By Ian Coates

Last updated 11:25, Monday, 24 November 2008

Medicine has always fascinated me, especially surgery. Maybe not in a Casualty kind of way, because I can’t watch the gruesome close ups.

For me it’s very personal, I’m never happier than when I’m picking at scabs, spots and blemishes and I have wondered how I came to be this way inclined.

When I was a child, if I ever got a splinter of wood in my finger, my mum would say; ‘tell your Dad’.

Perhaps it was this medicinally-challenged upbringing, where minor surgical procedures were performed upon me, not by a doctor with several years’ medical school training but by a father with a needle and perhaps a latent yearning for joining the medical – or butchery – professions.

Fortunately for my siblings and me, he reserved his operations to removing skelfs from our persons. He was quite adept, but his bedside manner left a lot to be desired.

I still remember the phrase: “I’m going to have to dig it out.”

It was the same phrase he used for excavating trenches and to an eight-year-old child, very intimidating.

I doubt his teachings would be the accepted norm for today’s society.

His theory was; if it doesn’t hurt, then it can’t work.

His tried and trusted method of removing mouth ulcers was to put salt on them to dry them up. For all our protesting he would never accept that it just hurt, and didn’t heal.

It was the same with a product called Glinteel for cold sores, and his claim; ‘it’s painful, so it must work’ was little comfort.

That school of thought must mean that massaging an open wound is therapeutic – maybe not the way to encourage patients to come forward, but possibly a way for the NHS to reduce waiting times?

Whatever the truth, I’m not following in my father’s footsteps. So now, when I have a skelf in my hand I do it myself and, if he is around, I keep my mouth shut.