30 August 2007

Get out of the way - QUICK! - I'm a Skin Doctor!!

Doctors are a privileged bunch, having the knowledge, training and opportunity to help people at their most vulnerable, saving life and limb. It is for this reason that doctors - junior, senior and in every specialty - have pagers (that's "beepers" for the Yanks) so that when an emergency situation arises they can be instantly informed and do what's required to save the day.


As such it's quite common that lectures, tutorials and teaching sessions of any sort will be interrupted by the beeping and vibrating of pager and/or mobile phones, informing the doctor of a situation to be dealt with.
Often, doctors ignore these pleas for help (often they're mundane requests to complete paperwork, do simple procedures and the like)

One specialty, however, seems to be very diligent in their page-answering, obviously having to respond many calls for life-saving treatment.

It's not the surgeons, rushing to deal with the incoming multiple-trauma following a car accident.
It's not the cardiologists, hurrying to stent a coronary artery of someone verging on permanent heart cell death.
Nor is it the interventional radiologists, speeding to save someone's brain from the developing ischaemic stroke.
And not the obstetricians, off to the labour ward to perform an emergency twin caesarian.

It's those apparent kings of the medical emergency, the dermatologists, who answer their pages rapidly, diligently, unfaultingly.
So it lead me to wonder -- what exactly is a dermatologic emergency?

Precisely while I was wondering this, as if delivered from above, the answer appeared before me. There she was -- young and French, decked out in ridiculous-looking designer clothes and with her bag hanging in the crook of her elbow, rushing about the pharmacy telling staff that "someone need to look at this, I need this fixed immediately!" while pointing to a small spot on her face that had appeared since putting on makeup the previous evening.
My question had been answered but in doing so it left me with another: Why was this young woman at a pharmacy??
Perhaps her dermatologist wasn't carrying their pager....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And here I was thinking it was Stevens-Johnson syndrome.

It girl said...

Sim.. you are funny! I think life as a doctor does your humer a lot of good.

Shim

theflyingdoctor said...

nup Cam, you think too much.
in any case, SJS is usually mostly dealt with before the dermatologist is even alerted, they just deal with followup - and, no doubt, referral to their private clinic moneyspinner...