What's With Our Medical System, You Ask?

"We,...suffer, as a medical system (or whatever you want to call it) from a terrific lack of common sense. We have had the same drunk visit us every day, sometimes twice a day, for the last two weeks. The paramedics keep finding him laying in parks and alleys in an obvious alcohol induced stupor and they keep bringing him in whereupon he wakes up, becomes abusive, ties up a nurse dealing with his demands for some food, and then finally staggers out when he is ready to be discharged only to repeat the little charade twelve hours later. We don’t even bother drawing an alcohol level or any labs. What’s the point? More importantly, why do they keep bringing him to us to use up our finite manpower on a non-acute medical problem? They will have a salad bar in hell before he is cured of his affliction. It is just beyond [our] power. Better to make sure he has a pulse, prop him up against a wall somewhere, and leave him to sober up on his own. This would be no different conceptually from what we do for him in the department except he wouldn’t get a sandwich and he wouldn’t stink up the whole place."

-- From the great Panda Bear, M.D.