Alexander Torrie
For hundreds of years doctors have been placed on a pedestal, achieving a form of celebrity and authority over the lay person. Only doctors, went the logic, understood the confusing puzzle that is the human body. Only doctors could translate its strange signs and symptoms into a language that made sense. This attitude gave rise to paternalistic medicine, a system that implies that an individual’s healthcare is the sole responsibility of the physician. Paternalistic medicine gives the physician the power to make whatever decision they think is in the patient’s best interests, regardless of the actual capacity or desires of the patient.
“I want some help with a friend of mine because she has mental health problems and you have your own lived experience of mental health issues.”
For any medical student, there’s something quite hard to forget about walking into the anatomy lab for the very first time. My shoes squeaked against the blue linoleum floor as I wove my way through rows of grey body bags lying on stainless steel trolleys under that harsh fluorescent white light. What I found challenging about my first encounter with a corpse was that it was so undeniably and certainly human. Structurally there was not much difference between me and the body that lay on the trolley.
The grey light slowly creeps into the room from the window behind the couch. A table, chairs, and a small cluttered kitchen slowly emerge from the darkness. They’re colourless, kept in shadow by the thick curtains that hang in front of the windows behind the sink and by the table. The room is silent, bar the muted tick, tick, tick of a clock you found at a church fair in other days.
How many New Zealanders are receiving chemotherapy this week for cancer and other conditions? The number must be in the thousands. Yet this common medical intervention can never be a commonplace experience, evoking as it does such wildly fluctuating levels of both hope and anxiety.