SHAMrock doc

Television broke my heart again…  well, what did I expect?

I honestly don’t watch much TV so this may be old news to the rest of you but I just saw a commercial that lifted me up on hope and then threw me down to the ground again.

The scene is a hospital emergency room.  We see lots of cut-scenes of a bad accident victim being transferred from the EMTs to the ER.  The voice-over is a woman saying something similar to, “I am a nurse.  I am a woman of learning and I believe in medicine.”  One of the cut-scenes show the patient’s keys falling out of his pocket, his keyring is a four-leaf clover.  The voice-over nurse goes on about how modern science has come so far and how she is part of that, “I believe in science.”

I am so fricking giddy at this point that I’m actually smiling!

And then they kick me square in the taint with a spiked boot…

Last-scene, the nurse enters the quiet room, puts the four-leaf clover in the comatose patient’s hand and the voice-over says, “and I also believe in stacking the deck.”

What kind of superstitious bullshit is this!!!?!  Why would they do this?  What is the point of the commercial if we’re going to say, “hey, all that cool shit we discovered, designed and developed?  All those doctors and nurses that have studied and sacrificed just so they could learn how to make a better world?  All that sciency stuff that saves lives every single fucking day!?  Yeah, forget all of that shit, just make a wish on a star, rub your four-leaf clover and pray to Vishnu.”  And honestly, we all know they wanted to film the scene with a crucifix, the clover was a stand-in double to avoid any religious flack…

What horseshit!  Hey, if I’m ever in the hospital and a nurse wants to pray for me, light a candle, give me a good luck charm or any other superstitious nonsense that does NO recorded good whatsoever (in any CONTROLLED study and in fact, there has been cause to show that it may have the OPPOSITE effect, “Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from coronary artery bypass graft, but the certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.”)
If the person saving my life will feel better about themselves by holding a lucky rabbit’s foot, I won’t stop them.  But to actually encourage this kind of medieval thinking among the modern medical community?  I’m frightened.  I was hoping we were evolving away from the witch-doctor bullshit of superstition and religion.  I was hoping that if any place were more prone to see how ridiculous it was, it would be the doctors and nurses of the world… I guess I was wrong.

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And yes, I am aware that a “shamrock” only has three leaves and that a four-leaf clover is not a shamrock but I couldn’t pass up the headline with “sham” in it…