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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Epidemiology
Death, disease and demographics.
Monday, 2008-03-31 | Careerism
| Orchestra influenza |
From the Wikipedia page:
The work of communicable and non-communicable disease epidemiologists ranges from outbreak investigation, to study design, data collection and analysis including the development of statistical models to test hypotheses and the 'writing-up' of results for submission to peer reviewed journals. Epidemiologists may draw on a number of other scientific disciplines such as biology in understanding disease processes and social science disciplines including sociology and philosophy in order to better understand proximate and distal risk factors.
If I had decided to go into the family business--i.e. if I had decided to become a health care professional instead of a professional dilettante who moonlights as a malcontent--I probably would have gone into this particular branch of the field.
And probably concentrated more of the fieldwork/data-gathering aspect. The way I figure it, epidemiology is the most rock 'n roll of the various disciplines within the trade.
Innumerable television programs and films about heroic and self-sacrificing health care providers seem to have left the majority of people with the impression that to be in the health care business is to be a Hawkeye Pierce or a Florence Nightingale or a Mother Theresa or a Jesus Christ: the consensus among the laity is that to be a health care provider is to be the sort of person who lives among the disenfranchised--the metaphorically and sometimes literally leprous--and ministers selflessly to these poor souls. And while this often is the case, it's just as often not the case. In fact, many times it couldn't be further from the facts of the matter.
For every Father Damien, there are at least as many Nip/Tuck-type motherfuckers out there to make a quick buck selling snakeoil, suturing sagging jowls into place and vacuuming fat from the baggy midsections of the fast food nation. These guys just want to drive fast cars, eat exotic meat in rarefied settings and live in suburban stucco palaces.
And I don't hold any of that against them. There's a market for that sort of thing and who am I to tell a guy he can't accept money to corroborate the delusions of paying customers?
But it's not very punk rock. You've pretty much got to be in public health to be in the health care racket and not be a total pariah. And while you don't necessarily have to be working at the free clinic and fingering the salve onto the herpetic genitals of the working poor to be one of the good guys, you've got to at least be working for a public organization. There's nothing rock 'n roll about private health care.
And so, returning to my initial point, if I were to have gone into the family business, I'd have been an epidemiologist because epidemiology, by definition, is a public service that requires little or no hands-on treatment of the public. And that's what I'm talking about.
I mean, sure, you might have to put on the SARS mask every once in a while and conduct interviews in the TB ward to get your data, but I feel like the most hands-on you'd ever have to get would be taking the occasional blood sample handling the odd beaker of piss. And I could live with that.
Especially because I would know that, in spite of the fact that my career was ostensibly connected to the contemptible micromanagement of the downward spiraling physical health of any individual human that is the health care trade, I was doing work that would help automate this micromanagement and, maybe somewhere down the line, eliminate the need for it.
But instead, I work on information systems--computer networks. And the work is much more rewarding in that there are far fewer meaningless tragedies and that indisputable good can actually be done.
And an in that I don't have to explain a 30 day progesterone dosage cycle to a 14 year old girl who can't read and who especially can't afford to birth another baby.
