Halfway Over...

I can't believe that our trip is halfway over! It seems like we have been here awhile since we have done so many things, but at the same time it has gone by really fast. I have absolutely loved the trip though. It's hard for me to pick my favorite thing that we've seen or done because there have been so many, but if I did have to choose I would probably say the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden. I thought the entire museum was incredibly fascinating. I really like how Steffi and Dr. Wasser organized our trip for this museum too. I feel like I got much more out of the museum by each of us being assigned to a specific room and giving a tour of the rooms rather than us just exploring everything on our own in the amount of time that we had. I really wish we had more time to spend in the museum though. I thought that the wax models of the faces with various diseases, the display in the room that I explained, were really graphic but really cool. I thought it was really interesting that they were made from actual people so they depicted individualized symptoms. I would love to come back to this museum someday and spend time looking at each of the exhibits. It would not be a problem at all for me to spend a full day there.

I really have enjoyed the Blood and Guts novel that we were assigned to read. I have not finished all of the book yet, but the things that I have heard in some of the lectures are more familiar to me because I had read the book. All of the lectures that we have heard so far on this trip have been really interesting to me. I found that the lecture on complementary medicine was easier for me to listen to than the lecture on homeopathy and I think I learned more from this lecture also. The concepts in this lecture weren't as foreign to me as the ideas in the lecture that we heard in Bonn by the homeopath. The Charite Museum that we visited in Berlin was also very interesting. I really enjoyed looking at all of the organ specimens that they had displayed, especially the hearts and the fetuses, even though these were really difficult to look at since they were all very deformed and it was very sad, they were still very interesting to me. I just wish that the captions under the specimens were in English so that I would've known more about what exactly I was looking at.

I had never really understood exactly what a socialized health care system looked like until Dr. J. Keilstein explained Germany's healthcare today when we visited MHH. I like the system much more than I thought I would based on the American idea of "socialism" that I have always heard. I feel like their system actually is much more effective than the one America has, despite the fact that doctors make much less money here. I have very mixed feelings about the health insurance issues beacuse I know firsthand what it is like to not have health insurance. My stepdad desperately needs knee surgery and my mom has a herniated disc and also needs surgery so they are both living in constant pain and have been for awhile. However, they cannot affort to get the procedures done because they are unable to afford the healthcare that their employers offer. I'm not sure that they would be able to afford insurance under a socialized healthcare sytem either since such a large percentage (15.6%) of people's incomes are taken out, but there are many other things to take into account that we wouldn't have to pay for if we had a socialized medical system. Also, if it were mandatory to have health insurance for a flat rate, my parents and the other 47 million uninsured Americans would be able to get the high-cost procedures done that they would otherwise be unable to afford. I realize that my salary as a physician would be much less under this kind of healthcare plan, but that is not the reason that I want to be a doctor. I'm not sure what the solution to the healthcare problem in the US would be, and I realize there is not a perfect solution to accomodate everyone, but it is interesting to hear other countries' policies and it will be very interesting to see how Obama's planned policies will change healthcare back home.

I am very excited about the next week and a half. I really look forward to visiting the heart clinic next week and then going to Vienna soon after that. I know that I will definitely be ready to be back in Texas weather by the end of the trip because I do not tolerate cold weather very well. I used to think it was really really cold at home when it was right at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but I now know that I was very wrong about that! I am also looking forward to American food. I have enjoyed alot of the food I have had here, but some of it just makes me not feel good so I never know what to order. Yay for laundry tomorrow! It will be amazing to have clean clothes! Guten nacht!