Carry on Doctor

Before we start - Wildlife report: We have now witnessed possibly the most majestic of Sri Lankas wildlife... THE GIANT LAND SNAIL! Now monkeys are cool, and the monkeys we saw crawling around Kandy city centre are alright... but having seen this graceful beast, I might as well go home, my work here is done!! :) Although that is the only new addition on our animal count, we went to the Parasitology Dept. today, and got a lesson on how to identify the 5 different types of deadly land snakes in Sri Lanka: Russells Viper, small scale viper, cobra, Ceylon Crait, Indian Crait (at sea it is easy - ALL sea snakes can kill). My conclusion was in general, snake = run (and scream like a little girl). However, it is good to know that some snakes are not poisonous, such as the python, which can only kill you by constriction...

Right, onto the last two days. We have been attached to the medical wards at Peradeniya Teaching Hospital, and have been attending ward rounds with the final year medical students, following around the registrar/consultant discussing all the cases in the ward. Now being aware that most people are not medical freaks, and wont care what diseases I saw, I'll just say I saw some tropical diseases that I'm likely never to see in the UK... which is cool!
The hospital itself was weird, as it was precisely like stepping back 40 years in teaching methods, with the bad-ass consultant wandering around the place, diagnosing at will, with his minions following in awe!
However, what confused me the most was that although this hospital had money for CT, MRI and neurosurgeons, there was no facility to wash hands before reaching the wards, let alone between patients. The wards themselves were entirely open to the elements and there were so few beds that half of the people on the wards, even inpatients, had to sit on chairs along the sides to await attention! Overall it was an exciting experience, but it left me somewhat skeptical about the doctors priorities - Diagnosis technology vs basic hygiene. We should be going back to the hospital to the surgical departments next week sometime so perhaps this will change my opinions.

Another point that I noticed at the hospital was that of language in Sri Lanka. All of the medicine is discussed and undertaken in English, which most people in the population can understand a small amount of, but few outside the academic sphere are fluent in. Therefore there is a constant switch between English between the Doctors, and Sinhalese (Or Tamil, depending on the patient) when communication to the patient is required. We saw this from the odd angle of only being able to understand the medical aspect of the conversation, and not being able to converse with the patients, weirdly detaching ourselves from the medicine. All of this reminds me of the Latin - English divide of the past, where Latin, the language of the Learned was used almost to confuse/impress those who could not speak it. This really reinforces a Doctor-knows-best mentality over here, and the patients are entirely trusting of the doctors, being cooperative of any examination they wish to perform. This was of course surprising for us coming from the culture of "my doctor knows nothing and is crap" that we have in the UK (and moreso in the USA).

As we have spent alot of our time in the hospital recently, there has been a slight lack of interesting occurances for myself and Ben - So I apologise that this blog is a bit less jovial than my last few. However, we are up at 5am tomorrow to get the Train to Colombo, where we are staying for 3 days in a 2 pound a night YMCA and meeting up with miss Di Luzio... what could possibly go wrong :P xx