*** UPDATE --> Happy 141st Birthday, Canada! (01.07.08) ***

Another Cheshire cat smile graced my Eastern Slavic lips at dawn as sat down over a cup of Italian espresso in an allegedly Russian-owned cafe as I was being served by a Slovak waitress in our apparently all-Czech capital.

No matter.

Such a quilt-like "Czech" experience only added to my fulsome glee after reading the following article (and associated bonus sections) in MfD's (for my foreign readers, that's "Mlada Fronta Dnes" = Today's Brave Young Front) Monday edition.

In a single sentence -- this is the reason I enjoy dwelling in this country.

Dear non-Prague, non-Czech based readers: did you know there's always a new development underway?

What I admire most about my co-citizens in this most latter-day of Greek city-states (yes, Prague is often not indicative of life in Cesko) is how we're always willing to step up to the plate and improve our skills. We want to improve...and quickly. We step into the breach, mightily, as we slowly recapture that fighting Czechoslovak spirit which should have been our due in September 1938. Our grunts possessed mighty sacks of venom, and they weren't afraid to show anyone.

Quick content summary: the Czech Medical Chamber (CLK) has introduced a series of 6-month long "sensitivity training" courses for several hundred doctors from across the wide expanse of our CR, part of its master plan of improving doctor-patient relations. The article describes how poor patient communication techniques -- anything from flippantly dealing with aggressive, irate, or terribly drunk patients, to learning how to properly deliver bad news to patient's families and relatives, not aloofly -- is a direct inheritance from Our Old System (aka "socialism with the devil's horns"). What the CLK's course will attempts to radically alter -- through role-playing, primarily -- is the sometimes-haughty attitude doctors have towards their patients, especially when patients begin to challenge their know-how.

A fabulous read as I digested my morning cuppa and scone.

Personally, I've never had a single negative interaction at any Prague hospital I've had the misfortune of visiting.

The couple of times I've actually had a dire need to visit "Na Homolce" -- and on both occasions I arrived rather late in the night -- the triage nurses and attending physicians were positively heavenly. In fact, on both occasions they were also female, much to the surprise of the misogynist detractors at this blog who would still wish to prevent the blossoming of the Age of Aquarius in our nation-state. Who would choose to keep our XX Chromosomal Units permanently thunderstruck.

I like the direction things are going in over here. Do you?

I've opined about this before, in fact, about how the medication-diagnosis pas a deux isn't the only dynamic afoot in the healing process.

Kind words emanating from a knowledgeable, gracious physician often act as a soothing balm, as Nobel Prize-winning heart specialist Dr. Bernard Lown ably described in his best-selling tome, THE LOST ART OF HEALING. Doctoring in the Maimonidean spirit, as it were.

For those patients entering the twilight of their lives, I ::: shudder ::: at the thought how some of them will have to brook the roiling currents of our Prague hospital nightshifts...what with some of our doctors still hunt-and-pecking up their diagnoses on '70s-era typewriters, handing off endless slips of paper to each other as part of an endless ream of circle-jerk paper-chasing.

Look, I know -- save the rebukes, haters...I've heard all about it, and I'm not reprimanding, m'kay? I, too, realize we're in an Emerging Situation; yet rather than thrust all our Czech reforming attentions on things which have an exclusively macroeconomic bent, why don't we instead pump massive streams of dosh towards our institutions of higher medical practice? Very much like Cuba -- a net exporter of physicians across the world -- why can we not rather become mavens in one particular area of expertise? Just like the Old Days (the Sixties), when we were a centre of excellence in production of (Tatra) T3 red-and-cream tram cars, produced in the humble 'hood of Smichov (Praha 5)? A new kind of COMECON? Amen.

Hear, hear to the Czech Medical Chamber. Another step in the right direction. Another reassertion of our National Sovereignty. Another chunk of festering oxidation hacked off the inert rusty colossus which is our Hussite Heritage. Amen.

May our fighting spirit be revived again in Our Days and Our Time. Amen (and in case you were wondering, that's the neutral non-religious sort of "amen." I hardly wish to offend the >70% of my readers who don't believe in the Higher Classifier of All Matter and Things).

ADM...outtie for now.