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Show Your Doctor Says.. . The following is one of a series of articles written by members of the Utah State Medical Association and published in cooperation with your local newspaper. These articles are scheduled to appear every other week throughout the year in an effort to better acquaint you with problems of health, and designed to improve the well-being of the people of Utah. THE TECHNICAL SPECIALIST IN MEDICINE The practice of medicine as observed ob-served by most patients becomes more complex year by year. The same comment may be aptly applied ap-plied to many othex features of family life. The kitchen, the family fam-ily car and the income tax return are all quite a headache at times. But the patient himself is still just a human being- who has a pain and wants to be rid jf it. Usually his ideas about doctors in general are vague. He has heard that a general gen-eral practitioner does almost everything. ev-erything. To the movie-going public pub-lic a surgeon is a special sort of doctor. The people in Hollywood Holly-wood who make the pictures have glamorized surgery. After all, there's nothing like white sheets, shiny instruments a pulsating pul-sating rubber bag and a few pretty nurses with sad-sweet expressions ex-pressions when the folks want drama. There ie, however, another an-other type of doctor known among the medical fraternity as a technical tech-nical specialist about whom many people know little or nothing. The radiologist anZ the pathologist are most typically in this category and neither of these, to the writer's knowledge, has ever been featured or even seen in a moving picture. T.V. show or radio thriller. Perhaps in the category of medical medi-cal specialists they should be listed ar Doctor "X." Nevertheless, the contributions of the Doctors "X" to medical practice has a great deal to do with the difference between be-tween modern medicine and the sort of hopeful guess-work with which they treated Grandma back in the days of calomel and fancy poultices. Both the Radiologist and the Pathologist are highly trained graduates of a medical school. Both operate a laboratory and con- fine their work to technical examinations exam-inations of referred patients. The pathologist's place of business is a smelly accumulation of specimen jars, test tubes, chemicals, sterilizers steri-lizers and microscopes of complicated compli-cated and expensive type. His task in medicine is providing accurate information by examination of a patient's blood and tissues of bodily bodi-ly excretions. The radiologist seemj to be a man with a natural flair for mechanics. His office is a shop of sorts and has been compared com-pared with the place in the old mill where Dr. Frankenstein created cre-ated his monster. It houses a number of imposing electrical gadgets known among the initiated as X-Ray units, and his job in life is mainly the making and interpreting inter-preting of X-ray films. He also treats some diseases with X-ray. Many referred patients enter a medical laboratory with extremely vague notions of just what sort of people work there and how they go about doing their part in treating human illness. For example, an apparently intelligent housewife will enter the office of a radiologist radiolo-gist and say to the girl at the desk "I've cor e for an X-ray." "An X-ray of what?" says the irl. "Why, of me, my dear" says the woman. The girl counts ten mentally men-tally and then asks hopefu'ly, "What seems to ba your trouble?" "That's what I came to this place to find out" snaps the woman. After the examination has been completed the final annoying question ques-tion comes forth: "Sball I take the proofs to my doctor or will ' you send them?" Obviously the dear lady harbored the notion that her doctor waited her to go somewhere some-where and purchase come sort cf fancy picture an r.natomical photograph pho-tograph which could be viewed by he: doctor 'anc- doubtless some of he.- more curious friends with immediate im-mediate detection of the trouble. This humorous little incident would ordinarily be passed by with a chuckle had it not happened so often in any X-ray laboratory. It may be stated seriously that at least 25 per cent of patients referred re-ferred for an X-ray examination have the impression that they are buying a picture. A little briefing on the p?rt of the referring physician physi-cian in such cases would be of great help to all concerned. The film, like the pathologist's slide, is only an essential part of the examination. The interpretation in-terpretation of either one requires a rather extensive knowledge of human hu-man structures and this ir why we have technical specialists in modern mod-ern medicine. |