For television makers, I only see advantages in the approaching health care infarction in the Netherlands. Care poverty makes for great TV. Just look at what the broadcasters buy in programs from America and Great Britain, where healthcare is even more a luxury product than here that you have to be able to afford. Dr. Pimple Popper(TLC), an American dermatologist, sees people in her clinic with such enormous cysts and lipomas (fat deposits) in impossible places that you wonder how on earth those people could have let it get to this point. The question is easily answered: having a harmless horrific bump removed is not a necessary, but cosmetic care. Not insured, so never mind that volcanic pimple on your head.
In Great Britain they can also postpone some of it in terms of care. Marcel Levi, internist, was chairman of the AMC and then became head of University College London Hospitals. In London, he saw patients in the ER with diseases and disorders that we no longer even know about in the Netherlands, he said. Scurvy, insane sores, bulging tumors. Healthcare is free there, but many people do not have access to it. Illegals, unemployed, people in-between jobs. And that drives the desperate into the hands of television doctors. At least, I think so. Why else would you walk around for years with an ailment that you are so ashamed of that you don’t even dare to go to the doctor, only to suddenly throw everything out on TV, in front of a few million viewers who are horrified by it? Of course, they can be notorious care avoiders, who stay away from the doctor not because of a lack of money, but because of fear. But then I actually understand even less why you go to a doctor with a camera team in the consulting room.
The British Embarrassing bodies hot at RTL5 Generous bodies, and Monday evening the new series started. Three general practitioners each receive a patient with something unusual. First about those doctors, two women and a man. They are above average attractive and clearly ‘helped’ with their looks, lips, or lines in the skin. There you are as a 29-year-old woman with your skin apron after losing 95 kilos through stomach surgery, face to face with a wonderful doctor. Or that poor 27-year-old construction worker whose smelly pus drips like lava from his ears. Or the woman who has suffered for thirty years from a chronic condition that causes the skin around her vagina to tear when she has sex.
Licking fat
The cup must be completely empty for each patient. Undress, possibly sit on the treatment table, and then the camera drills its way through the ear canal, skin fold or perineum. Very terribly bad, the doctor then concludes and writes a referral letter for a specialist, where the process of exposing and viewing is repeated. Then we see, in full glory, the operation or treatment. Three and a half kilos of oozing fat and excess skin are cut away, the vagina and clitoris are injected with blood plasma and the inflammatory tissue is surgically removed from the ears. The follow-up check is again in the public consulting room. The patients look much better, with make-up on and hair blow-dried. They have to show how it turned out one more time, and then hope that no one recognizes them on the street afterwards.
In the Netherlands, these kinds of programs are made in dribs and drabs. RTL5 came up with this summer My skin doesn’t look good!, in which three dermatologists received people with peeling toenails, cysts in the face or, most recently, holes in the skin caused by scabies mite. Much less spectacular suffering than overseas. The care can still be a little less good.
#camera #drills #ear #canal #skin #fold #perineum