Thanx Nat! I am flattered & I totally agree with your statement about redirecting energies expended in bitching towards reform. This is my motivation is undertaking a dual residency: anesthesiology coupled with Leadership/Preventive Medicine. In the adjunct portion of my residency, I will receive intense, quality training in medical leadership in addition to earning an MPH from Dartmouth. This will provide me with the formal training to complement my already driven sense of professional advocacy. I will be one of the movers & shakers reforming medicine & our healthcare delivery system for the 21st century & beyond.
Ironically, I learned this new pattern of behavior back in my RRT days while sitting around the lunch table pissin & moaning about some new policy. One of my supervisors challenged me to get involved with a committee & put my money where my mouth was. I was totally uninterested in political activism, but was not about to allow myself to be challenged in public forum w/o responding - that youthful, male bravado got me into lots of hot wter in those days! However, this time, I learned that I did have a penchant for problem solving & negotiating…I was hooked! I have always been involved ever since.
Don’t get me wrong, I still can complain with the best of them. But, the major difference now is how I react AFTER the botch session. If it was worth my time to whine, I see it as an impetus to act as well.
This drive to improve things heavily influenced me in the creation & evolution of OldPreMeds.
Dr. Belle,
May I ask why you feel the need to chastise posters whose opinions are contrary to yours? The lawyer comment posted was general in nature and wasn’t directed at you or anyone specifically. Poking fun at lawyers is something even lawyers do. Heck even Shakespeare did it. I don’t think anyone would question the importance or necessity of legal scholarship. However specifically questioning and directing your comment to this poster’s maturity based on one sentence is fallacious. It is also alienating. If you didn’t agree with the poster, why didn’t you just say so? Discourse is good when opinions differ. The maturity comment was just as much an ad hominem as your inference to the supposed lawyer comment. Insulting the poster wasn’t necessary.
Hi there,
We have a whole forum for poking fun at anyone. It is under Jokes and other Nonsense. This comment would be better placed there and I could have easily moved it.
This board is about exchange of information in a professional manner. We have a whole area devoted to Jokes and we can certainly refrain from name calling or professional bashing should it be lawyers, physicians, respiratory therapists and nurses.
Jokes have their place but not in the regular forum and I believe that joking and name calling any profession outside the Jokes and other nonesense is not very professional.
If you disagree with me then we have a disagreement. Many professionals have them for lifetimes and I certainly do not want every person to agree with everything that I write at every time. However, I would hate to see OPM go the way of The Princeton Review website. Lately, SDN has been cracking down on unprofessional behavior and commenting.
I do not post unprofessional comments about any other profession and I would ask the same of other members. This is a public board with members welcome from all professions. I was offended by the comment where it was placed and I stand by my post. Had it been placed in the Jokes and other nonsense, that would have been a different story.
Cheers!
Natalie 
Natalie,
Granted I could have placed a post to this effect in the ‘jokes’ forum, but it would have been out of context. Every profession has stereotypical jokes made about it (for instance, drunk pilot jokes…); such jokes aren’t ever intended as slams against a particular member of the profession - or even necessarily the profession as a whole. The drunk pilot is, I wager, far more rare than the ambulance chasing attorney waiting outside the doors of an ICU but that doesn’t keep me from shaking my head at the thought of someone silly enough to sacrifice his life’s work for a 12 ounce can.
Quote:
This board is about exchange of information in a professional manner.
I agree, but that doesn’t mean it has to happen in a humorless, dour manner.
Boeing, I think you’ve made a good point that context is everything. Sometimes the context is a little harder to “hear” on the flat screen and in print. If we were all sitting around over a pitcher of beer this conversation wouldn’t take place in quite the way it’s come across here.
And by the way, with all due respect to aspiring lawyer Natalie, as well as my lawyer-father and several good friends who are lawyers, I am sure there is at least one thread in the jokes section devoted to lawyer jokes…
Mary