On 28 Sept 1924, two US Army aircraft landed in Seattle, Washington state, having completed the first round-the-world flight in 175 days (from the New York Times' "On This Day").
The God Complex
My medical jokes aside, I guess I am like most people. We mostly trust our medical doctors.
The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, however, asks us to reflect on this sentiment. She begins her recent opinion piece by noting a trend emerging in medical schools in the US -- they want the new doctors to be less intimidating to patients.
She believes, too, that there are patients who have begun to wean themselves from what has been called the "God Complex". The Internet, with its trove of medical information albeit not all accurate, has played a part in such incipient patient empowerment.
This complex was coined from the movie Malice, when a surgeon tells the character played by Alec Baldwin: "When someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn't miscarry or that their daughter doesn't bleed to death or that their mother doesn't suffer acute neural trauma from post-operative shock, who do you think they're praying to? You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God."
Ms Dowd goes on to detail how a medical couple -- oncologist Jerome Groopman and his wife, Pamela Hartzband, an endocrinologist -- have written a book that demystifies medicine.
They want to see patients regain confidence and control by understanding how doctors think, and in the process enable the two sides of the bedside to understand each other.
"The answer often lies not with the experts but within you (the patient)," they write, adding that Albert Einstein once said: Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
They are for a lot less medical jargon, and if jargon has to be used, it's gotta be explained (see!). Apart from citing Einstein, they quote (not too seriously, I'm sure) Voltaire too: The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Ms Dowd says: "Dr Hartzband and Dr Groopman warn against excessive reliance on overreaching so-called experts and nebulous metrics and statistics. The unsettling reality... is that much of medicine still exists in a gray zone, where there is no black or white answer about when to treat or how to treat."
Her piece ends on an optimistic note. The two authors are both "optimists" who warn against the "focusing illusion" -- focusing on what will be lost after a colostomy, mastectomy, prostate surgery or other major procedures. Yet, ordinary people do have the "extraordinary capacity to adapt, to enjoy life with less than perfect health".
That's very true. On this note, I'll end this posting with, yes, a medical joke:
Five surgeons are taking a coffee break. First surgeon says: "Accountants are the best to operate on because when you open them up, everything inside is numbered."
Second surgeon says: "Nah, secretaries are the best. Everything inside them is in alphabetical order."
Third doc says next: "Try geologists, man! Everything inside THEM is colour coded."
No 4 says: "I like engineers... they always understand when you have a few parts left over at the end."
So, what did the fifth surgeon, who has been quietly listening to the conversation, say?
"You're all wrong. Lawyers are the easiest. There's no guts, no heart, no spine and their head and butt are interchangeable."
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