Do I get a treat?

For the first time in two weeks I’m caught up with my clinic paperwork.  Sigh.

Ethical question: if a patient who’s never seen me (or anyone at my clinic) before calls ahead of her first visit because she wants me to telephone her so she can ask me a bunch of questions and see if I’m going to be the solution to her problems or if I’m just going to be “like all the other doctors”, am I justified in saying “no, that’s what the first visit is for” and refusing to call her?  Especially if I strongly suspect I’ll be JUST like all the other doctors, and she’ll hate me anyway?

(There’s more detail to the story that led me to believe that a doctor-patient relationship between me and her would be of no benefit to either of us, but the core question is whether it’s reasonable for me to refuse to be someone’s doctor in the first place).

My friend’s very precocious daughter asked me the yesterday what I would do if I have to be a doctor for someone I thoroughly dislike.  (She used George Bush as an example).  I stammered a bit and didn’t give her a very good answer.  What do y’all think the answer should be?

As a side note, I’m totally psyched that this friend’s daughter felt comfortable enough to have friendly conversation with me.  She’s at that wonderful, amazing preteen age where she’s really starting to put her worldview together, she doesn’t have a lot of female role models (her Dad has custody as a single parent for now), and before this she was always a little too shy to interact much with me. Now that’s a relationship that stands to be beneficial to both parties!  I look forward to future challenging questions from her.

Clarification

[info]hsapiens responded to the a comment I made in discussion about my last post, and her comments led me to believe I had not communicated effectively – and in doing so had appeared to take a stand on the controversy. Oops. Sadly, I know I am overly prolix in my writing, so I sometimes try to force myself to be brief. And then I fail to communicate at all.

And then in trying to explain myself, I ran on long and then started generalizing… and found myself intrigued by the Harry Potter connection… and eventually realized I’d better make my response a journal entry (with a cut) rather than a comment reply…

I had commented that miscegenation seemed like an inherently racist word because it used the word root mis-, which means bad or wrong. I was corrected, though. The word roots are actually “Misce” (or miscere), which means to mix, and “genare”, which means kinds. On hearing that, I commented that the word was “merely descriptive” rather than inherently judgmental.

hsapiens replied:

Actually, the word is not “merely descriptive.” It was a racist term invented by pro-slavery political campaigns and it has been the term of choice by openly bigoted types for keeping uppity blacks down and maintaining the purity of the “white race.”

I acknowledge this word’s historical use may have left it irretrievably stained with unacceptable connotations. Since I just learned the word, I really feel unqualified to judge that question. I was trying to explore a different point, which is that there are some words that are implicitly judgmental in their denotation, where others have simply come to have unsavory connotations.

Consider another word that uses the mis- root: Misbegotten. it means (according to Answers.com)

  1. Of, relating to, or being a child or children born to unmarried parents.
  2. Not lawfully obtained: misbegotten wealth.
  3. Having an improper basis or origin; ill-conceived: misbegotten ideas about education.


The word itself contains the mis- word root, so the denotation of the word is that something bad has happened. It doesn’t just describe a child born to unmarried parents; it states that that’s not the proper way to do things.

So anyway, I was musing about the qualitative difference between words that have become bad because of their usage, as opposed to words that started out calling the situation bad. To me, that has some bearing on whether you might choose to continue to use the word.  Others may disagree.

On other fronts, the Harry Potter book have lots of themes about the question of segregation versus inclusion.  There’s purebloods versus muggleborns, wizards versus other magical creatures (giants, elves, goblins, werewolves), magical creatures versus muggles, and so on.  Even the house rivalries present all kinds of issues with respect to stereotyping and prejudice.  The wizarding world in Harry Potter seems to be a society with many levels of deeply entrenched racism.  So, many fanfiction stories tackle the racism issue either implicitly or explicitly, both with respect to romantic pairings and more broadly.  So, is it so bad to have a category for stories in which that’s a central concern?  And if it’s OK to have such a genre, what would be a better, less negative word to use to describe it?

So anyway, that’s some thoughts… hope that my comments re-establish my relative neutrality on the issue and return me to the land of pure musing about word roots…

As long as I’m learning things…

I have a fairly expansive vocabulary… but somehow never managed to come across the word miscegenation.  Which two unconnected people on my flist tell me is considered a racist word.  So I guess it’s a hot topic for someone.

So I go to my online dictionary and learn what it means.  And I guess it’s useful to have words in the language that efficiently describe all the phenomena that occur around you – it’s more efficient to say “miscegenation” than to say “marriage between people of different races or socially-defined groups”.  But, the “mis-” prefix on the word does suggest that whoever coined the word probably thought that was a Bad Thing.  Me, having gone decades without ever needing the word, I’ll probably forget it soon and go the rest of my life without needing the word.  Aren’t there more interesting things to talk about?

Now here’s a term I like:  hybrid vigor.  Reproduce with someone different from you, so your kids won’t have any nasty recessive traits and will be beautiful and healthy.

Learning curves…

I’m on a kick of learning cool stuff about entertaining tools (toys?).

In particular, I’ve gone from ignoring my old ipod, to being an avid listener.  I have the car tape adapter thingie which lets my play the ipod through the car. When I do my electronics shopping this week (have decided to hit Fry’s whether or not I make final buying decisions today), I plan to pick up the headphone-to-audio jack adapter that will let me run ipod or computer output through the stereo.  And as my previous post shows, I’m giving myself crash courses in home AV system options.

So… what’re your favorite podcasts?  I’m fond of several of the NPR offerings (Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk), several newscasts associated with publications such as Nature, Discover, Science… and I’ve come across a few useful ones for honing my medical knowledge.  Also I’m enjoying one that reviews Spanish vocab in short lessons (Coffee break Spanish, I think it’s called).  And there’s one that features people giving one-minute lessons about random topics which is good for short trips… Several of these are just augmenting my learning jag; I got a cool tip for simplifying hard drive backups yesterday and so now my main working computer is properly backed up with less trouble than ever before…

Also have been on intense learning curve for school and work related projects – have been brushing up my HTML, which I learned at a very basic, unstructured level years ago.  Have overlaid an understanding of XML standards and CSS and am picking up some/more PHP and JavaScript skills to expand my capabilities.  And I’ve been reading up on a variety of new systems, since my employers are planning to replace our electronic  medical record with a completely different system and I’ve been part of that decision process…

My brain is full of new stuff.  It feels good!

Not to mention that I’m finding my original profession incredibly wearing right now, and it’s nice to think that my skills in other areas are developing to the point where I can do other things for a living…

A/V questions…

I’m considering replacing out a bunch of our AV equipment for K’s upcoming birthday.  He’s out of town this week which means that if I scramble around for the next couple of days, I could have it all in place when he got home and he’d have a true (if early) surprise.

But I have soooo many questions because I’m really quite ignorant about this stuff.  For example:

– DVD recorders – I hadn’t even realized you could own something that would record onto a DVD without needing some sort of subscription to fancy digital cable or whatever.  Has anyone got any experience with them?  What format is most likely to be readable by other DVD players? What do I need to know?  Can I get a decent-performing unit that records DVDs and also is a DVD changer (say, 5-disk)?

Shopping
– Is Fry’s really cheaper than other sources, or just… bigger?  What are other good places to shop in Houston, to get a fair price for a decent product?
– What are good brands these days?
– Any benefit in buying everything in the same brand?  e.g. single remote-control action?

Definitely spoiler comment.

Several people have commented that they were upset by the deaths of Lupin and Tonks, as it was unnecessary in the first place and then no one seemed to care.

Actually I was a lot more broken up about Hedwig and Dobby’s deaths than about Lupin and Tonks.  Partly this was because the order the deaths came in.  Partly, I was reacting to having recently lost a beloved pet – so I’m definitely aware that there’s animals who are more important than humans.  Partly this is because Hedwig and Dobby both were innocent creatures who never showed anything but love for Harry. 

Lupin, on the other hand, apparently ignored him for the decade he grew up in an abusive home and wasn’t all that involved with him after the re-acquaintance.  In his youth, he failed to prevent the mauraders from being bullies, whether or not he actively participated. As an adult, he failed to intervene when Sirius was abusive to Snape and to Kreacher.  And his first instinct in response to fatherhood was to cut and run. Overall, not terribly endearing. I mean, surely the wizarding world has some answer to the contraception issue; if fatherhood bothered him all that much, why didn’t he prevent it?

Tonks doesn’t seem to have done anything particularly offensive but she’s a decidedly minor character, obviously put in for entertainment value and not much else.  I could think of dozens of points in the books where her metamorphmagus skills would’ve been useful, but JKR chose to utterly ignore that potential tool in favor of a more Harry-centered plot.  So m’kay, but really one of my chief irritations of the book was Harry’s pathological inability to accept anyone else’s help, so I’m not gonna like this particular author’s perogative.

My strongest feeling about Lupin and Tonks was irritation that there was no further descriptions about the effects of the werewolf infection on a fetus or newborn…

All the cool kids are discussing spoilers…

And I really hadn’t bothered to go out and find any.  The book’ll be out soon enough and in the interim if I want to think about Harry Potter I could go back and reread the books so I could remember what details are canon versus fanfic… Or I could read fanfic, there’s been plenty of lovely writing by reliable authors lately.

Saw the movie last weekend, though. The credits were rolling and K turned to me and said “what do you think?” and I said, fervently, “That’s totally the wrong font for that background!” I also thought the movie is otherwise visually beautiful, but would be hard to follow if you hadn’t read the books.  And found myself musing about plot simplifications to keep the movie short – did their decisions about what to cut reflect any knowledge about how the series will end? 

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started