct, we import people trained in impoverished third world countries to tend our ills, leaving the people who trained them to rely on the charity of MSF for their care.

And the moral of the story is . . . we very carefully pat ourselves on the back for being so multicultural and so non-racist. Moral of the story, maybe, but ethical?

So the way we play doctor now, somebody ends up getting screwed. Children’s curious investigations were more medically ethical, I think—first of all, do no harm.