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Showing posts from July, 2014

Be ballistic please!

There has been much controversy generated by a single tweet, one by broadcast journo Maki Pulido and her perception of the lack of compassion among health service providers at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH). We’ve long known that social media easily gets the nerves of people. The problem is in a 21 st century world devoid of wit and almost all of satire, these little microblog phrases do more than surgery. They do vivisection and expose the illness and its pathology if we may, and in the process killing the patient. In a more literate age, another physician did a similar thing. Dr Jose Rizal did not pen a tweet, but what made for tweets or blogs in 19 th century Spanish Philippines are novels and essays. They killed Doctor Rizal who was essentially a messenger. But unlike Ms Pulido the journo, Dr Rizal had what we now call post-residency training. He was part of the medical fraternity. I never heard of an account that a physician went ballistic over Dr Rizal’s diagnosis.