Back in school, I remember Mr Owen§ commenting on how whenever advertisers wanted people to inherently trust some spurious claim they made about a certain product, they would use someone wearing a white lab coat to convey the message. Obviously this person was very likely to simply be an actor, but because viewers associated the white coat with scientists, their brain would subconsciously give the statement more veracity in it’s assessment.
So why this meandering introduction? Well a BBC article has detailed a recommendation to be made that hospital doctors should do away with their white lab style coats. The reason? The coats themselves are excellent at spreading infections from one area or patient to another. Again our school teacher also mentioned that you needed to be really careful not to contaminate one experiment with chemicals or reagents from another. Obviously a student’s experiment’s results are not as important as a patient’s health or even life, so I wonder why it took so long for this opinion to make it from a teacher level to health professionals? Also mentioned are the banning of long sleeves where practicable, as well as wrist watches and jewellery, for the same reasons as the traditional white doctor’s coat. I do wonder what women whose religion forbid too much skin to be on display will be required to do?
§ Or it could have been Miss Ribena-Berry, Mrs Dowse or another of our science teachers… this was about 15 years ago now, so I hope you will forgive my fuzzy memory…
