Three entirely unrelated topics
Healthcare Communication: Two quick statements to begin with, both true: 1) Some physicians are gifted, and 2), the difference between a condition and a gift, are awards. Bravo. What won’t deserve, much less get an award is the current state of the ‘doctor-patient communication’. In technical terms — it just sucks. The first example is from going to the dentist. By the time the guy asks you to crisply describe your pain, you are kicking back at a 45-degree angle staring at a ceiling-mounted, faded poster from Bora Bora while you sound like a stroke patient on a vodka binge. That’s because of the gurgling suction dangling from your mouth and held in place by a nasty tongue twitch, itself the result of an overdose of lidocaine injected shortly after you confirmed at the check-in desk that you had dental insurance. Ouch. The 2nd example is pretty much any humiliating visit at the urologist which culminates in you dropping your briefs (in front of someone who’s last name you can’t spell) and hoping for the best. To be sure, I doubt women look forward to their visits with the gynecologist either, but let’s not get sidetracked. Apparently, it’s not enough that seeking help for deeply personal healthcare issues — from someone who feels compelled to nail his or her med school degree on the wall to assert superiority — puts you in a vastly inferior position from the get-go. No, unless that certificate refers to a graduate degree ‘earned’ from an all-meals-inclusive school in the Caribbean that also teaches reggae while surfing, it’s that the knowledge distribution is generally highly asymmetrical — meaning they know a lot more than you — a situation that’s compounded for some by a perceived difference in social and/or economic status, all within the confines of an anxiety producing busy practice or even scarier hospital environment. The result is ineffective, one-sided communication, which is why patients eagerly nod just to spit out and get finally dressed, so that they can sprint home and then spend hours Googling obscure sources or seeking advice from the likes of ChatGPT. Mind you, I went to Med School myself. So, what’s wrong with (some of) my colleagues? How about starting by not talking down to patients, literally, i.e. without their mouth pried open with instruments that are reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman in ‘The Marathon Man’, or with their underwear tucked away neatly as opposed to dangling at their ankles? There’s got to be better, less demeaning ways to get level conversation going, and without blaming the insurance companies for paying only for ~8 min emotion-free “interaction”. Let’s think this over, guys — preferably before we invest in augmented reality goggles and the likes, let’s go low tech on this one first.
Risky Walk: … speaking of, I walked the dog this morning and I swear, from the safety of their altitude several squirrels launched nuts at us — no kidding. It reminded of the great-ish American novel that I always wanted to write, tentatively entitled “When killer squirrels attack”. It sounds a lot more benign than it is, given that the little too cute, decidedly not endangered, disease-carrying suckers make it their not-so-secret mission to distribute nuts around the neighborhood lawns that give rise to unwanted maple trees for many years to come. That Disneyesque episode provides a smooth segue to yet another ‘life is full of bets’, and some-of-them-go-sideways story. For instance, just to illustrate, after a storm you see a ton of branches on the ground, some sizable and you can’t help but think that they would have bloodied the unlucky sod that ventured underneath at the time of the drop. Gravity versus skin, simple. Now, no idea what you would do, but a day later I tend to walk from branch pile to pile under the perfectly reasonable assumption that the ones on the ground leave a vacuum up high and ergo, that spot can’t hurt you anymore. There is, however, another school of thought that argues that the piles merely indicate high-yield areas of progressive wood rot in the mature trees above that are about to send more stuff down, which consequently will land pretty much in the vicinity of what’s already on the ground. Two entirely different assumptions, you see, and whatever the real risk is, potentially very different outcomes. Of course, there’s a 3rd approach to just keep on walking straight, forget about karma being the proverbial b*tch (in this scenario, situated up high) and chance it altogether — arguing that, while excessively focusing on any threat from above, being run over by a car on the ground is a lot more likely. Drive long enough in Massachusetts and you fully appreciate the reasoning behind that stance. Anyway, why am I telling you this? Because walks make you appreciate life and how fleeting it is. On that topic — yesterday, I came across a lemonade stand operated by 2 little girls a few days post-PreK. They were polite and I couldn’t help but notice the older one must have gotten hold of a marketing book in the town library. So, when the cutesy gang predictably pandered their overpriced Vitamin-C shot, I used the same tried and true defensive strategy that I always employed in situations like these — “Sorry ladies, I’ve no money with me”. In an embarrassing twist and unmistakable sign of how outdated this approach has become in the digital age, they didn’t lose a beat and fired back “… no problem, we have Venmo”. Just adorable.
Content Relevance: … back home, I came across an online article that dutifully asked several scholars “Did the Nobel change your life?”. This seemed like a great find, also because, strangely enough, I ask myself this question often — ‘what if I get the call?’. Well, let’s quickly discard mundane concerns — if the Royal Swedish Academy calls while you’re in the loo, they’ll probably call back once more, so take your time to flush please. Similarly, don’t mistake the annoying clicks on your answering machine for the biggest miss of your life — the difference between your offshore telemarketers and the brainy Swedes is caller ID. A slightly bigger threat is my wife just hanging up the phone when some guy with a Nordic accent and a name that inevitably ends on some variation of ‘-son’ asks for me — she may think the Red Cross butched it up this time and finally hired a call center in Scandinavia to guilt us into year-end donations, one Krona at a time. But enough of me — between 1901 and 2022, the Nobel was awarded to less than 1000 individuals, with some 235 still alive as I read somewhere yesterday, although, given the average age bracket, that might have changed since. With the world population currently standing a bit over 8.1 billion, if my decidedly sub-Nobel math is even close, how the award changed the lives of each one of these 235 geniuses could then be of relevance to some 34 million regular peeps each, or just enough to click 100 times or so on the article to feign ‘audience engagement’. So, we all got lucky with that article, not as lucky as the author getting this completely irrelevant sh*te past her editor, but still quite lucky. I put it in the same Pulitzer-light category as, say, “How Academy Award winners cope with taking limos in the age of climate change”. That stuff is gold, and directly relatable as well, right. To be sure, unless you compete in the more obscure categories that come late into the 4–5 hours broadcast and no one really cares about, winning an Oscar is equally difficult to achieve. And, true again, few of us have the makeup artists, personal trainers, and Oscar de la ’Rentals’ to pull off looking that buff in a closeup on some red carpet in LA, pretending hard not to sweat. Publishers routinely serve this stuff up precisely because the honors are exceedingly rare and the awarding events excessively glamorous, to differentiate those and themselves from ordinary folks — aka “us” — best served in color & all captions at easy-grip hip-height along the supermarket checkout counter. So, while most of us will never experience any of this, we tend to live vicariously through our heroes — just like through our kids, both certifiably pathetic. In summary, first: from here on out, no need to sit next to the phone as probability dictates that ‘that call’ won’t come, no matter your carrier or time zone. Secondly: Just don’t be upset not getting a Nobel or an Academy Award, neither did Jonas Salk or Alfred Hitchcock, which should put this sufficiently in perspective. So, in addition to being in rather good company, as for your case in particular, embracing solid mediocrity also means that no one had to report (or read) how any award changed you. Now, that is quite an achievement.
