There's an old joke that asks what the difference is between God and a doctor, the answer being that God doesn't think He's a doctor.  It's funny because there's a grain of truth in it.  Doctors do think well of themselves, and they want the lower run of human beings who didn't attend medical school to think well of them and to trust them.  It's an attitude that extends to many health care workers, such as nurses, physician assistants, and first responders, and to a certain extent, it may even be justified.  The health care worker is the one who takes care of you when you are sick.  Theoretically, we are all on the same side.

That no longer appears to be the case.  Health care workers are increasingly bitter towards COVID patients who are asking for non-Democrat-approved medical treatment, specifically ivermectin.  The current "treatment" for a person who tests positive for COVID is to tell them to go home and quarantine themselves.  If the patient feels ill, he is to go to the hospital.  By then it may be too late.

There is a U.K. trial to test ivermectin as a possible COVID treatment.  The World Health Organization has recommended that ivermectin be used only in clinical trials, which suggests that ivermectin as a treatment for COVID is worth exploring.  Approximately 3.7 billion doses of ivermectin have been administered over the past 30 years for parasitic infections, and harmful side-effects are rare.  There appears to be no valid reason not to try a medical treatment that in any case will do no harm and that may prevent a person from developing a severe case of COVID.

Image: Healthcare worker (text added).  Piqsels.

Health care workers should be grateful there is a treatment that may prevent serious illness in their patients.  They are not grateful.  They are increasingly disgusted with patients who are not vaccinated, as if vaccination against COVID prevents a person from catching the disease (it doesn't), and they don't want patients to use ivermectin lest it slow vaccination efforts.

Hospitals are fighting so hard against giving ivermectin to patients that they are being sued across the country to provide the treatment, and the hospitals are losing their fight against giving the treatment to COVID patients.  Judges are ruling that patients have the right to try ivermectin.

Health care workers are responding with rage against patients who only want to receive some treatment for their illness.  A nurse in Wisconsin says of the unvaccinated, "I find it frustrating.  I get angry...I wonder why they did this, why they're doing this to me.  Why are they doing this to all the people that need to be away from sick people in the waiting room?  I'm frustrated because I can't get them out of the frickin' waiting room."

A nurse in California complains, "Our patients don't trust us anymore. ... A year and a half ago, the emotion that came with the influx of these patients was sympathy, empathy, remorse, guilt — and that well of emotion has dried up.  What is left is anger and hostility and mistrust."  A doctor in Wisconsin supports mask mandates, insists that vaccines are the way to stop the virus, and wonders why patients are suspicious and hostile.

Perhaps the medicine needed most is a good dose of common sense.  We have been told for almost two years that COVID is a deadly disease ravaging the planet.  Common sense would dictate that if such were the case, a drug that will do no harm and might save some lives ought to be tried.  At the very least, doctors prescribing medicine to patients instead of getting mad at them might get everyone on the same side again: the side of preserving good health and preventing disease.

Pandra Selivanov is the author of Future Slave, a story about a 21st-century black teenager who goes back in time and becomes a slave in the Old South.