I have been observing.
People. Their beliefs, their reactions. their practices.
The last few days have been rather thought provoking, thoughts on myriad issues and in various fields and I intend to pen a couple of them down now.
A pal and I went to a water expo a couple of weeks ago. It was more of an engineering thing. It made me realize that engineering is by far a tougher and more challenging field to be in. All those motors! All those materials. What goes where? What and what don't go together. What stuff catches on fire at the drop of a hat! And how ,dear god, does one remember all those temperatures and pressures coz' people were talking in kelvins and kilograms and none of them had a reference book by their side.
And it made me feel reallllllly dumb! At one point, I was going to ask a PhD on ozone purifiers, "erm...so this machine of yours..., is it used for sterilization of equipments in hospitals...coz I'm a physician you see" just so those geeks don't think of me as a dumb bimbo, which I bet they did!
Well its not just the engineers who've dumbed me over. People with common sense have!
It's been brought to my notice by a pal who was injured last week at a cricket match, that Vaseline works beautifully on abrasions. I brushed him off with a " What rot! leave it alone and it'll heal. Put something on it if you want to watch it rot!"
But he decided to go with the Vaseline and hey presto, its healing beautifully, scab free and all, and apparently it'll be scar free too! gotta see that!
Now how is it, that after 4.5 years of med school, nobody told me that one is allowed to apply Vaseline on a wound? I googled it up and found an article on BMJ that supports this mode of treatment. And this is just one example of how native treatment works better than allopathy. My pal's mom, a housewife blessed with amazing culinary skills and quite a load of common sense, pointed out to me that all the antibiotic creams that are prescribed for wounds, contain paraffin/ other petroleum products, if those work, why would applying Vaseline alone not work? Now why didn't that occur to me? probably because I've got blinkers that decide on what I glean and what I don't. Happens in Nature too. Watched a programme on Discovery( at a pal's place) today that said that insects are so specialized that they eat only a special kind of leaf. They are species specific when it comes to food. And we are pretty much that, when it comes to knowledge. I have evolved to an extent , that my thoughts have been streamlined to think like an allopathic doctor who swears by the tomes and anything outside the tome doesn't strike home easily. Must shake that off, for India is a country that hasn't yet learnt to swear by Allopathic doctors. Most Indians still trust their homeopathic physicans and the unnani medications. And why? coz they work! coz they provide hope. coz don't just flatly say 'this is all we can offer' ' or 'this is what is recommended based on research'. I'm gonna try and treat beyond the textbooks. maybe i could pick up a few tricks of the trades from the patients themselves -- ask them what sort of native treatment they've tried, and look it up to see if a study has been done on that, and if not, do one in that field. Amen.
And now to answer the title Question: How common is common sense? Not too common. I recently bumped into a steel cupboard in the hostel which looked a bit like this (forgive the crude image) :
The cupboad owner must've lost the almarah's key and instead devised this ingenious way of keeping her cupboard out of bounds by looping a cycle chain to the handle and locking ( with a big heavy lock, mind you) it up through a loop above her mirror. Little did she think that the doors would swing with an open sesame if the loop around the handle is eased out, which believe me was a very easy thing to do as the chain per se was locked in a very lax position.
And for the record, I did not steal anything from my classmates cupboard, and 'locked' it back again. And the brain that came up with this innovative lock is supposedly one of the finest in the city by virtue of being a medical student at one offinest medical schools in the country.
Oh well, maybe common sense is for the common man
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