Here’s the sick truth. The truth about sickness.
– Alcohol Abuse. In a study done on the American College of Surgeons, 15% of male surgeons and 25% of female surgeons suffered from alcohol abuse and dependence. And a significant portion reported having errors during surgery in the prior three months because of this dependence.
I was at a dinner once and part of the topics being discussed in dinner was my opposition to sending kids to school. Someone who worked for NYC Mayor Bloomberg asked me,
“Would you ever want to be operated on by someone who didn’t go to medical school?”
My answer is “yes”. If you want to be safe, it turns out, be operated on by someone who is male, who has children, and who specializes in operating on veterans. For some reason, these are the people least likely to be drunk while operating on you. I don’t know why.
– Malpractice. Johns Hopkins has done a bunch of studies on this. 98,000 people a year die from mistakes doctors make. Either a mistake in surgery or a mistake in a prescription or some other weird mistake. One study showed that if you randomly pull 100 medical charts, 40 will contain evidence of doctor errors.
– Fake medical degrees. At least 5000 doctors operating in the United States today have fake medical degrees. Don’t believe me? Google “buy a fake medical degree” and you can be operating within a matter of weeks in your basement.
And it makes perfect sense. Some “medical schools” located offshore have “virtual simulators”. You can practice surgery while sitting in your bathroom with your laptop!
– Doctors hate you and they hate their lives.
On average, one doctor a day kills himself. Despite what you hear about lawyers, doctors actually have the highest suicide rate, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
It’s even worse among female doctors. You think they like looking at you with your clothes off? You’re disgusting.
The suicide rate among female doctors is 2.3x the national average. When they cut open that body and see what we’re really made of they think: “This is just hopeless.”
– Doctors are obese. There’s nothing wrong with being obese. But it will kill you. And doctors know that.
Obesity causes everything from diabetes to heart attacks to strokes and is linked to early onset of Alzheimer’s. And yet, doctors have a death wish. 53% of doctors, despite knowing all of this, are obese. And you put yourself in their care.
Why should it matter if doctors are obese? In a sample of patients who are overweight, only 7% of the overweight doctors would diagnose their patients as overweight. As opposed to over 90% of the doctors who were not overweight.
– If you get sick in July, you’re screwed. In medical circles (trust me, I’m a doctor) it’s known as the “July Effect”.
Doctors go on vacation in July. So interns become residents and residents pretend to be the real doctors. Deaths from surgery and malpractice skyrocket in July. I hope you don’t get sick in July..
– Bad handwriting. You know how the doctor prescribes this weird thing to you and you think, “How can anyone read that?” but for some reason you trust that your pharmacist has this supernatural power to read the doctor’s handwriting? Well… he doesn’t.
Over 7000 deaths a year occur because the pharmacist couldn’t decipher the prescription, and gave you an overdose of some weird chemotherapy pill instead of Viagra.
Claudia, my wife, asked me the other day if she thought I would die before her. I know the answer already. The answer is “no”. Because I never go to the doctor. She goes to various doctors throughout the year. So I’ve just eliminated the leading cause of death.
Now I’m going to get a fake medical degree. Because the next time someone asks me what I do for a living I’m going to tell him the simple truth:
“I save lives.”
Be your own doctor. Get Ann Wigmore’s RECIPES FOR LONGER LIFE.
