Category: Health

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Saraphim, Sarafem

Lying, scheming, scoundrels!

Eli Lilly is the drug company that makes “Prozac”. Prozac, used to treat depression, is patented, which means Eli Lilly can charge a fortune for each prescription because nobody else can make or sell it. Unfortunately– hold the tears– the patent on Prozac expires in August of 2001.

Hold the tears.

Prozac is one of those wonder drugs that doctors love to prescribe to people who come in and say they are tired and depressed and sad and unhappy and tired and don’t enjoy their lives and are miserable and unhappy and tired and so on and so on and since the doctor doesn’t have the time, ability, or inclination to make the person’s life any better– to find them better jobs or spouses or children or neighborhoods or families– he prescribes a happy pill, which alters the basic chemical balance in the brain– well, it makes you happy. Like pot, except legal. And about $100 a month, which, frankly, makes pot look like value for the dollar.

But– hold the tears– soon anybody will be able to make a drug called “Prozac” and will be able to sell it for less than Eli Lilly. Lilly, one of the most profitable corporations on the face of the earth, will have to actually begin charging something close to what it actually costs to make the drug, plus a little profit.

Prozac earns Lilly about $2 billion a year. I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating. The Washington Post said it: $2 billion! A year! What’s a greedy corporation to do, especially after all it’s contributions to election campaigns have failed to save it’s patent!

Well, by golly, never underestimate the imagination and creativity of the drug dealers. The “legit” drug dealers, I mean. Eli Lilly has just introduced a new drug– Sarafem– and a massive advertising campaign to designed to convince you that you’re sick even if you aint. And low and behold– holy pharmaceuticals, Batman!– Sarafem, in cute little pastel colours, is nothing other than– hold those tears!– Prozac, relabeled and packaged!

Sarafem is for women suffering from PMDD. You don’t know what PMDD is? You don’t?! Shocking. How could you not be aware of an illness that is so absolutely scientifically proven that is has an official acronym? Read the magazines! Watch television! See your doctor! Ask her if you might be suffering from PMDD.

PMDD is “PreMenstrual Dysphoric Disorder”. That’s right. Phew. First of all, breathe a sigh of relief if you are a man. Since you aren’t as likely to stuff yourself full of chemicals in the first place, you can relish another opportunity to save yourself some money, because “Sarafem” costs as much as the old patented Prozac– about $100 a month. It is reported that women take Sarafem every day.

Every day! I find that stunning. Prozac is not a little pep pill or aspirin. It is a powerful psychotropic drug. And doctors and the pharmaceutical industry just blithely go about trying to persuade as many normal young women as possible to tamper with their brains.

Well, by golly, why does it cost so much? I’m glad you asked. If Prozac is no longer a patent medicine after August 2001 and anybody can make it….!

Ah– the loopholes! You see if an existing drug can find a new application, the patent on the new application of the existing drug can continue, in this case, until 2007! So while anybody can now make and market “Prozac”, only Eli Lilly can make and market Sarafem.

Yahoo! Now all we need to do is find an illness!

Now how do you find an illness? Well, in the United States, the APA (American Psychiatric Association) sort of officially defines mental illnesses. It puts out this huge book called the “DSM” which is like the Bible of mental health. You might remember a few years ago that the DSM has decided that most every energetic two-year-old is afflicted with a mental illness. Most parents have the good sense to know that their child is merely a two-year-old. But, hey, where’s the profit in that? And do “most” parents really know this? The statistics on the use of Ritalin do not encourage this assumption.

The importance of the DSM is that insurance companies use it to determine whether or not they will pay for treatments. If it aint listed, it aint covered. Of course, it is then in the interests of the health industry to ensure that almost everything is listed, so that therapists, doctors, and pharmacists can be paid.

In other words, what the DSM has actually become is a shopping catalogue of real and imagined complexes.

Anyway, we have women with periods. Periods, by all accounts, are uncomfortable and annoying. In short, they sometimes make women feel bad. Now, most people accept that PMS exists– a kind of moody irritable stage of the monthly cycle just before the period– and that drugs that alleviate the feelings of bloatedness and… whatever.. make some sense. Some.

But even the DSM doesn’t believe that PMDD really exists. It is listed in the appendix as a condition that is “under evaluation”. That doesn’t stop Eli Lilly from running advertisements that suggest that that lousy feeling you have while pushing a heavy shopping cart in an ugly grocery store with three kids screaming at you for candy can actually be blamed on an official, registered, scientifically validated “disorder”. See your doctor. Women do. They see the ad, they see their doctors, their doctors prescribe, Eli Lilly gets rich.

How can they get away with this? Well, the good old Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. has decided that Lilly’s opinion matters more than the DSM’s. It has approved Lilly marketing the drug for a non-existent disorder.

What we have here is something that, like Hyper Attention Deficit Disorder or Hyper Disorder Attention Deficit or whatever it’s called, defines normal but unpleasant conditions as a “disorder”. That is the dream disease for the drug companies because everyone has it. We have a limitless number of potential customers. All we need to do is convince them that they’re sick. And Sarafem advertises itself as the only official remedy for PMDD.

What we need are ads that show the same external conditions that the Eli Lilly ads show– tired women, ugly stores, muzak, incoherent labels, over-priced candy, noise, dust, rude clerks– with a text that runs: “Does your life stink? Try changing your life.” One thing you could do is join an organization that fights companies like Eli Lilly.

And hold the tears.

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The London Defibrillation Choir

The New York Times, which never lies, has an article today about a movement to train everyone on how to use defibrillators. Apparently about 90% of the people who have cardiac arrest– which is not the same as a heart attack or a heart with no companion– die in the first 10 minutes. But if you have a defibrillator handy (in your purse or your camera bag or something, I assume), about 53% of the victims survive. That is amazing. Now the heart can have a companion.

They were even able to demonstrate that the average grade six student, who doesn’t know the state capital of Alaska where the oil is, can nevertheless be trained to operate a defibrillator in just a few hours. They tell them it’s just like a Sony Playstation.

Still, I find it somewhat alarming. New York State has passed a law that released from liability anyone who uses a defibrillator to try to save someone. You see, if you use a defibrillator on someone who is not having a heart attack, you can actually kill them. So I think the first thing we need to do, after making defibrillators available to everyone in order to save lots of lives, is to restrict their availability in order to save lots of lives.

Another thing I find alarming about defibrillators is that you have supposed to shave the person’s chest before applying the two little paddles and shouting “all clear”, so everyone knows you watch ER. I mean, some guy is dying (most likely in a Casino where there is a disproportionate number of cardiac arrests as well as tacky double-knit pantsuits), and you rush over to help and everyone’s standing around watching and you have to say, “anyone got a razor– while he’s down, I might as well shave his chest.” What if it was Burt Reynolds or someone? “Oh my god, this is going to take hours. Anyone got a Philishave?” What if it was Dolly Parton? “Bigger paddles, quick! We need— yes, those satellite dishes will do quite nicely….”

Another thing is — which is why Cohen’s explicit poetry is actually good for our society– what if it is a woman undergoing cardiac arrest and you’re kind of a shy young man and all these people are watching…. Can New York State also make an exception for sexual harassment lawsuits? But then, if they did, you’d have all these guys walking around the beach with defibrillators on their shoulders instead of boom boxes, and they’d be targeting good looking girls who fall asleep while tanning. “All clear. Leon! I said ALL CLEAR! Now. I mean it. All right, see if I care. ZZZZZZAAAAAPPPPP. Oh my God! Leon’s down! Someone get a razor, quick!”

I’m only bringing this up because if Leonard attends Hydra 2002… well, he is getting on in years, and I hope they have a defibrillator handy just in case. You know how women react around him. If Fiona or Judith or Ania actually met Leonard, you’d have to be ready to use those paddles, I think, though I would be very nervous about it myself. And, instead of shouting out “all clear”, I think, apropos of the occasion, I would shout “did you ever go clear?” ZZAAAAPPPP. “Bill, Bill, stop! She’s only taking a nap!” “Not any more. We better do it again. It’s like the reset button on a computer, isn’t it?”

And before I go to bed, I want to note that they have an actual video of a 77 year old man having cardiac arrest in a Las Vegas Casino. He falls over. The security guards rush to his aid. They look like they are in grade 6. They rip off his shirt and shave his chest. They apply the goo, the little sensor pads, and then — “Go Clear!”– the paddles. ZAAAAPPPP. He’s up. An old man who had fainted was revived. And everyone agreed twould be a miracle indeed…. except that the video also shows all the other people in the Casino basically ignoring him. I’m not kidding. They took one look at the guy and went back to their slots and blackjacks.

I think hell is… you’re in a Casino. Wayne Newton is singing “Dunkeshein”. Fat ladies in pastel-plaid double-knit pantsuits are working the slot machines. The décor resembles Andy Warhol repackaged by Walmart. You have a heart attack. Your soul starts to rise from your body and you look down and notice that not a single person gives a damn. What depresses you even more is that these are not the kind of people you wish would give a damn about you, but Ania and Fiona and Judith and Corisa and Tim and both Mikes and Mark and Jarkko and Nancy and Barbara …. are all in Hydra jamming to an aud and eating roast sheep. They don’t give a damn, and the guards stand helpless by: no one remembered a shaver. They try the paddles on your butt instead. With every zap you return to your body and the whole experience starts over again.

Did you ever go clear? No. ZZZZZAAAAAPPPPP Ow! Now I am.

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The Diagnosis

It is so important to give it a label.

You feel tired. You are bored. You are frustrated. Maybe you’re also not very bright or ambitious. You don’t want to tell people you are tired and bored and frustrated and not very ambitious, because that would make it sound like it’s your own fault. So, instead, you have chronic fatigue syndrome.

Maybe your two-year-old is really active. He climbs up everything. He’s loud and noisy and eager and excitable. You find this annoying. But you can’t tell anyone that you find your own kid annoying or that you are too impatient to be a good parent, so, instead, you say that he has attention deficit disorder and pop some drugs into him to slow him down.  Sure, it takes away some of his energy and curiosity, but, hey, you have to get your sleep.

The diagnosis, in our society, is essential. We need that label. We need an identifier. We have to generate public belief in and enthusiasm for conditions that might be nebulous, vague, or invisible.

Why?

Well, almost every time you hear the diagnostic label being propounded, it’s by someone who makes his or her living treating it. This is why the bible of psychotherapy, the DSM III or IV or V or whatever it’s at now, always gets bigger and bigger. It never shrinks. They almost never remove “syndromes” from it. (It caused a bit of nudging and winking when they did finally remove homosexuality from their list of morbidities not all that long ago.)

And that’s why pharmaceutical companies are determined to get your kid into their slimy clutches. They are promoting the idea that a four-year-old who wont go to bed nicely when asked has some kind of mental disorder and needs to be drugged. Once your kid is used to those colorful little pills twelve times a day, they know he’ll never, ever again feel that he can handle life without some kind of narcotic assistance.  His “baseline” is obliterated.  Whatever he feels from now on will be partly due to the drugs and partly due to withdrawal from the drugs.  The perfecta of pharmaceutical self-sufficiency.

The magic of the diagnosis is clear. Some people will deny that feeling tired or frustrated or depressed is an illness. Some people might think its just part of life. You put up with it. You endure it, and get on with the things you have to do.

But it’s easy to convince people otherwise. If you have the proper label for something, people will assume that adequate research and scientific analysis has determined that this condition really exists. We trust doctors. They’ll assume that a doctor made the diagnosis, and everyone knows how smart doctors are. They’ll assume that everyone thinks it is a real condition because it has become part of the language. It becomes shorthand, to a lot of people, for complexities that are too hard to explain quickly.

When I was a lot younger, if I heard someone say something like, “he has attention deficit disorder”, I would just assume that there was such a thing as “attention deficit disorder”, and therefore we better do something about it. Now I’m a lot more skeptical, but I can remember how easy it was to accept sophisticated-sounding terms like that as if they referred to clear, objective realities.

When you look at the “symptoms” of chronic fatigue syndrome, you realize how utterly subjective and arbitrary labels can be. Tiredness. Depression. Loss of appetite. Headaches. Difficult to get up in the morning. And so on. Sounds like just about anyone’s rotten little life. Label it, and we can blame someone or something else. Label it, and we can talk multi-million dollar lawsuits. Label it and we can make a drug that fixes it. Then we are not “doing drugs”. We are doing “therapy”. We are taking the “wonder drugs”, Lithium and Prozac and Paxil, and whatever. It’s okay– we have to take these drugs: we have a condition.

The drugs, of course, don’t really fix anything. They give you a sustained high. It is one of the great myths of our society that drugs like Lithium and Prozac actually treat real conditions. That is utter nonsense. They simply make you feel good. But we have to believe in the myth, or else we would have to admit that we’re really not much better than your average drug addict or alcoholic.

Well, we’re not.

I heard some parents on the radio recently (the CBC) talking about their “hyper-active” child. The parents of this child were at their wits end. They didn’t know what to do. They went to the doctor. He prescribed Ritalin. They tried it. It worked! Hallelujah. However, their child just didn’t seem to be herself anymore. She lost her sense of insatiable curiosity. She lost her spark, her zest for life. They took her off Ritalin and tried different parenting techniques instead. From the details the father gave on the air, it was clear that he and his wife simply got better at parenting. They learned to anticipate when problems might occur. They planned ahead for family outings. They became more flexible and adaptable. Amazingly, the problems seemed to go away.

Was their child ever really “hyper-active”? If you read the definition of hyper-activity from the DSM, it is an amazingly accurate description of just about any two-year-old.

Beware of labels.

Update 2022-04-26

And I will concede that this will not a popular post.  I am regularly astounded at how many people I know are taking psychotropic drugs, and obviously I am very skeptical of their use.  I am wary of hurting people’s feelings.  But there is good reason to voice my dissent no matter how small a minority I represent.  We in danger, as a society, of building a world in which we continually anesthetize ourselves against our deepest anxieties.  We have good reason to be anxious: we are melting the ice caps.  We are promoting intolerance and bigotry.  We are more divided than ever before.  We should be anxious and the worst solution is to address our anxiety with palliatives.

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The Forbidden Lion King

In 1995 the Virginia-based American Life League urged a recall of “The Lion King,” arguing that in one scene rising clouds of dust spelled the word “sex.” – New York Times, January 7, 1999

Whoa! Baby! Quick, children, cover your eyes!

American Life League? Who are these people? Where are the little holes in the ground that they hide in whenever someone talks seriously about art and life and bodily functions? American Life League? Let me guess: they want a return to “traditional” values, emphasizing nation, God, and family, and hard work.

Just to feel better about myself, I think I will take a piece of cardboard and write the word “sex” on it and show it to my children tonight, just to see what happens.

Look out!

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Health for Profit

Imagine your doctor telling you this:

Well, Bill, you have a very serious illness. In fact, if we don’t do something about it, you’re going to die. Fortunately, we have a cure. It costs $1 million. Do you have it? No? Oh, that’s too bad. Well, it’s been nice knowing you. Please give my best to your family.

Unimaginable, right? No doctor would ever say that. Never. What the doctor would say would be more like, “Well, Bill, we better make an appointment with our team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, oncologists, anthologists, and scientologists, and get you into surgery as quickly as possible so we can save your life.” Yeah, that’s more like it. The doctor cares about you. He is working hard to save your life. Nobody is going to let you die. Then all those doctors and hospitals would just send their bills to your insurance company.

In Canada, they would send their bills to the provincial agency in charge of health care (OHIP, where I live). There would be no need to check with them before hand: other than some cosmetic surgeries and exotic experimental treatments, pretty well everything is pre-approved. OHIP would then pay the bill. Done.

In the U.S., however, they would have to negotiate with your HMO or your insurance company and arrive at an agreed upon treatment plan. The doctor gets paid for doing surgery, not for keeping you healthy. He wants to do as much surgery as possible so he can retire early. But the insurance company or HMO wants to keep their money so they can pay it to shareholders and reward their top executives with mind-boggling salaries, private jets and country club memberships, and numerous vacations. They will do everything they can to keep from having to pay for your surgery. “Well, it’s not as if Bill is really all that well-liked anyway…”

Christian doctors, who hold an incredibly high regard for human life of course, charge only a modest amount, even if they know they could get a lot more. Ha ha.

The cost of medical treatment is a reflection of a number of factors, including scarcity and necessity. The U.S. has opted for a free enterprise model. Supposedly, all those doctors and hospitals will keep their costs real, real low, because they have to compete with each other for patients. So hospitals advertise the odd special: “New stem-cell leukemia treatment– was $350,000, but marked down, this weekend only, to $285,000. Folks, these are close-out prices!”

A kidney transplant can be a regular bargain at $120,000, if there are no complications. And that doesn’t include all the drugs you need afterwards.

Treating someone who’s been in a serious accident can cost $80,000! Just for a few hours in OR! That sounds a bit pricey for me. Couldn’t I try the emergency room at St. Mary’s? I hear they give coupons.

Well, where does the $350,000 come from? What exactly do you get for $80,000? Who gets most of the $120,000?

Well, look at a hospital. It’s got offices, computers, janitors, cooks, nurses, receptionists, presidents, vice-presidents, administrators, human resources staff, training staff, support personnel, vision statements, and so on. Some of the money goes to doctors, of course, and they’re probably over-paid (compared to teachers, at least), but they don’t get anywhere near the $350,000 total. I’ve seen some medical catalogues: hospitals pay big bucks for equipment that looks like it ought to be a lot cheaper. A little plastic tube costs $14.00. It looks like you could get it free at Wendy’s with a Kid’s Meal Cheeseburger.

Well, the reason these medical tools are so expensive is volume. They don’t make enough of them. I think everybody should own their own surgery kit. If they sold enough of them, the price would really come down.

Then we could just rent a surgery room somewhere, hire a doctor for, say, $250.00 an hour, and do the operation there. That would be true free enterprise. And why should only doctors have the right to do surgery? What if you knew somebody who was really good at it? I’ll bet the competition would really reduce the costs.

I’ll bet you could do the kidney transplant for less than $3,000. Instead of nurses, you could have your aunt or grandmother come in and tidy up, change the sheets, hand the instruments to the doctor, and count sponges. Instead of filling out ten zillion forms and arguing with your HMO, you could just give the doctor your car, or a year of yardwork, or your stereo.

A big, big problem is that about half of all the medical treatment in North America goes to terminally ill elderly patients. An 86-year-old guy with bad kidneys gets some heart pain, so we zap him into surgery and perform a triple by-pass. Because he’s old and weak, he’ll take about three months of constant care to recover. A week after he starts walking again, they’ll find cancer or something, and do some more surgery. There goes the family inheritance. So this guy worked hard for fifty years, got married, had kids, contributed to his employee pension plan, bought insurance, bought a house as an investment, scrimped and saved and invested and wasted not… only to get sucked dry by doctors in the last six months of his life. It’s like some kind of horrible, dirty trick they play on all of us. You think you’re getting ahead, but THEY, whoever they are, the holders of wealth in our society, get it all back from you in the end. Your children and your children’s children have to start all over from scratch. That sucks.

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Doctor Impersonators

Stephen Kai Yiu Chung, 60, was arrested in Ancaster yesterday. Chung has been practicing medicine in Ancaster, Ontario for 15 years. I’ll bet you think he’s a respected member of the community and that everyone was shocked when he was arrested?

Well, not everyone. You see, the main problem is that Mr. Chung is not a doctor. He was licensed by the ever-vigilant College of Physicians until last month, but not everyone who is licensed to practice as a doctor is a doctor. They discovered that he actually had no medical training, no medical degree, and no qualifications to practice medicine.

Well, I’m not one to be picky. And who knows, if I ever lose my present job, I may want to go into medicine myself. Obviously, it can’t be as difficult as it looks. If Mr. Chung can get by for fifteen years without raising any suspicions, I figure I could last for five at least, maybe ten.

So how did they finally catch up with the ingenious Mr. Chung? Did someone finally notice him reattaching hands backwards? Did he prescribe expensive drugs of dubious medicinal value? Did he ignore his patients needs and see them only when it was convenient for himself? Did he recommend useless surgeries to pad his OHIP billings? Did he ridicule and attack cheap, readily available natural remedies? Did he recommend that his patients ignore the causes of their illnesses and just pay him for treatment instead?

No. You see, none of those things–aside from attaching the hands backwards– would have actually raised any suspicions about him actually being a doctor. Just as every person who tries to seek compensation for you after you have suffered grievous harm at hands of a heartless, criminally negligent corporation, and then impoverishes you with his own absurdly excessive billing, is not necessarily a lawyer.

No, they caught Mr. Chung by pure chance. It appears that some other guy in London, Ontario, named Roark, embarrassed the heck out of the College of Physicians by doing a little heart surgery on the side without having actually acquired any training to do so. After this public humiliation, the College decided to get right on top of things and try to find out exactly how many of our respected doctors are actually… “qualified”.

By the way, some woman has charged Mr. Chung with sexual assault. This happened five years ago. It’s nice to know that not only can you practice medicine without any qualifications for fifteen years without being caught in Ontario, but you can toss in a few assaults and forged documents while you’re at it.

Nobody will notice.

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Modern Medicine

We were wrong about doctors and science.

For the past 100 years, we all thought that we were all living longer and healthier lives thanks to science and modern medicine. We could eat whatever we wanted, do all kinds of daring things– like lock ourselves into two tons of jagged metal and glass and hurl ourselves down the highway at 100 miles per hour– and cover the earth with refuse and soot, and still live longer and longer and longer.

Life expectancy at the turn of the century was, oh, about 22. Now, men can expect to live to 75 and women to 75 and four days. And it’s all thanks to modern medicine.

Or is it?

Turns out, maybe it isn’t. Turns out maybe we don’t even believe it ourselves: everyone is flocking to alternative remedies. Got some strange rash on your bum? Go to a chiropractor. Stomach upset? Get a massage. Broken arm? Take some natural herbs and stick some needles into your arms.

Why are so many people doing this? There are a gazillion television programs telling us that doctors are smart and compassionate and nurses are beautiful and sexy. Why do we suddenly prefer tea enemas?

Maybe it’s because we discovered some kind of secret truth about doctors and hospitals. For one thing, an awful lot of people seem to die after seeing a doctor. For another thing, hospital food is pretty well uniformly bad.

We all have been raised to believe that science– doctors– saved us from the awful polio virus. That fact is like a totem of modern science, a cathedral: it hovers over us constantly, hammering into us the idea that science saves, that modern medicine can cure everything. But I was shocked a few years ago to discover that the incidence of polio had waned to practically nothing before Jonas Salk invented a vaccine for it. (Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me.) All these years, we thought that science had saved us from polio, but it didn’t. It was something else. What was it? If the real doctors know, they sure won’t tell us. “Go home, eat a variety of foods, and stay out of wars.” Not good tv. The pharmaceutical companies sure won’t tell us. “This drug, which cost you 100 times more than it cost a vet to give to a hamster, will cure you if you take it tonight since we have figured out that most people go to the doctor just after a particular virus has peaked in strength and, therefore, will feel better the next day no matter what, so you might as well think it was the drug that did it so we can make zillions of dollars to invest in research so that some day we might be able to copyright your DNA and sell parts of it to other people.”

But we’re all living longer, aren’t we? So if it wasn’t science and medicine that saved us, what did?

Probably, the simple abundance of relatively nutritious food. You may think about McDonald’s and laugh, but it might surprise you to know that even a Big Mac has some nutritional value. You can walk into a McDonald’s and pick up a Big Mac and some fries and a milk shake pretty well any time you want to. That’s affluence. It wasn’t like that for thousands of years. Does a Big Mac sound nutritious? Not very. But consider a world in which many people didn’t even know if they were going to have enough food to last them through the winter.

So yes, we are fat and unfit, but we are living longer than ever, even though, if you believe the TV preachers, we are the most drug addled, promiscuous, violent, and pernicious generation that ever lived. Think about that! If even one tenth of what the TV preachers– and more than a few pulpit pundits–say about the human race was true, wouldn’t life expectancy be declining?

A few years ago, the doctors in Israel went on strike. A well-known study (so well-known I can’t remember the name of it) was done on mortality rates during the strike. It turns out they went down. Some people rationalized that this was because patients were forced to postpone surgeries, stop eating hospital food, and pay smaller health insurance premiums, but it’s not true, according to the researchers. The death rate actually went down. It went down and it stayed down. Eventually, the pr got so bad that the doctors went back to work without getting anything that they wanted. Maybe that’s the real reason there hasn’t been a doctor’s strike yet in Ontario.

Do you suppose that if church ministers unionized and went on strike, that the church might actually grow? Well, think about that a bit too. In our church, the Christian Reformed Church of North America, ministers generally spend a lot of time at big meetings hollering at each other about purity and orthodoxy and scriptural authority and the like. What if they just went out into the cities and cleaned up a few vacant lots and distributed sandwiches to the homeless instead?

Here’s another juicy piece of information: what professional group do you think declines surgical procedures more often than any other? You guessed it: surgeons. That’s worth thinking about a lot the next time your doctor recommends surgery to you.

I have one last little gripe: most of us are gradually coming to the realization that animals deserve a little more respect than we have been giving them in the past. We used to see animals as steak-fodder, beasts of burden, and incipient fur coats. Now, thanks to the extremists, we moderates are beginning to realize that animals are not all that much different from us. I mean, sure, lions and tigers kill indiscriminately, while we only kill when we really, really have to, like when our oil reserves are low so we can’t hurtle ourselves across the highways in our metal and glass behemoths anymore, but, basically, we’re not all that different. Then why does a vet get, like, 50 cents for doing surgery on a dog, while a doctor gets mega-bucks for doing surgery on a human being, like, say, Preston Manning? Does this make sense? Do you really believe that a doctor is that much smarter than a vet?

What I think we should do is de-regulate surgery. Let anyone do it. After all, the free markets have given us this wonderfully rich and meaningful lifestyle we all now share (unless you are lazy). Why not let it work its magic on medicine? If you get a few really, really bad surgeons setting up shop, hey, people won’t go to them after a while and they will go out of business, like Microsoft, so we will only be left with the best surgeons. And they will have to price themselves competitively or else people won’t go to them anymore, unless you are very rich, in which case you probably also pretty smart, in which case you wouldn’t go to a surgeon anyway. I mean, would you rather have some crackpot cutting into you with a knife or giving you a tea enema?