23. VERY SUPERSTITIOUS
I’m still just a medical student, but our hospital sees a lot of poor and poorly educated patients since we’re a big tertiary hospital in a developing country.
Worst I’ve seen so far are the old ladies who everyone in the family turns to for health advice, their only qualification being seniority. They usually have a bunch of superstitions that end up contributing to the patient’s condition in the first place.
I once saw an infant brought to the ER for a really bad oral infection, and the mother clearly hadn’t taken a bath since the delivery (it’s a common superstition here that mothers shouldn’t take a bath a week or so postpartum), so we figured that’s the source of the infection.
While we’re assessing the patient, the doting grandmother in the background decides she has to comment on everything we’re doing (remember she’s probably the one who advised her daughter not to take a bath).
I just had to shut her down because it was late and people were running out of patience in our understaffed, under-equipped ER and they were more worried that pulse oximetry is hurting the baby’s toes when there’s freaking pus leaking out of the baby’s very inflamed salivary glands.
I mean, I get that infections like these are a disease of poverty, that their poor education is just indicative of a wider systemic problem that society fails to address time and again, but by golly does it get annoying.
Doctor_Doo