anti-superbug neckties.

to wear a tie or not to wear a tie that is the question.

on the one hand they (the medics) like to wear a tie (see, there must be something wrong with them in the first place) but these ties are universally filthy. it’s a bit weird but your average fella never ever washes his ties (probably something to do with the fact that they are the very devil to iron) and in the course of a tie’s lifetime it will get covered in mouldering curries and tv snacks, will accumulate hairs from the pet cat and lord knows what else – these doctor types tend to lead quite sordid private lives.

the sensible thing for doctors, would be to refrain from wearing neckties altogether which would not routinely get dipped in blood plasma or be draped across each patient in turn during ward rounds, picking up various nasty germs and bacteria along the way which in turn will gorge greedily on the aforementioned curries and tv dinners and pet fur or indeed get lost inside a patient during operations but that is probably most unlikely. in fact, a doctors tie is probably statistically more likely to carry more germs than the average domestic toilet seat.

but then, doctors will argue that patients will not treat them in the reverential manner that they have become accustomed to. well, no, actually doctors wouldn’t argue that at all; they would say something quite different, along the lines of “the patients would not have the same feeling of confidence or trust in an open-shirted physician”.

of course, all this debate is missing the point entirely. what doctors * should * be doing is to be washing their hands more regularly. for goodness sake, we’ve known this fact for years now. where’s Flo Nightingale when you need her?

we should be equipping our doctors with fully disposable neckties (*with a nice pretty pattern on it) containing an inner compartment filled with antiseptic handwash and a small valve similar to a toothpaste nozzle at the bottom. they can just squeeze out a few mm of this antiseptic all over their hands before handling each patient.

* I wonder if there is any deep-rooted psychological associations between the pattern on a doctor’s tie and the patient’s subsequent prognosis.