Medicine.

During third year of medical school, as a part of our pharmacology practicals, we had an 'apothecary class'.  Each student was given access to some chemicals, a pestle and a mortar, some brown wrapping paper, ribbons and a simple squeezable plastic bottle. Our task was to make the ointment for scabies, a disease caused by a parasite which makes you itch all over, and is very contagious.

  We prepared the medicine and installed it in bottle, cleaning the rim of the bottle with a spatula.  Next, we wrapped the bottles up in a brown paper and then we were taught to tie the ribbon in a figure of 8 for some technicality that had to do with ease of opening the wrapping. We then  labeled the bottle with its ingredients as well as with the name of the imaginary patient to whom it was being dispensed.  Although far from being an ideal or efficient way of dispensing medicines, there was some satisfaction in having every step of the process under your control.  It  gave me a feeling of how medicine used to be practiced in olden days.

The practice of modern medicine is very different. Now, in order to treat a patient, what you do is rack your brains and choose the most suitable agent, on a computer, and the medicine after going through multiple checks of quality control and pharmacist review, is collected by the patient.  Delegation of responsibilities to chosen people instead of one person, and multiple number of quality checks are in the best interest of the patient. The only drawback is that the task of treating patients has lost a personal touch for both the physician and the patient. A good internal medicine doctor of today is an efficient thinking machine.

 In clinical practice, I observe that it is the work of the nurses, which is directly satisfactory in that they are the ones who deliver the medicine to the patient and are involved in more intimate care of the patient. For myself, anticipating how the patient will be comfortable and attending to their small needs, as well as giving them the medicines, is an invaluable experience ever if I can contribute to  it. There's something to it that seems to restore medicine from the domain of a 'profession' to the realm of a sacred service.