See No Evil

Here’s a neat little moral dilemma. You are a consultant psychiatrist working for the NHS. You repeatedly witness your colleagues perjuring themselves, declaring in court that their patients are not ill when in fact these people are ill, often seriously ill, just so they are not obliged to confront the chronic shortage of beds. Do you:

a. Let the relevant authorities know immediately.
b. Have a quiet word with your colleagues, reminding them that perjury is a criminal offence.
c. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Then wait for a couple of decades until an American publisher offers you a big, fat book deal and a cheque that miraculously unleashes your memories.

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/2005-October/004376.html

There’s a reason this guy never became a brain surgeon, people: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3292495.htm

And in the rigidly hierarchical medical profession you can’t get much lower than the prison doctor. In the eyes of his colleagues he’d be subterranean.

And if the good doctor’s patients were as parasitical as he claims then what does that make him? A parasite feeding off lesser parasites?

Addendum: someone else has spotted inconsistencies in The Dalrympian Anecdote:

http://hurryupharry.org/2011/08/15/can-we-trust-theodore-dalrymple’s-anecdotes/

In Life At the Bottom Dalrymple claims that psychiatric nurses confided in him about their own violent relationships. Very touching, until you look at the way in which NHS hospitals handle violent or distressed psychiatric patients. The psychiatrist simply gives the order. It is the nurses (mainly women) who restrain and sedate the patient. My mother is a psychiatric nurse and she nearly died laughing at the very thought that any psych nurse in her right mind would turn to an NHS consultant psychiatrist for advice. They are not held in high esteem by their underlings.

Tags: doctors, NHS, Perjury, psychiatry, Theodore Dalrymple