DOCTOR HEAL THYSELF: I’m not a big fan of doctors. Most of them have quite an unpleasant attitude. I accept the fact that when you’re sick, ya just gotta put up with it. They’re probably right in looking down on you from on high when you come to them hurting or bleeding or ready to keel over from fever or weakness. You need an Army colonel at that point.

But as to prevention, as to avoiding disease and chronic illness, I find doctors to be almost worthless. They don’t seem ready or able to stand down their attitude and get to know you. Oh sure, they’ve got plenty of tests and are ready at any time to tell you how they’ve found something and you’d better be ready to spend the rest of your life submitting to their egos and their pills and whatever other tortures they’ve come up with or else you’re gonna die a grisly, painful death (even if you’re feeling just fine right now, or at least you did until you stepped into the examining room). As to getting to know you personally and considering whether changes in lifestyle and diet and attitude might first be tried, well … that they just don’t do. Other than Patch Adams, they don’t realize the healing power of humor, and definately don’t have much of a sense of it.

I’ve heard that there actually are some humane doctors out there who do stuff like that, and I hope someday to meet one. But I have a case-in-point story to tell right here that doesn’t give me much hope. At the moment, we have two young interns living in the apartment upstairs from me. One of them seems like a more-or-less average guy; the medical profession may actually require a few years to turn him into an SOB. But as the other guy … well, he drives a BMW with a Princeton undergrad sticker on his windshield. So he sounds quite impressive. But when I’m going to work in the morning and see his car in the lot, I can see what a mess the inside of it is. Textbooks, papers, coffee cups, shirts, tossed about all over the seats and floor. Sure, I know that interns live extraordinarily busy lives, but I know other extraordinarily busy people who don’t use that as an excuse to turn their cars into pig stys.

But the killer here … literally … regards this intelligent and priviledged young intern’s smoking habit. You see packs of Camels and Marlboros strewn all about his car. And lately, since the weather got warm and the windows stay open, I get to hear his hacking cough as he walks past my window going to and from the parking lot. I mean, HELLO, this guy just completed four years of graduate level classes regarding disease and the human body, and he can’t figure out what those butts are doing to him? Would I want to put my life and my health into this man’s hands? But before long, the medical establishment is going to confer him with credentials saying that I can. And that doesn’t give me a lot of comfort about the medical establishment.

Modern medicine … plenty of knowledge, more and more all the time. But a few quarts low as to human wisdom. You really have to wonder how many people they lose because of their coldness and disconnection from everyday life, despite the (admittedly) many people that they do actually help.