"This God-damned Dog and Pony Show"

My father was very angry at the way he was treated in his last few days before his death at the Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire, and referred to the situation as "this God-damned dog and pony show.”

An article in the NY Times, "Doctors Strive to Do Less Harm by Inattentive Care," and the comments on it this morning remind me very much of his experience.

Dad's vocabulary was dated, and it could easily appear to the unperceptive that he was being harsh, due to his being under stress, rather than as being truthful regardless of the consequences on the occasion of death.

But I think he was precisely, validly, on the mark. The comments on the NY Times article are in today's vocabulary and emotionally "careful," but clearly confirm my own serious experience of this last year with the medical industry.

The comments on articles and letters to the editors are usually the most interesting and helpful parts of newspapers for me, although not always.

Here is one comment on this article:

Paxinmano

Rhinebeck, NY

"... and I will take care that they suffer no hurt or damage." This from the oath all doctors swear, the Hippocratic oath. Or was that the hypocritic oath? Ah close enough. You can see how they might have gotten it confused. This is 2015 and doctors are finally thinking from "the patients perspective" instead of their own perspectives. Well, wonders will never cease as my grandmother used to say...

What goes through my mind now is that the horror of the last forty years of programmatic societal selfishness has been so extreme and relentless and radical, that people are being forced to face it and to rethink it. The fact that the NY Times has been running a series of articles like this one brings hope that this might be true.