Because You Never Asked

DOCTORS, I

(6/07, Spain)

     Perhaps the most altruistic profession known to mankind would be that of healing the sick. None of us go through life without bouts of corporal malfunction, none of us like it, and the training of those meant to alleviate such distress has probably been a part of humanoid culture since the earliest manifestations of the species. Unlike lawyers, accountants, stock brokers and other such white collar outbreaks of global economy shenanigans, the well defined, universally approved purpose of the medical profession has always lent itself to an heroic, knight-in-shining-armor kind of image that is easily concocted and maintained. Is there a mother anywhere who’d be dismayed by a child professing its desire to be a doctor?

     “But Georgie, I was so hoping you’d be a plumber.”

     The perverse American mindset has turned the healing arts into a multi-gajillion dollar private industry of medical professionals, hospitals, drug companies, insurance pilferers and public relations mouthpieces trying to convince us that the people working in this industry are a beatified group of demy-Gods flirting with a perfection unknown to the rest of us mere mortals. Television, perhaps the greatest propaganda mechanism ever created, has never been lacking an abundance of dramas portraying our medical establishment in the most glittering light; well prepared, quick to act, unerring in their diagnoses and remedies.

     Medicine on TV: --- boom! An agonizing patient is wheeled into the emergency room amidst a burst of light and activity. Impeccably starched personnel in dazzling white or pastel colored uniforms are scurrying about in a free form whirl where individual devotion and purpose defy the chaotic aspects of it all. Everyone is busy, everyone knows where they are going and what they have to do. Like a marching band quickly reforming with military precision, the agonizing patient is surrounded by a bevy of eager professionals; connecting tubes, regulating drips, taking readings, barking out numbers, without the moribund cargo ever having to come to a stop. Like a baton in a relay race, the ailing package has been handed off as it makes its way to salvation. Moving,  running, running, moving, in a desperate attempt to waste nary a second of precious time, with the distress of trying to save yet another human life etched deeply in the faces of all, “it could be a hecatombal laryngitis with pituitary secretions drowning the anti-diluvium tubes.”

     “But doctor”, a nurse timidly interjects (she’s sexier than Anna Nichole before we ever heard of her), “the red corpuscles are frenetically mutating into stripes and plaids.”

     “Good point (translation: I’ll meet you in the supply room after we save this dude), but this happens frequently when the retinal satchmo is over worked. Just add 3 milligrams of cleaning fluid to his blood count. He’ll make it.” Oh doctor, she silently swoons, without missing a beat.

     The show ends with the patient winning a triathlon 3 days later, the hospital staff there to greet him at the finish line.

     I have a lady friend who is familiar with my work and has one of the most solvent intellects I know. She studied anthropology and such at one of our most prestigious universities. She claims, in harmony with a not insignificant group of people associated with this educational specialty, that pre-historic man was a healthier specimen than the clod we see in the mirror each morning, preparing him or herself for their daily jousts with the modern world. Lending some credence to such a thought, besides a substantial amount of scientific evidence offered by people of such a mind, is the fact that even now, in some isolated areas not known for their access to the best in modern medicine, there are pockets of health and longevity far superior to those living in close contact with the healing arts dispensed on “Grey’s Anatomy”. (The Caucasus regions of southeast Europe, some places in primarily indigenous parts of the Andes, etc.). Such data can be quite suggestive. Even if it is marginally factual, it offers some proof that modern man has self inflicted much of its own sickness. In the words of the great Spanish novelist, F. Garcia Pavon, “we’ve gotten sick so we can invent the cure.”

     Further proof of the nebulous quality of modern medicine lies much closer to home. Cuba, an undeniably third world country with a standard of living (whatever that means) far below that of its colossal neighbor to the north, has garnered a well earned reputation for the quality of its medical services. Although certain segments of the Cuban health care establishment do possess the latest in medical gadgetry, the average citizen probably has less access to such (the accuracy of that statement could be the result of American propaganda having its effects on me, but I think we can say, at the least, that American medical treatment operates at a far higher technological level than Cuba’s does). In addition, for political reasons not relevant to this essay, there are shortages of some basic medical supplies --- and yet, from a statistical standpoint, including the Big Kahuna of all medical statistics, longevity, Cuba matches or surpasses the ostentatious medical technology so proudly displayed in the United States. This suggests 2 things: 1) The Cubans distribute medical attention in a more efficient way, and 2) the glittering techno-medicine of the developed world is a bit of a public relations stunt.

     The biggest challenge now facing our professional healing fraternity is the cancer dilemma. Fighting cancer has become a multi-billion dollar cottage industry displayed in a dazzling showcase of spectacular new buildings and research centers equipped with an impressive array of complex machinery that will soon save us all from the invasion of this degrading, deadly disease. Expenditures of this magnitude must be gotten from somewhere and the justification of such becomes a task for that great army of capitalist enterprise, the public relations people. It is their job to make us believe we are getting somewhere with all this, that the disease is being controlled, that a cure is right in the next bubbling test tube --- we ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie. Perhaps I’ve been privy to too many defunctions of this nature, thus jading my outlook, but I have my doubts. Something tells me if we could just find a way to rid ourselves of the industrial slime we live in, we could take all these glittering new “oncological” centers sprouting like weeds across the landscape of our sea to shining sea, and turn them into botanical gardens. There is something that does not add up here; if we are making so much progress fighting cancer, why are there more and more facilities to treat it? The demand  seems to be rising, and until you can show me some of these facilities disappearing, I’ll remain skeptical.

     This is not to say that medical practice in the U.S. and the developed world in general, is a crock of poop with no credibility. The human race has trod this planet for uncountable millenniums before reaching the present moment we now reside in, and healing the sick has accompanied that journey. There are hundreds of millions of us functioning in a reasonably dignified corporal way, eating, processing nourishment, excreting, and getting about as the animal organism our perceptions are encased in was  meant to do. When this organism shows signs of malfunction, there does seem to be some correlation between the work of our professional health personnel and the recuperation of the physical faculties in distress.

     But when the healing arts are made into a purely commercial venture with the same incentives Wal-Mart might use to sell a fishing rod, we create an environment that breeds self interest. This self interest creates a tendency towards insincerity. It engenders the kind of image fabrication meant to camouflage the weaknesses that could negatively effect such self interest. When Toyota sells you a car, it is not only going to tell you how good it is, it is going to exaggerate such qualities, without ever mentioning how good it might not be. It will also denigrate the competition in a way that could give you a false sense of reality. When it comes to buying a car, this could be considered an innocuous process.

     But you cannot go “shopping” to alleviate sickness in the same way you can shop for a car, cell phone, panties or veal scallopini. Though business people with debatable ethics have turned healing into a market business, the medical professionals themselves do not operate that way. Whereas Toyota or Chevrolet will mutually aggrandize or denigrate the quality of their products, medical professionals consider themselves well trained practitioners of the same grey, sharing similar levels of competence and trust. Can a laymen really make an educated choice in such an environment?

     But even worse is the burlesque of omnipotence and infallibility a market medical system must feign. If, as the “market” tries to convince us, “you get what you pay for”, and we are paying through our butts, then they better have something good to tell us.

     Up until now it’s been all talk. The second essay in this series, “Doctors, II”, is meant to puncture this medical public relations bubble with what could be called, in the vernacular of TV-cinema production, a “true story”. I beseech the reader to go on to the already cited essay.      

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Email: JerryG@postcman.info