It's Too Bad I'm Not Scottish

If this PSA is any indication, the Scots take their colon cancer -- or rather, bowel cancer -- screening very seriously. It makes you wonder if, had I been Scottish, might my cancer have been diagnosed earlier than it was as American. 

Perhaps.

Of course, on the flip side of that equation a) it seems that the screening was mostly focused on older people (which might have made sense at one point, but increasingly doesn't) so might not have been directed at me, and b) the steps the test required -- click the link at the end of the video below for another video showing testing procedure -- is probably the sort of thing I would've avoided if at all possible. Anything that involves "catching your poo before it hits the water" is probably not something I'm going to be rushing to the front of the line to participate in, so even if I could've been tested I very probably wouldn't have been. So maybe I wouldn't have been diagnosed any earlier.

Who knows? And really, who cares? It is what it is, and so we roll along. 

But in any case, the Scottish bowel cancer screening effort gives me an excuse to post their PSA (which I found amusing) and, once again, gives me the chance to identify yet another advantage of "socialized medicine": in a single payer system, this kind of broad uniform screening is way easier to do than in a system that requires hundreds of entities to first agree as to who's going to pay for it. (Everybody's answer: "Somebody else," and therefore it never happens.)

So now, without further ado, I give you "The Poo Song":