The importance of a fluffy pen

Many years ago, in my pre-reg year, I was pulled into an office by my tutor and told that I needed to sober up. She didn't mean that in an alcohol sense, but instead that I needed to start being more serious, dour, and less quirky. She told me that my personality, as it was, wasn't right to be a professional.

At the time, I believed her. She told me that I would never make a good pharmacist if I carried on the way I was. I was terrified, as all I wanted to do with my life was to be a pharmacist. If I couldn't be a good one, then I would really need to change my personality.

All of this started because I had a Christmas pen. It played tinny music for an alarmingly long time when pressed, and it became a bit of a joke in the dispensary to sneak up behind me when I was working and set it off, making everyone dissolve into giggles. A dispensing assistant, who was wearing a Christmas tie, was also told off, and strongly advised to not wear it again.

But nowadays, I disagree heartily that you have to be serious to be professional. I think a little bit of well-placed silliness and a lot of humour can add to our professionalism.

We need to be approachable to patients. And what makes a person more approachable than a little bit of personality? Nothing, except perhaps a novelty pen. On a couple of occasions, women who have come to see me about the emergency hormonal contraception pill, and who have been very nervous, have ended up giggling at a ridiculously fluffy pink flamingo pen I used to have. It broke the ice, and they could see that I was a person just like them, and I wasn't going to sit there all business-suited and high and mighty at the other side of the table and judge them. They felt a lot more comfortable because of that pen, and I think I was able to help them a lot more as a result.

At the moment, I have a Special Pen in my desk drawer. It is comedically large, pink, and slightly phallic, with some floppy rubber spikes on the end. I like to take it out of my desk drawer and offer it up, straight-faced, when people ask to borrow a pen.

My current Special Pen. Banana for scale.

We health care professionals deal with a lot of dark stuff on a daily basis: sickness, death, disability, anger, frustration etc. We need to balance that darkness out with something lighter. Whether its doing something daft in the dispensary to make your staff laugh for a few seconds when times are stressful, or donning a fox mask and writing silly things on the internet, it all counts. 

As long as we put the patient first, we treat others with respect, and we work within our limits, true professionalism doesn't have to mean that we all walk about with serious faces.

Hxxx  

Medical and Homeopathic information sources: A comparison

My friend Nancy and I are doing another Skeptics In The Pub talk this Thursday, and as a result, I’ve been delving back into the world of homeopathy, and all of the nonsense that it entails.

Part of my research and preparation has been consulting homeopathic texts- materia medica and repertories that are still in use by modern homeopaths.

One thing that I have been repeatedly struck by is the stark differences in the quality of these information sources compared to those used in modern medicine. Let’s take a look at some of those differences.

Up To Date?

Part of my day job’s role is resource management. This means that I need to make sure that all of the resources that we use and have access to are present and up to date. Whenever I use a book as part of my work, I document which edition I have used. If I use a website, I make sure to include when it was last updated. When we get a new book in the office, I find the old copy and cover it in stickers saying “Out of date- do not use”.

I don’t do these things because I am weird, or because I enjoy it. I do it to ensure that I give the most accurate, up to date information so that the patient gets the best care. What we know about medicines is constantly evolving- new medicines, new safety information, and new evidence is emerging daily. What might have been correct to the best of our knowledge last year may now have been subsumed by more recent experiments, and so the information sources I use change accordingly. So, for example, I can reach for a copy of the British National Formulary from 2005, and find information that recommends sibutramine as a weight loss aid in certain patients. However, if I look at the current version, I won’t see it in there, as it has since been withdrawn for safety reasons. If I were to have used the 2005 copy to advise a patient, I might have given them the wrong advice, in the context of what we know today.

How up to date is the information used by homeopaths? According to The Homeopathic Pharmacy (Kayne, S. 2nd Edition, published in 2006 by Elsevier Churchill Livingstone, page 192- I did warn you about the documentation): ‘The most well known are Boericke’s Materia Medica with repertory and Kent’s Repertory of the Homeopathic Materia Medica’. Sadly, the author of this book doesn’t see fit to bother telling us when these were published. Neither does the online version of it, although there is a bit of a hint in that the “Preface to the ninth edition” on there is signed off by William Boericke in 1927.

Nineteen Twenty Seven. Medicine and healthcare is a pretty fast-paced industry, with new innovations and information coming out at an overwhelming rate. So much has happened in medicine since 1927 that there is no way that anyone should accept health care advice based on something written from that time. I know I certainly wouldn’t be too happy if my GP gave me health advice from a dusty tome, or if I went to the dentist’s to find them using equipment from the 1920’s.

Maybe Kent’s Repertory will be more up to date? A Quick look at the website gives us no clues. This time, the preface contains no date at all. http://homeoint.org/books/kentrep/kentpref.htm. The closest thing that we have to a publishing date is the fact that the website is copyright 1998, and appears to have been formatted by a default-font loving child in the early nineties.

Political Correctness

Over the years, medical terminology has changed and evolved along with society and scientific discoveries, and rightly so. In some cases, words that used to be considered as perfectly legitimate scientific terminology (such as ‘Mongol’, or ‘Mongoloid Idiocy’, used to describe a person with Down syndrome) are now considered downright offensive. Even whole swathes of what is now considered normal society (such as gay people) were once declared as illnesses- and of course we know better by now, or at least we should do, and if you don’t- grow the hell up, will you. We generally don’t refer to people as “hysterical”, or “insane” anymore, as we know a lot more about such conditions, so are able to categorise people more helpfully and professionally.

As a result, we healthcare professionals are very aware of how crucial the use of clear, concise, professional communication is, including the information in our resources. No self-respecting modern medical text would ever dream of using out-dated, offensive terms, and if it did, there would be an outcry.

Let’s have a look at the sort of thing that Boericke’s Repertory wants to help us to treat. There are things like “Brain-Fag”, “Cretinism”, “Masturbatic dementia”, “Fears of syphilis”, “hysteria”, “insanity”, “weak memory from sexual abuse”, “Haughty”, “Stupid”, and many others. These were just taken from the “Mind” section, but there are many other examples in the other sections too. These terms are just too outdated and are wholly inappropriate to be used in today’s society.

Having looked through various other Materia Medica entries too, I’ve found statements that are sexist, bigoted, and occasionally racist. Nice eh? You don’t find that sort of thing in an up-to-date copy of Martindale: The Complete Drug Reference.

Clarity

Good, modern medical resources are all about clarity. They need to be- after all if someone gives the wrong medical advice because they have interpreted something incorrectly, patients could be at risk.

Jargon is sometimes necessary, but nowadays medical jargon tends to use standardized, accepted terminology which keeps the risks of misinterpretation to a minimum.

Homeopathic repertories and material medica, on the other hand, are full of vague, odd terms which are massively open to interpretation. What, pray tell, is a “voluptuous, tingling female genitalia” when it is at home? (and I wonder whether Ann Summers offers free delivery on such a thing?). What does “expectoration, taste, herbaceous” mean clinically? How is one supposed to diagnose “Taedium vitae”? When would you class a person as “Obscene, amative”, and when would they be considered as merely “gay, frolicsome, hilarious”?

In Conclusion

Our health is arguably the most important asset that we have. Why would we entrust it to sources which are terribly out of date, inaccurate, and in some cases, offensive?

Homeopaths like to paint themselves as a caring, human alternative to the more business-like, clinical world of real health-care professionals. But when this alternative categorises people as being “stupid”, or “cretinous”, and is happy to use criminally out of date resources which can risk peoples’ health, I wonder just how caring and ethical it really can be.  

Why would you continue to use an abacus when calculators exist, and are proven to have a better record at getting the right answer?