I’d prefer a hero from Sorrento’s Subs I’d accept one from Jersey Mike’s . I’d buy one from Subway , if that were the only option. A hero is a hero.
But we’re sitting al fresco, enjoying the fresh New Jersey air, lattes, and croissant sandwiches, real effete New Yorker type stuff, not big and bold macho like a New Jersey hero-sub dripping in vinegar, basil and oil. The type that leaks on and ruins your Salvatore Ferragamo tie , but you still don’t care. To make matters worse, they don’t serve Murphy’s at Starbucks. They should, but they don’t. Murphy’s Stout .
My friend Dr. Bowel joins us, and the three of us are yakking away. Dr. Bowel had a break in his schedule, looking up people’s poop way. He does from the top down and the bottom up. He doesn’t realize GI tracts are a one-way street running only south. He’s good, and he does mine when I run out of excuses and actually take care of my health.
That’s when Lew P started talking about heroes. Arthur Frank, my friend at the FBI, everyone calls him a hero when his work is known, because it can be life and death. Police, firemen all are heroes for us.
Doctors like Dr. Bowel are heroes too. Not because he has been a patient and fights back everyday, not letting his disease win. He is a hero, because he works with people who are infectious as well as sick. Physicians qualify as heroes because they put themselves at risk for the betterment of those they treat.
Patients ignore this fact because it is a doctor’s job, and expected, but it is still fact. Doctors have to be ready to be exposed to risk 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Our little group was doing the cock’n’bull thing, talking about President O’Bummer, and his vast television exposure. Omnipresent – ala FDR and radio in the 30’s. Those who don’t recognize history relive it daily, political Altzheimers.
We will not debate whether he is a hero or not here. Dr. Bowel and Lew P beat that horse to Russian stew over the lattes. Talk to your loved ones about that during Thanksgiving or watch the Cowboys on television; he’ll probably pre-empt them. I refuse to fix the broken bones, which will surely be the end result of a passionate political discussion.
While we are talking and being very political – read emotional and passionate – out of the blue walks Dr. Big Owl. Dr. Big Owl is a hero and people don’t have any idea how courageous he is.
He looks like any other large human, oversized brown horn rimmed glasses with round lenses ala Sally Jesse Raphael. He is barrel-chested, with long straight brown hair neatly tied in a ponytail that splits his shoulder blades. He lumbers with a rolling waddle to his gait that makes you think of a Sasquatch.
But he is hardly inarticulate or sub-human or that hairy. He is a hero.
He wears a swatch watch, his high school class ring, and a pocket full of pens – see physician’s phobias about running out of ink in the Fatal Blow – without a pocket protector. The pens are mainly Bics and Paper Mates. He wears knit-ties not Ferragamo’s. Just an average joe, but he is a hero, making this Mad Mutt feel like a wannabe.
The Mad Mutt wants to make things right and correct injustice. That is why I became a doctor. My karma needs the balance of doing good, not that I was any worse than any other human, but I felt that need.
I was a hero once, and that was when I practiced orthopedics full time with full surgical privileges. The general public doesn’t realize how heroic doctors were in the 1970’s and 1980’s when less was understood about HIV – AIDS. The physician was at risk for infection by the undetected or non-declaring positive tester. The transmission of HIV from patient to physician was not as publicized as the transmission the other way. The infection roadway was and is a two directional street.
Do not take this blog’s meaning the wrong way, I have empathy for both the positive tester and those exposed but not yet positive. My concept of a good doctor includes empathy for the patient, whether they have a cold or cancer, and for everything in between those two diagnoses.
Maybe I’m just an ole Mad Mutt, but physicians are the guardians of the most precious treasure a human can own, good health. They are always fighting, as the guys in the white hats, to prolong a patient’s health. But in order for them to do so, they put themselves at risk.
This is a fact that the patients ignore. When a doctor leans down and listens to the chest of the patient with pneumonia, he breathes in that patient’s air. He is risking contracting that virus or bacteria and thereby getting that pneumonia.
When a physician spends time touching and closely examining a sick human he has no protective shield that guarantees him immunity. The sicker the patient, and the more complex the clinical presentation, the longer the physician must spend in proximity to the patient.
In other words, the worse and more hidden the problem, the greater the risk to the doctor, and the longer the exposure for him, the larger the amount of courage he demonstrates in treating that patient.
Compare this to the insurance company executive whose greatest fear daily is whether someone parked in his space, or will the executive dining room’s lunch be served on time. Is this Duck L’Orange . subtly over cooked? Where is that white wine? Heroic questions if I ever heard one.
Big Owl goes one step further than the average physician; he is an Infectious Disease Specialist. That means he treats patients that can give him a disease all day and all night. He is the one running the HIV – AIDS clinic at the hospital.
They draw bloods and treat with IV medications, both of which expose the staff and the physicians to risks that the general population can ignore – blood products. So the real heroes are the workers and physicians who man that clinic.
“But they are just doing their job man.” The whine of the ingrate public who can’t appreciate the risks of a soldier in the war against disease.
Big Owl must also be a masochist, because he is a Jets fan. But that is a psychological impairment, not physical. If he caught it from anyone, it was from his father. There maybe a genetic basis or predisposition to that disease. It is not infectious, as I have been unable to make Jayson a Jets fan. He and his mom bleed Giant blue. The cure for Big Owl and me is a quick dose of Rex Ryan, given visually, and via the auditory meatus.
The thought of Big Owl and the risks of HIV transmission to the surgeon during surgery made me remember someone who I thought was a hero, Dr. Lorraine Day. While Mutt and Lew P were training to be orthopedic surgeons, Lorraine was the chief of orthopedics at San Francisco General hospital. A victory in and of itself, because there weren’t any women heading up orthopedic departments even in Podunk at that time. She was a pioneer.
She detailed the risks of HIV transmission, especially during bloody trauma surgery. She used mathematical risk equations (actuarial tables) to demonstrate that the risk was higher than generally appreciated.
She dealt in science and proven cold facts.
She highlighted the courage and selflessness of trauma surgeons and surgeons in general. She worked in San Francisco where the density of HIV positive patients was higher than most other areas. She was a hero, apparently fearless.
It is 2009, not 1980, and I researched my hero for this blog. How disappointing to find that she resigned from her post and retired as an orthopedic surgeon in 1989, claiming the risk of HIV acquisition was too high and for her the stress was too great.
I guess even heroes have a threshold to discouragement. She was gallant for over ten years. I could still admire her during her retreat from the field of battle.
In 1992, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and showed courage in fighting that disease as a patient. She renewed my faith in her as a hero. She claimed after a recurrence and treating herself that she had gained another remission and probably was cured.
She has subsequently claimed to know the origin of cancer, and the optimal treatment for cancer. I will not dwell on the facts she presents because they are not what is important. She threw out the theories of western medicine and replaced them with hers. They include: “sugar is as addictive as cocaine” and “paralyzes the immune system for four hours.” She has stated that “the more milk you drink, the more osteoporotic you become.” These statements were taken from her biographical article on the Wikipedia web site.
On that site is a list of conspiracies to which Dr. Day is said to subscribe and my conclusion is that she has become paranoid. Maybe she always was, and my hero worship was misplaced even in the 1980’s. Back then, at times she spoke about HIV patients with significant distrust, hinting that they were involved in covering up their disease. Because of the stigma involved, at that time, who could blame them, apparently Dr. Day.
Finally she testified on behalf of Ernst Zündel (termed a neo-nazi, who was arrested in Canada for publishing literature, which "is likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group." He was considered a national security threat in Canada, and charged with inciting racial hatred in Germany.) In 2003, Dr. Day testified for his release from a Canadian prison, in which, he awaited deportation for trial in Germany on the charges of inciting racial hatred.
He is a Holocaust denier who claimed he cured his own terminal cancer using a method similar to the one that Dr. Day proclaims she discovered. It uses herbal treatments. She claimed the Canadian government was denying him access to the medicines, and thereby caused a relapse, in a covert attempt to kill him.
All this proves is that once a hero, not always a hero. Sometimes we misinterpret actions as heroic, when they were generated by intents and psychology that was different and unique in origin. We can only judge the actions and not the intent. Good results can eventuate from evil intent, or twisted logic; and certainly, bad results and disasters can occur when good intentions go awry.
Mutt says look no further than the Fatal Blow where killing Shark-face Neinstine to better the healthcare of the community seemed an immoral act with good results. An evil act contemplated for the best of reasons. When it finally happened, it was the twisted, evil mind of an egocentric person who accomplished the good deed. The action flowed from self-interest, not creating a better environment for the community. The murderer cannot be called a hero, because of the egocentric base to the action, yet the community benefited with the result. Go figure.
I wish Dr. Day health in the rest of her life. I hope that she can find the peace that she deserves, although a self-tortured soul can never escape its torturer. I hope in her zealot’s pursuit of her cause that she does not rob the precious gift of the chance of recovery from those who would believe in her, like some Ponzi healthcare scheme.
To be confident that a treatment can work enough times to make the probability of a successful treatment high, one must test the method in a population of significant size over a significant time period with a control group as a comparison, and long term follow up, years. Only when such testing is performed can a method be called scientifically proven to benefit the patient.
Scientific medical innovations move like a sloth, because if they ran like a Gazelle they would end badly too often. Mutt’s momma always said, “If it sounds to good to be true, it is.” Simple as that.
My former hero has bypassed the testing step. She has not used a statistically significant test population to prove her theory is successful, and therefore, even if she is right, she has become the seller of unproven dreams, and is listed on Quackwatch.org. 1
Anecdotal endorsements from Jane Doe proves that it worked for Jane Doe or she really likes the seller or the seller paid her for her opinion. “I’m not a sick person but I play one on a web site?” Come on man.
Would you invest your money with Bernie, then why invest your health with ….
Heroes place themselves at risk for the betterment of others.
To place others at risk for the betterment of oneself makes you the anti-hero in my book.
In 2004 the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus reviewed Dr. Day’s infomercial used to promote Dr. Lorraine Day's "Cancer Doesn't Scare Me Any More" video in which she claims to have cured herself of metastatic breast cancer with a program featuring diet and prayer. They concluded in November 2004, that Dr. Stephen Barrett’s complaint was justified. Dr. Barrett is listed as a consumer advocate. 5
I have base all these statements on the information presented on the web and from Dr. Day’s web site as well as Wikipedia.
On her website, Dr. Day warns her critics that she will pray for them, but she promises that God will not deal punishment or retribution. Her enemies will reap what they sow. I sow the hope that scientifically proven methods of treatment are offer to every patient, and I preclude nothing except those methods that exclude the proven methods in favor of anecdotal dreams. Alternative medicine that can be used along side the proven treatments are welcome, even if the science is not proven yet, because they uphold the ultimate law of being a good physician. “First do your patient no harm.”
I’m just asking that she make an effort to become a hero again, and scientifically document that which she has discovered.
It has been proven scientifically that the immune system responds to positive emotional stimuli by responding more strongly to antigens. In stress the immune system responds in a diminished pattern. There is the science, go from there, but use that with proven theories, please, go and prove your theory, now.
I truly believe in visualization as a method to augment treatment of disease. It has been proven that laughing helps the recovery process in an objective way, via systematic study.
All I ask of Dr. Day is to prove that your system can be consistently successful by using objective testing and standards in a control environment over time.
No one is above the laws of nature and God. Not even his true prophets, ask Peter, ask Mohammed, ask Moses.
Back to Big Owl, he is a hero, as are the surgeons and the doctors who risk personal injury, disease and disability to make us healthy. They go under-appreciated because they are just doing their job. If they do it really well, then we never know how courageous they really are.
Thank a doctor today. You never know, you might need him tomorrow.
These links are used as reference concerning the information on Dr. Lorraine Day:
As always, I am the Mad Mutt. You are neither mad nor a mutt. Thank your lucky stars for that.
PS --> Lance was at the shore house Monday, and crawled into the rose bramble, more about that another time.
1 comment:
That picture looks more like Lew P than Big Owl says the Mad Mutt.
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