farmdoc's blog post number 481

I’ve been registered with the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria since 1969. I can’t recall when I was first registered with the Medical Council of Tasmania, but I think it was in 1992. Each Australian state has its own medical registration body. So a doctor working in two or more states needs to register, and pay an annual re-registration fee, in each. A few years ago, some bureaucrat had a bright idea – that nationwide medical registration would be more efficient. Loads of people were seduced by this trumpeted efficiency. Thus a national registration scheme will start on 1 July 2010. But state medical boards will still exist, to handle complaints against doctors, among other functions. So the new regulatory machine will be bigger – and more cumbersome – than the status quo. To date, the promise has been that the annual re-registration fees won’t rise. But I’ll bet they will, because the total cost will be much higher, and governments won’t pay the extra if they can compel Muggins doctors to. In this world you get nothing for nothing, especially from bureaucrats and governments. Here their quid pro quo is the right to put their grasping fingers into the pie of medical undergraduate and specialist training, and continuing education – where their fingers don’t belong. This new juggernaut may hasten my retirement from active medical work. Time will tell.

farmdoc's blog post number 65

Occasionally I marvel at a word that sounds just right for its meaning. A good example is Muggins. The word Muggins has several meanings that fall into two types: A Type 1 Muggins is defective: a person lacking judgment/intelligence/commonsense, a fool/idiot/mug. A Type 2 Muggins is not defective, but rather is duped. A Type 1 Muggins is to be pitied but is essentially unredeemable. A Type 2 is a Muggins due to circumstances and nothing innate, and so is potentially redeemable. We all come across people who unscrupulously con others with schemes so clever that even the very intelligent are taken in. But more frequently a person becomes a Type 2 Muggins because of self-perceived weakness in a relationship and/or an inability to simply say no and walk away from someone or something. Nobody wants to be a Muggins. And assuming we have a three digit IQ, there is no reason why we should be one. With rare exceptions, there is no hurry to say yes to anything. If we feel put on the spot and are unsure how to respond, it is best to delay the response (for example by saying ‘I’ll think about it and get back to you’). If more people did this, fewer people would be Type 2 Mugginses. And the would-be Mugginses of this world would be much happier.