I’m upside down relative to you and four hours away in the time space continuum, with no real knowledge of whether there’s going to be wifi access where we’re headed next, so this week’s little effort was written a touch earlier than usual and you might find that it is disconnected from events as they may have unfolded during the week.
When you’re on holiday, happenings back home seem to take on a different aspect.
Chelsea lost three to nothing at the Bridge while I was having a snack in a street café and the news moved me far, far less than it would have done had I been sitting in front of the telly, restraining myself from chucking things at the screen.
Similarly, Joseph Muscat’s boys doing something silly is of less pith and moment at this remove than it normally is, though the wonders of the net being what they are, I’m perfectly able to keep up with the news. For instance, I was brought up to speed with the long-known about intention on the part of Austin Gatt to call it a day in politics at the same time you were, assuming, that is, that you had got up late.
On clicking onto the net while I could, I did the usual round of the sites and surfed over, inter alia, to Facebook, to find that someone had joined me up to a group called “Save Baby Pea” or something like that. At first, I gave this little thought but then a story on timesofmalta.com caught my eye, the one about the parents of – yep, you guessed it – said Baby Pea getting all hot and bothered about the way they had been treated by the staff at Mater Dei Hospital.
Let’s get one thing clear: Even 25 years after the event, I can still recall the desperate worry that creeps up on you when the newly born has even the slightest of slight health scares, so these two young parents have my fullest sympathy from that point of view.
But there my sympathy stops dead in its tracks.
When my bike develops any sort of fault, I make sure I hand it over to the tender mercies of someone who knows what he’s about when it comes to these things, I don’t get onto the net, grab a spanner and start hitting things because some Zen instructor told me to do it that way. Much less so would I trust the health and well-being of a newborn baby to this manner of doing things, which, according to the news story, is precisely what these two have been doing.
You see, they’ve apparently been second-guessing the medical professionals (note the word: professionals) all down the line, seemingly making nuisances of themselves because they’ve been reading about things on the net. Back in the day, you’d have to get hold of medical tomes and be able to decipher the technical language in order to get some sort of handle on what the doctors and nurses were doing and, even then, you were probably going to get hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Today, Heaven help us (more precisely, Heaven help the ones over whose lives we have some control) any Tom, Dick or Marissa can Google a couple of what they think are keywords, bring up any one of the 2,400,221 sites found in 0.0003 seconds and ingest, and regurgitate, any manner of balderdash, without the slightest bit of quality control or peer review and argue the toss with someone who has spent years of his or her life learning enough to be able to tell the rubbish from the real stuff and, more importantly, to understand it.
They used to say that a little knowledge is a bad thing: Today the inverse is sadly true, there’s so much information out there that is so, so easy to access that it’s dynamite in the hands of the undiscerning.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s every possibility that doctors make mistakes, just as any other professional can, but there’s far less of a chance that a doctor will get it wrong than an out-and-out layman getting his knowledge off the net, without even knowing if what he’s reading makes scientific sense in the first place.
And what of the “friend” that put me in the group originally?
Well, she calls herself a doula, which seems to be some sort of shaman who helps women in childbirth or something New-Agey like that and she also calls herself a belly-dancing instructor, which sort of puts things into perspective, don’t you think?
I banged off a short note asking her by what right she put me into this group, pointing out that I thought the parents were acting like moderately unintelligent Jehovah’s Witnesses and pressed the “unfriend” button, one of the more satisfying functions you can carry out on FB.
imbocca@gmail.com
www.timesofmalta.com/blogs