Couple of questions about medical professionals (more suited to IMHO than GQ):
Is there actually some sort of specific training meant to de-sensitize students in medical school towards the career of blood, guts, shit, puke and gaping wounds they can expect to see much of over their career, or do the instructors just let it happen naturally?
Around what percentage of doctors and nurses in the world ***aren’t ***desensitized to this sort of stuff? <5%? 0%?
I don’t know the answer to #1 from a medical-professional perspective. I can tell you that while aversion to vomit, blood, guts, etc. is very common and perhaps the human default, it is far from universal. IOW, specific “desensitization” training may not be necessary, as people with especially strong aversions will avoid medical training.
A think many are affected when very bad things happen to young kids.
Do you remember the old '70s TV show "“Quincey, M.E.”? In the opening to the show (linked) Quincy, the medical Examiner is demonstrating autopsy procedures to a crop of new police officers, all of whom immediately lose their last meal, faint or just run.
This may well be urban legend but I’m told that new Med school student often are thrown into the deep end of graphic and gooey medical effluvia as early and as harshly as is practical. The message seems to be “This is your future now. Get used to it or become a Podiatrist.”
Data point of one but my mother’s RN classes definitely had such a moment.
I hunt, and I’ve known of several people who went out for their first time and tossed cookies when it came time to field dress the deer (cut it open and get the organs out before they start to putrefy.)
Re: Observers at an autopsy losing it when the blood and guts start coming out:
My college health ed instructor tells of his experience attending such an event. It was actually a physiology class where they dissect a cadaver. The cadaver was marinated in formaldehyde. According to his telling, it was the formaldehyde fumes that did it.
Depends on the specialty, I suspect - a surgeon may see a lot of blood, but not much vomit, for example. A pediatrician gets the vomit and feces, but not as much blood as a surgeon (probably). A dermatologist might get by with relatively little of all three (but a fair amount of pus).
(somewhere I read that medical students should decide which effluvia bothers them the most, and choose their specialty accordingly)
I remember the episode that clip is from. Quincy wanted to go somewhere to investigate something but he was scheduled to demonstrate for the new cops. So he did the goriest stuff he could think of to get the rookies to go away.
I often wonder what kinda person it takes to be a proctologist. Has to be the worst specialty.
Except someone mentioned podiatrist. Nope, nope, nope. Do not want to see folks foot diseases, ever.
As Mom I’ve seen some pretty nasty stuff coming outta my kids. Never got used to it.
Yeah, I remember that too. “You are now going to enter the most fascinating sphere of police work” - and down they go one by one.
Ha, we pathologists see ( and smell) it all.
Not as much in the urp department, but what with stomach and small intestinal contents plus having had numerous dogs, one of which was into recreational vomiting, I’ve become fairly inured to regurgitation.
Autopsies in med school gross anatomy went slowly with gradual entry into body cavities, so no one in my memory got sick.
*last night I saw an episode of ‘Homicide Hunter’ in which a young woman was found dead in a forest with her little dog, which had survived by dining on Mama. Pluto the field spaniel was resting on my lap as this gruesome scene unfolded. Gave me a turn, it did. 
Puke and poo don’t really bother me. I’ve helped sick friends, and cleaned animal cages. Blood does bother me but I can handle it, and freak out when it’s all over.
The first anatomy lesson really is a big filter, according to several doctors I know. If you can’t cut a corpse, you’ve got no business being a doctor.
I know several medics who prefer to avoid treating people they know, partly because in order to treat someone they know they have to do more mental preparation, more separation of “me-human” and “me-medic”, than for a stranger. All of them will also then be available to act as advocates for the patient or explain things to other acquaintances in ways that they wouldn’t if they were treating that person.
Blood and vomit meh.
The continuous oozing of c-diff stool will have me retching.
On that note, I once went over 20 years without vomiting.
Till the c-diff.
The smell from draining an empyema is fairly memorable.
I googled c-diff. I’m very sorry I did.
I’m not googling empyema. Nope.
not al lof them my cousin in law who was one test away from being an rn can handle blood feces and other fluids (she works for a doc who does cosmetic/dr pimple popper stuff now ) cant be in the same house with anyone barfing … even if she hears the sound shes joining them soon…
Friend of mine is a respiratory therapist. He can handle snot and drool and all kinds of mucus no problem, but he’ll still retch if he has to change a diaper and isn’t all that good at vomit either. His wife is an ICU nurse who started out on a VA gen surg unit and she’s pretty much unfazed by anything the human body can throw out of itself.
I’m pretty good with most stuff but dayum, I had to clean up after a litter of parvo puppies once upon a time and that is an absolutely horrifyingly awful stench–probably not too far off the already mentioned c. diff effluvia. I swear, over 20 years later, than I can still smell that stuff if I think about it too hard. Guh. The sight of icky stuff I’m pretty inured to but the smells can still get me gagging if I don’t keep a tight hold on the reflex.
My brother used to have a cat like that. This sentence had me LOLing! They changed his diet, put him on medication, hid things that he liked to lick with this as the result, etc. and nothing worked. Poor thing lived to be about 10 years old. I’m currently dealing with a drop of cat urine that has seemed to permate my entire living space, and NOTHING is getting rid of it. Not baking soda, not Lysol, not even Nature’s Miracle. 
Just hope it diffuses with time.
Anyway, I’ve heard that the thing that bothers many doctors and nurses the most is abscesses. We all know what urine, vomit, stool, etc. smell like, but you’re not going to know what an abscess smells like until it’s opened.
I’ve read about empyema, which used to be very common in the pre-antibiotic era, and how doctors would often drain a liter or more of pus out of people’s chest cavities - and they would recover! I’ve also heard my share of horror stories about peri-rectal abscesses, which don’t sound like much fun either.
My veterinarian said that for her, the grossest thing is cleaning infected ear wax out of a dog’s ear canal. There’s just something about it that is especially nasty to her, and she dresses almost like she’s going to go into an Ebola ward if she does that, because she doesn’t want to get any of it on her. Double gloves and shoe covers, eye protection, a hood, etc.
In 2011, I had to have a root canal do-over, followed by an apicoectomy (DO NOT Google-image that if you are squeamish). Truthfully, the thing I feared most didn’t happen, and it was this: I’d heard many stories about the dentist drilling into the tooth, and the infection’s smell permeated the room.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen when I had the original root canal in 1987 either, and I had a big pus pocket in my gums. :eek:
This is what happens in an apicoectomy.
The dentist, usually an endodontist (root canal specialist) peels back the gums and cracks the jawbone, which over the tooth roots is about as thick as an eggshell, and removes diseased tissue and cuts off the end of the root to a point where there’s no infection remaining. The tissues grow back, and an x-ray of that tooth has the root canal filling, and a sharp diagonal edge to the root instead of the rounded roots of my other teeth. For me, the procedure itself took about 10 minutes and was less traumatic than a filling.