Medical science

I went back to the doctor’s last night and picked up a private prescription for the anti-malarials. Just the prescription cost £12. £12! I think the tablets are going to cost getting on for £100 and it cost me £35 for the yellow fever injection, so this is becoming an expensive business and I haven’t even set foot out of the country yet. This holiday had better be worth it.

Talking of things medical, I think there is something very fascinating about the human brain. It must be one of the least understood parts of the human body and yet it controls pretty much everything we do. How things translate from thought to action or speech is amazing. However, because of the brain’s huge role in our ability to do pretty much anything, any damage to our head can have pretty catastrophic consequences.

So I was really interested to read this article (it’s very long), basically some people who have been in a persistent vegetative state for years have regained consciousness and been able to interact with people after being given a sleeping pill. Instead of the pill making them sleep it has made them suddenly regain consciousness and, where the brain damage has not affected their ability to do so, actually able to speak and communicate. They need to continue to take doses of the sleeping tablet in order to maintain proper consciousness, but it must be amazing to have been trapped inside a body that was unable to communicate in any way and suddenly to be able to talk and joke and so on. I just think it’s amazing what is possible and sometimes it is just a complete accident that they find out how to do this, as was the case in this instance. Even so, I am kind of hopeful that I will never need to make use of this medical breakthrough.

At the opposite end of the scale a bloke won damages from a US hospital recently. When he was going through an airport metal detector, he kept setting it off despite having removed all metal items from his pockets and so on. Then his mind wandered back to the operation he’d been through three months before, after which he had suffered severe abdominal pains, which the doctors had told him were normal. He decided to go back to hospital to get this investigated at which point he discovered that they had left a retractor inside him the length of his forearm. That can’t have been good. No wonder I don’t really like going to the doctor’s.