docs: def sendrequest(self, request):
          '''
              Recieves a request xml as a string and posts it
              to the health service url specified in the
              settings.py
          '''
          url = urlparse.urlparse(self.connection.healthserviceurl)
          conn = None
          if url.scheme == 'https':
              conn = httplib.HTTPSConnection(url.netloc)
          else:
              conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(url.netloc)
          conn.putrequest('POST', url.path)
          conn.putheader('Content-Type', 'text/xml')
          conn.putheader('Content-Length', '%d' % len(request))
          conn.endheaders()
          try:
              conn.send(request)
          except socket.error, v:
              if v[0] == 32:      # Broken pipe
                  conn.close()
              raise
          response = conn.getresponse().read()
          return etree.fromstring(response)