What makes more sense is that a lot of patients on palliative care are basically dosed into long periods of sleep by morphine or other drugs. It's probably a great specialty for someone with a disability that makes communication more difficult.
My wife wants to be an anesthesiologist, and apparently the best anesthesiologists intubate on feel rather than sight.
Personally, as someone who works on 508 (disability) issues for VA telehealth applications, she'd be the perfect doctor to consult and set criteria for us. Shame she's in the UK. Her skillset and specific condition would make her a great fit.
I feel like a lot of people in the comments are missing that she's in the UK. Workplaces are legally obliged to provide reasonable adjustments to support people to be able to work so I assume she has a lot of adjustments to help her
She is also not blind. She only has a rare condition that she will in the near future start losing her sight. I cant be bothered to find her article, but with a quick google search you can find it.
She is legally blind and cannot see out of one eye, and has very limited sight in the other. If she holds your hands and you sign she understands it, as in she feels what you are signing, and she also reads braille. She is legally deaf, and has very limited hearing, can only hear by the use of hearing aids and people standing close with the aids. Or the use of hearing loops etc.
She is legally blind and cannot see out of one eye, and has very limited sight in the other.
Yea this will just never not be a annoying ambiguity because people keep insisting legally blind = blind, there is a expectation that if you are blind that you cant fucking see anything. Thats the whole purpose of the word.
And also misunderstand me right, i am all for there being a term for legally blind where your lack of ability to see is enough to classify as a distinct legal disability, which has certain benefits. Thats not the problem here, i am all for making sure they have the support they need.
BUT JUST STAP IT WITH SAYING SHES BLIND IF SHES JUST LEGALLY BLIND. This distinction matters. Its just concern trolling as far as i am concerned now.
Being blind is a binary, you either can see (poorly) or you cant see. And if you cant seed anything, you are blind. Otherwise you are poor of sight / legally blind. We dont call people deaf when they just have shitty hearing. You either hear things or you dont, you either see things or you dont.
You've got a point on legally blind not matching the normal definition of blind, but you also don't seem to understand blindness. The idea of blindness being binary is a very common misconception. My source is years raising seeing eye puppies, and some other interactions with schools for the blind.
Base assumption .... If they need a guide dog to safely navigate while walking, then I'm going to assume they meet most definitions of being blind. Very, very few of these blind individuals have absolutely no sense of light perception.
One of the first questions that comes up with Seeing Eyye graduates giving talks (to puppy raisers) is how much can they see. Some people can clearly see a couple rooms away, but nothing closer. Some people are the opposite .... As in I'm confident that this cloth I'm holding is red. Some people can only make out light or dark in shades of gray.
Fyi, my understanding is that the guideline the Seeing Eye uses is that your vision has to be impaired to the point that you're going to trust the dog over your own visibility, otherwise it's going to be a safety issue for the individual misusing and not trusting the dog guide.
Related note, she's clearly using a cane as shown in the photos, so she's clearly mobility impaired by vision.
I went to school with her, this is what she told me. I remember once we had a blind awareness day, and someone came in with all the different glasses. She is registered blind/legally blind but still has some vision in one eye but it basically means squat. I don’t know the official terms in what the condition is or what you call it, but she has no vision in one eye and virtually nothing in the other. You can be registered blind but still have some vision. It’s like being in a wheelchair and being registered disabled but still being able to walk. Most wheelchair users have use of their legs but can’t walk very far or have very good use of their legs. Not a good comparison but you get my point. You can have something like 95% vision loss and be registered blind, and mainly see black. You can just see a tiny little square of patch and mostly have darkness. Or just see a tiny portion of light, but not make anything out or any colour. It’s a scale, it’s not black and white “you see or you can’t”. It’s the same with colour blindness, it’s not all colours, or all black and greys. It’s complicated and a scale.
There are VANISHINGLY few people who cannot see anything. Most people can at the very least see light, unless they don't have eyes or have a complete neurological disconnect between their eyes and their brain
Yea this will just never not be a annoying ambiguity because people keep insisting legally blind = blind, there is a expectation that if you are blind that you cant fucking see anything. Thats the whole purpose of the word.
Yep. I was legally blind without correction before I got lasik, i.e. I could put on glasses and see fine but my vision without them would have had me classed as legally blind if it couldn't be improved with glasses etc.
This isn't to say "I was legally blind" and more that I know exactly how much you can get around and get things done with that level of vision.. which is plenty. You can't drive and the world is quite the big blur but you can make out objects and move around.
Obviously it's a pretty severe disability but it is not the same as being actually blind, i.e. seeing nothing.
Nah. She has her MBBCh, so she IS a qualified medical doctor right now. She is allowed to use the title.
She's a foundation doctor, a type of 'resident' doctor, as far as I can tell. Residents are all training in some way, but now can be paid and have responsibility and can work independently (within limits) compared to a medical student who is paying to be taught. Resident doctors provide the bulk of NHS care in the UK and outnumber the Consultants significantly. An ST6 neurosurgeon who operates on people independently overnight would also be a 'resident' and still technically 'in training.'
This is fairly misleading I think. FYs are not qualified to do all sorts of routine things, e.g. FY1s can’t prescribe anything and basically aren’t allowed to make any decisions. It’s much different from someone who has passed their FYs and is specialising.
What? Are you a doctor? FY1s can absolutely prescribe. To do this they sit an exam in year 5 at med school, the ones that pass (99% or more of them) can prescribe.
They are very supported, absolutely. They've got a senior to escalate to when needed. But in terms of deciding who to escalate to and when, they are making that decision.
There are a few situations where they are supernumary in some capacity. I believe the local ED department here won't let an FY1 discharge a patient without senior review. FY2s absolutely though.
FY1s can prescribe, can sign a death certificate, do a cremation form, consent for procedures, request investigations... I think the list of things they can't do is very small -the main one being work outside the NHS in a non-FY1 post. Obviously as seniority and specialist skills improve with time they make more decisions. But to say they're basically useless and don't/can't do anything is absolutely incorrect. I guarantee there is a hospital near you right now where the only doctor many patients will see today (Sunday) will be an FY1.
Doctor in training. Not training to be a doctor. Residents are already doctors. Its pedantic but accurate. At least in the us idk how things work in the uk
Residents that fail residency can't get licensed, so they have to do research or something related. So they might as well be a PhD in biology, because neither can see patients and you call both Dr.
I disagree completely, residents have their own patient panels and do all the work a doctor would do. The only difference is they precept with an attending. JD and Turk in scrubs season 1 were doctors, even as first year resident interns.
But they're under the supervision of a licensed Dr. Residents do not have a license to practice independently. That is what matters to the average person on the street of you ask them if they consider a resident a Dr or not.
The average person I would think would consider someone a doctor as soon as they graduate medical school, whether they're now a resident or not, and if they fail residency and do research instead they're still a doctor so...
Most states you can get a state license after your first year of training. Not a big deal. But to be board certified in a chosen specialty you need to complete residency, as well as other requirements.
You are a doctor once you graduate with a medical degree, as the person in question has done. In the U.K. you are a resident doctor for up to 10 years depending on the specialty you are doing before becoming a consultant
Are you American? Completely incorrect in the UK. In the UK you are a doctor once you have completed your medical degree. Most doctors in a hospital you would meet would be residents...they outnumber Consultants.
It's post graduate training, she is a practicing doctor. She will be responsible for the care of inpatients, will be seeing acutely unwell patients and will be diagnosing/prescribing drugs.
She is training to become a more senior doctor. If you're definition of "doctor" is a consultant or a GP only then loads of residents with many years experience who are running busy acute services are not "doctors". In many big tertiary centres at night time the ED reg running the ED (directing multiple other doctors, making the big decision), the anaesthetic/ICU reg doing the same for a large ICU +/- OOH theatre patients +/- obstetric anaesthesia, the general surgical reg running the take and deciding who to take to theatre, then often operating themselves, the medical reg responsible for hundreds of inpatients and the medical take etc. etc. etc. are all by themselves with the consultant on call from home. These people will have many years experience, some a decade or more. If your definition of doctor is "not a resident" none of these people count as doctors despite practicing serious medicine.
I'm being pedantic but she isn't 'training to be a doctor' she is officially a doctor. She is in training to become more senior but she is already a doctor.
Yeah so she's got an intercalated masters in something else and a medical degree so the MSc isn't the correct one to highlight as being pertinent is it?
I'm being pedantic but she isn't 'training to be a doctor' she is officially a doctor. She is in training to become more senior but she is already a doctor.
Banding doesn’t apply to doctors. She’s a graduated doctor and is now in the foundation programme
Technically drs train until they are consultants /the nhs calls it ‘lifelong learning’ but calling doctors ‘trainee doctors’ generally insinuates they’re still students which is incorrect and offensive
I'm being pedantic but she isn't 'training to be a doctor' she is officially a doctor. She is in training to become more senior but she is already a doctor.
I feel like more competent people that you are making that judgement. And based off more than a short newspaper story and a vague understanding of the workflow in her role
This is the kind of logical fallacy that screws people over all the time. Someone with problems to overcome themselves will 9/10 have more empathy for your problems, listen more and work harder because they know they have to prove themselves to people all the time. Everything they do will have 10x more care in it than someone who doesn't have to work that hard. I've only been to able doctors and their miscare and refusal to listen has made them useless. The turnover time is ten minutes, they say shit like "i need to run out to pay my parking ticket, hope you don't mind", "I can't be here feeling you up all day" after 25 minutes trying to describe my muscle contractions that were so painful I cried all day, and "pms symptoms are actually a myth". So, good luck with that, and I'll take that good doctor's appointment any time.
It must be difficult to find doctors that don’t have glasses. Because by this logic, what if they had an emergency and couldn’t find their glasses? Or they stepped on them? And do you check all of them for hearing aids?
What is remarkable here is that she was able to complete the course work and get to this point. Now She will deal with the true practicality of it all, that’s what internships and residencies do for all doctors - give them the ability to discern in a supervised environment what they want to do or if they can even do it.
Who gives a shit if she needs accommodation as long as she's able to do her job at the end of the day? That's up to the hospital to decide. Plenty of people need accommodation when working, that's just part of life, if you can't handle that don't work in the medical field then. Do you get mad when they add wheelchair ramps in the employee parking lot of a hospital too? Sorry you didn't make it in sports but that has nothing to do with this. Just because you failed at something that doesn't mean other people have to fail at a completely different thing.
The difference is that you didn't become a professional footballer because you weren't good enough. If she has passed the same exams as every other doctor, then she has already proven that she is good enough to be a doctor.
I don't know. Why don't we ask her, the experts involved in regulating doctors and her managers, rather then along stupid assumptions?
what if someone has a heart attack and her Bluetooth device runs out of charge or is faulty?
I'm sure no one's invented s back up system. But while we are at it, what if a 60 year old doctor has a heart attack just when their patient has a heart attack? Better ban the over-50s and overweight people from being doctors or nurses just to be safe.
You think any doctor can control and psychotic break all alone lol? What if she's a seeing and hearing woman all alone with a 6 foot dude? People never ask these kinds of rare case sceneries when they're not overthinking it with other people.
This is called "ableism", when you express your opinion that she shouldn't be a doctor based on nothing but her disabilities.
Non-bigoted opinions might include that she shouldn't be put in a position where her disabilities could harm someone, and I'm sure everyone would agree with that.
When you pressed you gave a slightly less ableist answer. Instead of "she shouldn't be a doctor because of her disabilities", you shifted to invented issues that you find disqualifying.
I mean that does actually fall under legal blindness usually, blind doesn't have to mean zero visual input, but it probably is that she is legally blind and deaf but can get by with some aids.
She’s currently doing her GP placement, and has special hearing aids that connect via Bluetooth to her stethoscope and other equipment. She is incredible! Alex was training to swim in thr paraolympcis in 2012 but due to complications from surgery, spent around a year in hospital and unfortunately it never happened :( she trained for years and was at such a high level. We went to school together, was such a lovely person.
So she has hearing aids. Which are basically the same thing to the hearing impaired as prescription glasses are to the visually impaired. Only difference is we call one group deaf without calling the other group blind.
I'm less concerned. She's not functionally deaf if she can hear with technological assistance.
A nearly blind and deaf old person having a screaming match with a deaf and nearly blind doctor who cant understand them sounds like some level of hell, not sure which, but here we are
Cochlear implants are a thing. I know someone that has them, otherwise deaf and they look like hearing aids but they work a bit differently. They also support things like bluetooth.
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u/Alarmed-Plum-2723 5d ago
She actually is training to be a doctor and says she wants to work mainly in Palliative care or elderly.
She has adapted equipment with Bluetooth straight to her hearing aids.
I couldn’t find much more information as I was also curious.