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When the brain is idle....

The A&E department isn't busy all the time, which occasionally allows time for you to have a natter with your colleagues. Sometimes it's just a brief chat about where you trained before, where do you live, travelling's a bitch isn't it - topics close to a junior doctor's heart since they shift departments every few months. Sometimes it descends into some colleague bashing but occasionally you get a really left-field topic like in-breeding.

I was in the X-Ray department on a late shift waiting for the radiographer to do a series of films on a patient of mine who had been in a motorcycle accident. I started chatting to Dave, the 6 foot plus grey-haired health care assisstant. Somehow the topic turned to how dumb and completely lacking in common sense some people are (please note: we weren't talking about the motorcyclist). Dave reckons that people's I.Q. has been going downhill. His wife, he says, who has been teaching for more than 20 years and is probably in a better position to judge this, agrees whole-heartedly with him. Part of the problem, she thinks, is due to inbreeding. She has been teaching at the same school for yonks and teaches the children of the children of the children she taught when she first started. There have been several times when she comes across new students who look so similar to each other that she's convinced they must be siblings but when asked, they say no.

The theory goes when one woman has children with several different partners then these different partners have children with several different women who in turn give birth to children. In effect you have several half-siblings brought up with different mothers with absent fathers, who because of their social situation in the first place, never move far from where they grew up. So their children grow up to become sexually consenting adults/teenagers who end up in sexual relationships with their unknowingly half-siblings and then end up having children. And so on.

I can see that happening, I told Dave, on the odd case, but a whole community?

Then my registrar had to to tell me of the time she did paediatrics in a hospital where she used to work, which serves an area called Parth - a notorious, socially deprived area, infamously known for its rough streets, high rates of teenage pregnancy and unemplyment. Now I'm going to digress a little into medical-land to illustrate the issue.

In a medical examination, the first thing you are taught to do before you even touch the patient, is to observe. It can give you a lot of clues. For example, the patient says he is breathless. But what does his body language tell you? Does he look blue, or plethoric? Does he have a smoker's yellow teeth and nails? Is he leaning forwards, grasping the desk in front of him or is he lying down with his legs crossed and saying "Ooooh doc, I can't catch my breath"? This skill becomes more apparent in paediatrics when all you're ever going to get is what a child shows you. And one of the things you are taught to look at is the child's face. When I was a medical student (which was not too long ago) it was still acceptable to write in a child's medical notes FLK. Funny looking kid. It was a valid observation which points to a possible congenital syndrome i.e. children with Down's syndrome have a distinctive facies to them. It is a step towards making a diagnosis.

But in Parth, there were a high number of these children with FLK in their notes and many had syndromes which had no name, or somebody hadn't gotten around to naming it. Now I'm not saying that everybody with a congenital deformity or illness are inbred - illness and genetics are not as simple as that and I would kick anybody's ass if they dare pick on the next Down's kid they see. And not everyone who comes from a socially deprived area are screwing their sister. It was just two rather scary observations made by two of my colleagues. About in breeding.

Comments

Maryam said…
Thank god we're gorgeous then, eh?

Ahah
Kere said…
What?! You don't know of the FLK in your medical notes?
Kere said…
Isn't Fly Like A Kite some sort of sexual joke?

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