Someone beat us to the satire, but like good ingredients, you needn't add much to plate it and go: according to Chris Fowler on Gameday Saturday, Tim Tebow performed not just medical procedures during his last trip to the Philippines, but "used a scalpel" under the supervision of medical types. Meaning: Tim Tebow, Jungle Surgeon, lives.
This makes us unbelievably queasy to think about, and not because Tim Tebow could slice precious hand ligaments, forever damaging his non-throwing hand in the process. (Fumbles, kids. They kill more people every year than tetanus. This statistic brought to you by the Swindle School of Handily Fabricated Statistics.) Unless they're talking about psychic surgery, something we think Tebow could master with a bowl of pig innards and five minutes of training, and which is quite popular in the Philippines.
In a former life, we worked in development/refugee stuff, and part of that stuff included a stint working with an emergency prep unit at a large development agency. They guys who worked there were universally crusty development types, mostly American vets with medical training or cynical Brits (redundancy), and they had tales of being in the field following earthquakes or in undersupplied refugee camps and having no choice but to perform basic medical procedures: IVs, injections, bandaging and perhaps lancing if absolutely necessary.
None of them--and we're talking about PTSD cases with skin cancers from third-world sun that demanded their own coffee in the morning, damn grizzled types--none of them had stories about actually opening people up. None of 'em. A large development agency working in shithouse conditions like the legendarily nasty camp at Goma cringes when they hear about that happening, mostly because they try to keep an ample supply of doctors on staff to do the nasty stuff.
It's not like anyone can sue; there happens to be a paucity of malpractice attorneys on the volcanic plains of the eastern Congo. (Young law school grads---we smell opportunity!) It's a matter of medical ethics: if you don't really know what you're doing, you probably shouldn't be cutting into another human being. We really, really, really hope Fowler misspoke---or at the very least, got an inflated/inaccurate story handed to him. Because, for lack of a better word, that is some sketchy, sketchy shit, even with the Philippines' atrocious doctor/patient ratio.
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