Science Isn’t Magic. (It’s better!) Doctors Aren’t Omnipotent. (They’re human!)

Trust your health care providers, but know that they are neither omniscient nor infallible – they may thank you for your scrutiny  The only thing more impressive than how much we know about biology – both in scale and content – is how much we don’t know. Yet, a pervasive thought exists that might have been borne out of the vaguely all-knowing feeling that Google gives us.  The world thinks that science knows how the body works – entirely.  This gives […]

You Live in Your Body – Not Your Doctor

I don’t know when it happened, exactly. But at some point in the last few decades, we as a nation, collectively turned over our bodies to doctors and said “here, fix this and get back to me when you have it sorted out.” It makes some sense.  We need lawyers for legal things.  Accountants for the undecipherable tax code, and so on.  We outsource complex things to complexity experts.  It’s a useful division of labor. But outsourcing your health is […]

How Numb Can We Get? …A lot Numb

Last week the New England Journal of Medicine published an alarming fact.  When drug makers tried to reformulate OxyContin so that it was harder to get “a high” from it – people did reduce their OxyContin usage. And then they switched to heroin.  When I read this I laughed.  I mean I could not stop laughing for days.  “Oh, the human condition, how we cannot be thwarted from our addictions!” I chuckled. I shared this story with others and made them […]