>>>>A couple of years ago, my liver enzymes shot through the roof. My doctor had me scheduled for a CAT scan the next day. Think that happens in places where they have socialized medicine?
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>>Socialized health schemes have no CAT scanners or modern equipment so most likely they'd take a history, conduct an examination, consider the differential diagnosis... and tell you to cut down on the booze. ;-)
>
>Fifteen years ago I was sitting in a room with an illusion of a CAT scanner in our local hospital. And mind you, back then we were under Sloba's soft dictatorship and mostly under all kinds of sanctions.

Here the same thing.. about 25 years ago, had a problem with an ankle, that MRI that took 1mm sliced images of the bone and flesh mass was probably an illision too.

Related, this week as you might know :), I was at a conference in istanbul and my colleage from Canada was expecting a poor city. He was absolutely amazed of the dynamic modern city and its wealth. I did ask him outright what he did expect. His answer was a poor city. I think this is something that is common in North America, but many of those percieved poor cities in my book let Toronto, San Fransisco or Phillidelphia look like underdevelopped. North american friends that visited a new turkish clinic where absolutely stunned about the facilities they saw and made their jaws drop and mouth watering. And here we are talking about Turkey...

But then, istanbul was/is just amazing.