Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Medical Garb

Episode Date: July 8, 2016

Why do doctors wear that? What did they used to wear? Dr. Sydnee and Justin answer the big questions like that, including the big one: What's up with that little head mirror? Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Sawbones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here.

I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here.

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I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here. for the mouth. Wow. Hello everybody, welcome to Saul Bones, a marital tour of misguided medicine. I'm your coach, Justin McAroy. And I'm Sydney McAroy. Sydney, I have a great vignette for you. Oh good, Justin. It's a medical vignette. You know how you like medical crap?

I do, sort of like in, in readers digest, when they have those, those little vignettes about like funny medical stories, laughter is the best medicine. Everybody loves those, right? Listen, who's doing this intro? Me or you? I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this.

I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this.

I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. I'm just saying that I love this. It's like your medical journals. They just hoard around the house like a medical journal hoarder. I'm gonna get to all of them. Okay, so here's my vineyard.

You know the video, first she blinded me with science. You know that song by Thomas Dolby? Yes. There's an old man in there and he's the one who's like science. Right. They want him to wear a medical coat for that. But he refused because it's a crime. Why did he refuse?

Is a crime to impersonate a doctor in the UK. Now, I know what you're saying. Is that how acting works? And the answer is no, it isn't. But I don't think we were working with like a crack team of professionals here. What's a crime to impersonate a doctor in the US, too, right? Yes, yes.

I'm sure if he had been a very, very dumb American. He would have thought the same thing, but I don't want to be smurched his good name. I'm, you know, here's the thing. I got this from Popup video like a decade ago. So maybe my memory of it, maybe mixed up or Popup video may have been lied to me. It's hard to say. That's really difficult. You know, do you think that's why I make dreamy quit, Grey's Anatomy? Because he was eating the coffee. He kept on eating. The coffee was catching up to him.

They were catching up. They were sniffing around asking his friends and relatives, like, so what is he, what does he do during the day? Where is this, you remember the kid from Camp Army Loan? What is he doing now? And what's he wearing while he's doing that? What is he, what are they clothes for?

Where are they now? It's actually like an investigation of federal investigation for portrayed as a TV show. It was the CIA all along. But yeah, he wouldn't wear a doctor's coat because he thought it was a crime. Well, I agree with you. I don't think it is a crime.

But as long as we're talking about doctor's coats, you want to talk about that for the show, will we do? Do you want to hear more about them? Yeah, actually, I do with you. I don't think it is a crime, but as long as we're talking about doctor's codes. You want to talk about that for the show, we do. Do you want to hear more about them? Yeah, actually I do, Sid. Not just doctor's codes. I want to talk a little bit about just some of the medical garb, some of the things we associate with doctors, what we are supposed to wear, I guess,

how we are portrayed in television, movies, caricature, what you think a doctor's supposed to look like. Cause that's changed through the years, as you may imagine. Of course. I wanna thank Aaron and Jeremy for both recommending this topic. This was really cool for me to read about too, cause I never thought about the white coat.

Let's start with the white coat. Okay. When do you think doctors start awareness? Well, you're reading ahead, you're cheating. No, I'm not. I, it's around, it goes hand in hand with germ theory, right? Yeah. So like semilwice. No, not that far back. Not that far back. No, but there, there is an association. I mean, that's fair. There is an association with the white coat and science as well as antiseptis. So we did not, as doctors, we did not wear anything like a white

coat until about a hundred years ago. Prior to that early on, physicians mainly dressed in black. Because it looks cool. Like they're trying to look cool and rad. Well, yeah, I mean it does look cool, but there were a couple reasons. One is that black was, and still is a formal color,

like formal attire is black, you know, suits, tuxedos, you know, formal gowns, robes, or judges, magistrates, priests. You know, black is a formal color. Medicine and the clergy have a long-running connection. So I wonder if that's part of it. That is part of it. The tie between, because there were

so many members of the clergy acting as physicians, and then even as we branched away from the church, that kind of idea that because it is such a somber formal profession, that same long black robes would be worn over your clothing. So very similar to what we think of as like a judge wearing, you know? Nancy. Yeah, very fancy.

So it was very formal. Doctors were people who were supposed to be respected and those kinds of like big black robes commanded respect and you know power and so that was another reason they wore them. And then the other thought is that we have in our culture anyway associated wearing black clothing with mourning and death and grieving. And so if they beef it, they're already like suited up and ready to like, hold on, let me just jump in my grieving mode. Okay.

Well, you got to think for a long time, we didn't know what we were doing. And so when you visited a doctor because you're sick, I mean, your odds were already not great just by virtue of the fact that you were walking in the door. And then again, for a long time, we did some pretty, if you listen to show you know this, we did some pretty messed up stuff. And so once you got into our hands, your odds were a lot worse. Yeah, it's sort of like a Magdog McCree FNV classic.

When you get shot at Mad Dog Macree, the next face you see is the undertaker. And he talks to you and he's like, you better get lucky, you're gonna be dead. And it's like, well, okay, are you seeing me for medical? Am I here for medical treatment right now? Like, I understand the connection between like, if I'm don't, I better get lucky or I'm gonna get dead.

I understand that. But like, are you a medical doctor at this point? Are you just like biting your time? What's going on? If he isn't, that doctor. Did I wake up? That doesn't seem like a great arrangement for you because he has like a vested interest in you not.

When, when, for him. You're not making it. Yeah, yeah, when, when. Now, while doctors were, like I said, for up to about 100 years ago, formal attire, if you went to visit a patient at their home, even when doctors weren't wearing the big black robes, even as those, it began to fall out of fashion to have the robes on necessarily, you would still dress and like.

And we're mainly talking about men at the time. There weren't as many female doctors in suits, very formally attired. And that was just the way, if you got blood or guts or whatever on them, that's just what happened. So you would just walk around with that all over your street clothes, your formal street clothes. Now, lab techs, people who worked in, once we began to develop the idea of like laboratory science and experimentation and scientific method and that kind of thing, people who worked

within laboratories and science-related fields already wore coats similar to what we think of as the white coat. Now they were actually beige at the time, but there was already this established connection between a lab coat and science, you know, something, something scientific, something that required thought and experimentation and, you know, evidence. So in the late 1800s, when we see this shift in medicine towards, you know, maybe instead of just making stuff up as we go, we should start coming up with good guesses, testing them, and then writing it all down,

and doing the things that work, and not do the things that don't work. Sounds like a lot of work to me, Doc, I don't know. Maybe we should just keep with the bleeding and stuff. That seems to be working fine. It's weird that that was revolutionary, but that doesn't seem like, but there you go. There you go, I have it.

But as we began to apply more science to medicine, physicians wanted to echo that. And so they adopted the lab coat, the white coat as well. So initially, like I said, it would have been beige, but at the same time, kind of what you alluded to Justin, we were getting the concept of like anisepsis that there were germs and that we wanted cleanliness. Sure.

That there was a connection between having clothes that looked clean and like surroundings that looked clean and things that looked very clean and health. And hence, white became the color. It's a lot easier to hide stains on a black coat than it is on a white one. Exactly. So then everything, basically everything became white. The, not just the white coat, you know, that doctors started wearing, but you also at

this time, and I'll get into this a little bit more, you see like scrubs and nurses uniforms, everything, everything becomes white, because the idea was that then you would, you know, a patient would walk in, and they would see all this spotless white everywhere, and then everything's very clean. Yeah, very clean out. The white coats were adopted by surgeons first.

Because of blood, right? Again, I think it was more the connection with the operating room. Okay. And then the hospital doctors started wearing them as well. So the surgeons in the hospital would wear them and then the other doctors who worked within a hospital setting saw that and said, yeah, that looks like a good.

I like that. And then finally, doctors who worked in offices followed suit. And by the 1920s, it was just kind of the standard. You began to associate this white coat with physicians. And then I think the next big evolution sort of after that was the red nose and big clonchus from Pat Chimes, which of course are standard issues to every doctor. If you're not patient, you win. In the 1990s, they actually developed something called the white coat ceremony. And you may not have heard of this if you're not, you know, either involved in the medical field or don't know, you know, anybody, you know, sometimes like Justin, you've heard of it. If you're a Justin,

you may have been to a few at this point, if you're a Justin McRoy. And the white coat ceremony have been it by Arnold Gold was kind of supposed to be like this initiation, right of passage, so to speak, into the medical field, symbolized by the white coat. So I had a white coat ceremony. You stand there nervously until you get to walk across this age and somebody puts a white coat on you. And then, you're a medical student. You're not a doctor, you're a medical

student. It's the moment when you've decided that someday I'm going to be a doctor, at least I'm willing to start paying, you know, a hundred thousand bucks or so to work towards that happening. So you get the white coat at the beginning of your medical school thing? Yeah, remember? That's right. And so it's something. I've been to a few in the past, so it's hard to. Well, it is confusing because it's something that evolves.

So if you'll notice, medical students wear white coats and then physicians wear white coats. Right, but they're different lengths. Exactly. The student coat is just like to the waist, almost like a sports coat, slightly longer sports coat. Yeah. It's not very convenient. There aren't as big pockets. They never fit. I don't know if maybe there are other schools where this is not true. They don't fit women well. They don't. Surprise. There it is. They're just made for a more typical, like, broader shoulder, narrower waist.

And they're not really made to accommodate, like, It's the glass ceiling and the hips. It's the glass ceiling and the ilfitting coat. Yeah, that is prevalent in medicine, medical garb. When you become a resident, so when you're done with your medical school, and so you get your degree and you're a doctor, then you get the long white coat, which is a big deal, because then you look like a doctor. And if you someone steals it, you have to grant them through wishes, if we can be a doctor again, a lot of people will know that.

They also, a lot of times... They can learn your name if they win your name. That's correct. A lot of times the student code will just have a symbol of your medical school on it. It won't necessarily have your name stitched on it. You'll wear a name tag, but don't have it stitched on it. When you get your official doctor code, it has your name stitched on it, and it has all the pockets everywhere for all the stuff you carry around around. Now what's interesting about that is the white coat is, I mean it's symbolic of doctors, right? Like you think of that, you think of doctors. If you see, you know,

a cartoon doctor, he's wearing a white coat. He's wearing a white coat. He's wearing a white coat. Yes, exactly. I was thinking of Dr. Hibbert. I think that's why I said he. Okay. Yeah. This is all I'm picturing as it's just Simpsons in my head. But he or she is wearing a white coat typically. What's weird is that not all doctors wear those anymore. Oh, yeah. No, so more and more doctors are moving away from the white coat, especially certain groups. Pediatricians don't tend to wear white coats as often because they're intimidating to kids.

Sure. You know, they can be scary. Psychiatrists often don't wear white coats because, again, they can be upsetting to their patients sometimes. In family medicine, I can't tell you the last time I wore my white coat. I mean, it's been a long time. As a resident, I found it quite handy because it had the big pockets and so I could carry a lot of stuff in it when I went around the hospital.

But more and more, we see doctors kind of moving away from it for a couple of reasons. One, because it creates like this barrier in my mind between me and my patients. Like look at me and my fancy white coat. But don't you think that's, I mean, does it make it harder to like get them to listen to you and get respect like without the coat? You know, it's really interesting. They did a study where they ask patients if they like trust and have more respect for their doctor If they wear a white coat or not and it's a really generational divide really older patients tend to like a physician to wear the white coat And feel like they're having more like the doctor experience,

whereas younger patients tend to prefer that their doctor's not wear it. So they feel like it's more of like a partnership, like a teamwork kind of thing. You should offer them the option where you can be in. I'm sorry, was you like Dr. McLean Luther without the white coat today?

We like to give everybody the choice. There's also the last thing I'll say about white coats. There's also a lot of question about white coats as fomites, fomites being inanimate objects that serve as carriers of disease. So there's lots of things that you could wear that would be a, you know, your watch, just a long-sleeved shirt, right?

Right. But the thought is that white coats, there's been a lot of fear that maybe they were spreading disease. Now, there's never been a study that's really born that out, that's really shown that like a white coat. I mean, yes, there's been studies that show white coats carry bacteria.

Yeah. But anything you wear in the hospital is probably gonna carry bacteria on it. Except for the fact that you... Us, like I carry bacteria on me. Except for the fact that you... Us, like I carry bacteria on me. Except for the fact that you almost certainly aren't washing your coat as often as you wear a new clothes, which is to say every single day. So this is one of the grounds of the arguments that physicians who are against white coats

now make is that even though, yes, anything can carry germs, when pulled physicians rarely wash their white coats. And so that was one big argument. I think in the UK, they actually forbid elbows down. You can't have anything on your arms. So I don't know if their white coats are short sleeves or if they just got other life coats. They're off, sweet cut off. There are physicians I work with who wear short sleeves white coats as a result.

Not a result of that band, but because of this thought, this feeling, this theory. So I think nothing from the elbows down sounds like a reasonable idea either way. I don't know. I would say toss off your white coat would be my advice, but to each their own. Now, what about underneath the white coat? I know you guys were scrubs. I know you've stolen a lot of scrubs over the years. I don't tell anybody that. Sorry. So scrubs, similar to the white coat, prior to the late 1800s, doctors were just wearing street clothes. And they would get blood and gutts and poop and goo

and snot all over the street clothes. And it would be like a source of pride. Look at what a good doctor I am. I got so bloody today. A really got in there. Really got in there. And I didn't help anybody got so bloody today. A really got in there. Really got in there and I didn't help anybody, but I go, I was in there. Sometimes if they were in the operating room,

they would just wear like big surgical aprons, which are sort of like butcher aprons. That's a cool image. That's a cool image to like chill people out with. Yeah, not that would be fairly fun. My name is Dr. Peterson and I'm gonna get in there today. I'm gonna get elbow deep in you. So bad that I have this protective apron

because some of you ain't coming out of my clothes. If I don't wear something to protect myself, that's how much you is gonna be out of you and on me today. Which is especially great without anesthesia. Sure, just looking at that. You just look at a dexter standing there over you. Sure. Nurses would wear at that. Just looking at dexter standing there over you. Sure.

Nurses would wear these surgical aprons as well and then whatever accumulated on their surgical aprons just kind of stayed there. So again, as we move into times where we want things to be cleaner, we worry about germs and we don't want to get so messy, we start to develop things like surgical gowns and drapes. These are like precursors of the scrubs. Okay. So scrub like things, but really just gowns that you would put on just when you're in the operating room. And then eventually from that,

we see the creation of scrubs. So like an entire outfit, you know, pants and shirt that you can wear inside the operating room. And then from there in the entire hospital, that would be comfortable, easy to move in, easy to wash, you know, fabric that would be really easy to just throw in the washer constantly because you wanted to keep them clean and that everybody could wear. What makes a good scrub sitting?

I'm going to give you one minute because I know you have strong opinions on the scrubs that are good and the scrubs that are not as comfortable. Okay. When scrubs are brand new, they're very uncomfortable, they're very stiff. I mean, it's recommended that they be 100% cotton, ours are not, I just use the ones thoughts, but they're very stiff and scratchy.

After they've been washed a ton, they get really soft, and that's way better. Again, though, they're, they're, they're sewn and cut way better for men than they are typical male bodies than for female bodies I will say everyone is different, but for my female body, they don't fit me very well And so I generally had to go like a size up to accommodate You know your womanhood my woman to accommodate my boobs. There you go. There it is But washing them more, they get better. They never fit like they do on Grayson Adity. Let me tell you

that. Well, they're not tailored. They get the name scrubs from the process of scrubbing infrastructure. Oh, yeah. I know about that. Yeah. So you get all clean. When we scrub infrastructure, like we like wash our hands really long and really hard and scrub our nails and wash all the way up to the elbow and then don't touch anything and you get your special clean suit on which became scrubs. These calm whites because they were white. Yeah, but not anymore. No, they're not white. So then how the scrubs?

Scrubs stuck, whites didn't. Like I said initially everything in the OR was white. Now if you've ever been in an operating room or seen one, they're pretty bright, right? Yeah. So, imagine that you're a surgeon, you're doing technical work, you're down in there, in the blood and guts, staring at that, and then you look up and the entire room is bathed in glowing white light constantly. Very distracting.

Very hard on the eyes. Hard on the eyes, okay. So, you can get red fatigue from looking inside the Goosey human body for too long. Oh, she's staring at all that pink and red. And after a while it gets hard to distinguish what's pink and what's red and what's important. And that's important.

Yeah, that's important to know what all the Goosey things are. So what happens when that, when you get the red fatigue, is you look up at a white surface and you see those like green shadows. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. And so to cut down on that, they started making scrubs, different colors, most blue and green.

That's the most common color for scrubs, blue and green. Does this feel like clean colors? Well, no, the green is the opposite of red. Oh. And it's the other pathway that I said, a cone you got. Oh, all right. So when you look at something green,

it almost like recharges your red vision. And so you're able to distinguish all those blood and guts a little better. So there you go, blue and green scrubs, especially green, arzure green, for that reason. Cool, that's interesting. I wanna hear, okay, here's what I wanna know about. You wanna know about the thing,

the shiny thing on the head. I'm making a circle in top of my forehead right now with my thumb and forefinger, you can tell. I'm gonna tell you all about that Justin right after we go to the billion department. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that ask you lift my car before the mouth.

Okay, I've waited long enough, Sydney. Tell me about that little thing up there that all cartoon doctors have and no one's ever heading real high. Dr. Hibbert, where is one of those two? Of course it does. So Justin's referring to the head mirror, which is that round, shiny thing that is usually depicted like squarely in the center of a doctor's forehead. That is not where you would wear that for any use. Let me say that to begin with.

So what is this thing for? Yes. The idea of a head mirror is to be able to reflect light in order to more closely examine the back of the throat to look down the throat or up the nose. OK. So in order to use it, what you would do is, is like, right now I'm sitting across from Justin.

If I had a head mirror on, I would have a light directly behind him, just above and behind him. I would flip my mirror over my eye. If you notice, there's a hole in the middle of the head mirror. Okay. It goes over one eye and you're looking through the hole in the middle of the head mirror. Okay. It goes over one eye and you're looking through the hole in the middle.

What? And the surface that now is outward is very shiny reflective. It's a mirror, it's a concave mirror. So it's going to reflect that light source from behind Justin off of my mirror and then down his throat or up his nose or wherever I'm looking.

That is the purpose of the head mirror. Baffling. Yep. But now we have electricity. Well, hold on. Let me tell you the history of this. So I was invented in 1743 by a French. I had to figure this out.

It was an Aconshore, which is like a, he was like a male midwife or perhaps obstetrician. I'm not really sure You're not really a con-sure I'm not that was a good one LeVair and he Developed a bent mirror that he could wear and look he was obsessed with the lernix Which is again very that's back at you know back in way back in the throat that's not in Anywhere where a midwife or an obstetrician would be examining

so this confused me further. So it was just a fetish? He just really liked to look at larynxes. Anyway, so he developed this mirror and then all these people tried to improve on it because they realized that this is a great way to look down patients' throats and up their noses, which were desperate to do. We needed a way to do that. Okay.

So, they tried different ways to improve it by attaching a little extended speculum to the end of the mirror and then put a candle on one end of the speculum so we would stick something like a duck build like thing down your throat or up your nose with a candle on the other end. As you can imagine, these things didn't work very well. There was an attempt to like have an epiglottis retractor where we could pull your epiglottis out of the way.

No, that didn't work very well. There was a Spanish vocal teacher, a famous Spanish vocal teacher, Manuel Garcia, who used a dental mirror and a handheld mirror and sunlight in order to accomplish this to help look down his throat because he matters a voice for his area. So if you can imagine that, it's like a bent mirror and then another mirror and then a window is what he was using. This was the great medical advance that he was making. Two mirrors and a window. You know, it's fun.

You give people a hard time. We do for being bad at stuff, but like, look how hard it was just to do that. That was really hard. It's a big, that thing. And he presented this to the Royal Society of Medicine. And everybody at the Royal Society of Medicine got really excited about it. Like, look, he got two mirrors and some sunlight and look what he was able to do. So people started experimenting.

There was a professor in Vienna, a Turk who was trying to reproduce these results of Garcia's and he couldn't do it, which the reason why is because he was trying to do it in Vienna in the fall. And there isn't enough sunlight to get the light bright trying to do it in Vienna in the fall and there isn't enough sunlight to get the light bright enough to reflect it, which is a crazy thing that he didn't think about. It was repeated later by Zermock and he was the one who is finally given credit for what we think of as the modern head mirror because he did the same thing only with candlelight in 1858.

More constant, yeah. Basically just the head mirror, a candlelight as the light source reflected it down patients thirts up their noses really has not changed much since then. Just we're using electric light source versus a candle. Exactly. Now, here's the thing about it. You don't see many doctors using these these days if you've been to a physician unless you've been to an ear, nose, and throat doctor.

That is the one field where you still see them in use or ear, nose, and throat doctors. And that doesn't mean all of them use it, but there are certainly ENTs who are still trained with them. They're incredibly difficult to learn how to use. It's not something you can just figure out. I am not trained in it, so I would not attempt to use it. I wouldn't be able to. You really need to be trained in using it.

But in fact, I got you one. Do you think you would practice with it? Yeah, I'd draw. Do you want to learn how to do it? I think it'd be a cool. It'd be a cool, yeah. Okay. I think it'd be a cool thing to do.

And there are people who still like them because they like fold up easily in your pocket, and they're lightweight on your head your head is just a mirror. And what they've been replaced by is a head lamp, you know, it's just a light that you strap around your head. Yeah. So it's still hands free, but it's also heavier. And I don't know. People, there's the argument that sometimes more technology isn't better.

Should we go back to head mirrors? I don't know, but there's still people being trained on them to this day. Well, that's wild. I, the people are actually still using that. That's pretty, pretty nutty. Now, I want, I, I know we're mainly talking about physicians. I just want to make a quick note. We've done a whole episode on nursing before and I talked a little bit about what they wore, but I just wanted a couple notes about nursing uniforms because some of this

played along with, with what we've already discussed. Initially, as we talked about the tie between the medical world and the clergy, initially nurses were nuns. Sure. So old nursing uniforms look a lot like nun habits. If you look at very old pictures of nuns or of nurses, they look like nuns. It's slightly modified nuns. They were long black robes, they were like nuns, slightly modified nuns. They were long black robes, they were white head coverings.

Even as nursing moved away from its religious roots, they still were these incredibly long gowns and that was to protect them from the patients, from any illness that the patient might have and they were called fever gowns. Yeah, wow. Which is kind of crazy, fever gowns or fever dresses. So these really uncomfortable, bulky, long gowns dresses that dresses. So these really uncomfortable bulky long gowns, dresses that nurses

would have to wear. Again, with the 1800s when everything turned white, that's where we see the origin of the stereotypical white nursing uniform. Sure, a nurse ratchet, kind of. The dress and the hat and everything. And it really wasn't until the 70s that we see nursing uniforms finally become practical. There was a long time where nursing was synonymous with like a dress. And yes, there were like scrub dresses and things that were more comfortable, although people who had to wear the scrub dresses will tell you they weren't. But were the short white dresses. There was a lot of sexualization of nurses, and so they were stuck in these very uncomfortable

and practical white dresses until the 70s. It's gotta be the presence of more men in the field, right? In the nursing field. I'm sure that was a big boost to it. It was one, the presence of more men, and then two, the realization that, you know, nurses have a lot of work to do, and they can't be worried about trying to straighten out their skirts all day, you know? They're professionals, they have a lot of work to do and they can't be worried about trying to straighten out.

They're skirts all day. They're professionals. They have a job. Let's let them wear comfortable clothes that allow them to perform their jobs. Sure. Today, I'm sure you've seen your doctor, most of us just wear street clothes, business cash. That's sloppy. A little bit.

I like cash. I like business cash, I think that's how I go. I don't wear a white coat. There are doctors who do. You see that more in the hospital. As Justin has noticed, you see white coats over scrubs with heat, which he thinks is crazy. But that is like, that was like my standard resident attire. I get it, I guess.

Yeah, I guess. It, I see a lot of sports coats over scrubs in the hospital. Now that's the one that I think is a little bit bananas. Everybody wears scrubs now. Everybody. That is not just a doctor thing, of course. Everybody in the hospital is wearing scrubs.

A lot of hospitals color code it. So in our hospital, based on what color scrubs you may be able to tell what sort of job that person has, not necessarily though. The ER has a weird uniform. I don't know if this is outside of our ER where they wear scrub tops and khakis go figure. Don't know why that's practical but that's our ER. Justin you had a question about why sometimes we're wearing like extra masks and yeah I was just curious how you decide like you know when you're you're going in to see sick people a lot of the time, people

who would be contagious a lot of the time, I'm just curious how you decide whether or not you're going to take additional precautions. So we decide actually there's a lot of criteria whether or not we're going to take additional precautions. So for every patient we use what we call universal precautions, which means we wash our hands. If we're going to touch like fluids or anything like that, we wear gloves. Obviously, we handle sharp things with care.

I mean, the universal precautions are meant to, we assume everybody's got something infectious that we could get. And so we take the appropriate precautions, not to get it. That's kind of where it comes from. Beyond that, there are special things, like for instance, contact precautions.

And that's usually if a patient has a history of a fairly serious infection, like an MRSA infection, a special resistance staff infection. In that case, we might come into your room wearing some sort of like paper yellow gown, angloves, just to make sure that we don't get any of our clothes contaminated or our hands contaminated. Mainly so we don't carry that to another patient in the hospital. You can see us wearing different kinds of masks as well. So moving on from contact precautions,

you've got like droplet precautions. So let's say that you've got the flu or Michael Plasma pneumonia or your little kid, you got RSV or something like that, crew, we might come in your room wearing a mask, just a regular old like surgical mask kind of thing. Let's say we're worried about something airborne, an airborne pathogen that's fairly infrequent.

Then we might come in your room in a little bit heavier duty mask, called an N95 mask, where those are in tuberculosis rooms. And then sometimes if we come in your room wearing a gown and a mask, it's not because we're worried about getting stuff honest to carry it on other patients because we want to be careful for you.

For instance, a patient who's undergoing chemotherapy and who may have a suppressed immune system. They might come in wearing a mask or gown or gloves or something to provide an extra barrier between us and our germs and you vulnerable patient. That's where your results will be. between us and our germs and you vulnerable patients. Well, that's very responsible of you. So just some other things you might see us wearing and why we might look like astronauts when we walk in your room. Folks, that's gonna do it for us for this week.

We hope you've had a lot of fun. I wanna say thanks to taxpayers for letting us use their song, Medicines as the intro and outro of our program. And also, you know, I never mentioned this, but I'll say the intro, the is an acoustic version of the taxpayers. If you go to taxpayers.bandcamp.com, you can buy their music. And I think you should do that because I think they're a fine group. Thank you to MaximumFund.org for letting us be a part of their network. Everybody over there

is super great. I recommend a new podcast to you. MaximumFun.org for letting us be a part of their network. Everybody over there is super great. I recommend a new podcast to you. Maximum Fun called Adam Ruins Everything. If you like that show, the TV show, now there's a podcast of the TV show. Well, I mean, it's not an adaptation. It's just the same cat, you know, making a podcast. But still, it's a new addition to our network from maximum fun. And I think it's, it's, people really seem to dig it. And I think you

should check it out. It's on iTunes, much like all of our shows. Other shows that sitting in our work on are at McElroyShows.com, that's MCEL, R-ELROY.shows.com. You can find a lot of our other things and video things and writing. So go explore our family of podcasts. A podcast. And just our family. I mean, it's our family. It's our family, basically. It's an actual family, literal family. And that's going to do it for us folks until next week. My name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfund.org

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