You know, I wonder sometimes about North American society. Canada and America both do this thing where they hand off responsibility to the state, or some arbitrary authority. When I see this, I have to stop and ask myself, why would no one here do that?
A doctor, with this sign in their car, stopping and doing consultations with needy people on the side of the road would likely be arrested and charged for not meeting some arbitrary requirement that's set by some board somewhere who makes rules for hospitals and doesn't bother to think how it limits the ability to act on real problems. No doctor would consider doing this. It's outside the system, they wouldn't endanger themselves that way, even to do good.
It's strange, because we get to see these exemplars of humanity, but it's always people who have to work under the most extreme of conditions, without proper equipment, without a support team or everything we'd demand for every patient here in North America. None of us, not a damn one of us ever meets our potential as human beings, because nothing demands it of us. We never have to struggle, thus never understand what we are truly capable of.
Now a days in NA you can't really get away with giving help to people on the street, unless they are in dire need, aka emergency. You can be accused of malpractice and taken to court if you diagnose someone incorrectly. Pre-early 2000s this wasn't a huge issue, but a lot of lawsuits started going around sueing doctors for such a thing. So this became A LOT less common.
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u/Peter_G Aug 13 '21
You know, I wonder sometimes about North American society. Canada and America both do this thing where they hand off responsibility to the state, or some arbitrary authority. When I see this, I have to stop and ask myself, why would no one here do that?
A doctor, with this sign in their car, stopping and doing consultations with needy people on the side of the road would likely be arrested and charged for not meeting some arbitrary requirement that's set by some board somewhere who makes rules for hospitals and doesn't bother to think how it limits the ability to act on real problems. No doctor would consider doing this. It's outside the system, they wouldn't endanger themselves that way, even to do good.
It's strange, because we get to see these exemplars of humanity, but it's always people who have to work under the most extreme of conditions, without proper equipment, without a support team or everything we'd demand for every patient here in North America. None of us, not a damn one of us ever meets our potential as human beings, because nothing demands it of us. We never have to struggle, thus never understand what we are truly capable of.
It's a sobering thought.