Sicko...

I ended up getting a last minute hook-up and got a chance to watch Michael Moore's new movie Sicko. A big deal was made of it and Michael Moore came out for a Q&A session after the showing. It was great to chat with people who work at the capitol and knew the difficulties of politics. There were workers protesting for health care for native american casino employees. Politicians would like to help out these employees, but they're non-union and dealing with them would anger their union base. Lots of hard decisions. Anyhow, the movie. It blew my mind away. It didn't present anything original, but it made me question many things.

1. It was like receiving CBT and correct all the distortions that my third year of medical school placed in my mind. In the hospital, there's something called "the game." Every resident has a certain number of patients, and the resident to discharge all of his patients wins the game. A lot of times, patients leave before they're ready to leave. Most of the time, residents hate having patients on their service, curse their patients under their breath and do everything within their power to get their patients out of the hospital. I don't know if it's just training in the US or if hospitals are like that around the world. What's wrong with the picture here? What ever happened to treating our patients like human being by treating their disease and making sure that they had a safe place to go to. When did it become ok to drop off patients on the corner of P and 35th? For the record, it's damn not ok to drop off patients there.

2. A big thing that Moore picks out is the death of the American soul. The loss of our values. We are so complacent and scared to take a step. To stand for what is right. We're trained to be self-reliant and be the best, often at the price of compassion for the less fortunate. By the end of this blog, I'm going to become complacent. I'm going to feel powerless and wonder what I could do to change the world. The feeling of powerlessness has crippled our generation. During the movie, some people felt Moore was being unpatriotic. In many ways, I felt like deep inside we were jealous at the Laissez-faire attitude of the Europeans and their outcries at any attempt to alter their charming way of life. We would have at best gone out with a whimper.

The stuff in the movie. It's all been said and done. Still, it knocked my socks off. Let me know what you think after you see it.

-bender