“The doctor gave a man six months to live. He couldn’t pay his bill so he gave him
another six months.” Henny Youngman,
stolen from God-knows-who.
Hey, if that’s all it takes to gain immortality, I’ll
happily be a living deadbeat. There must
be a catch or some fine print.
When you think about it, though, we do place a good bit of
implicit trust in our health-care providers.
(Relax, you’re the Prozac Generation, so Relax, Relax.) Suppose your doctor stood you up next to a
tape measure and then deduced that you had a fever; you’d be skeptical. But the latest innovation in thermometric
gadgetry inspires sufficient credence for you to allow the same deduction. Why?
Blind trust, either simply in our generation’s miraculous gadgetry or in
the doctor’s competence and professionalism.
And the level of this trust and confidence expands exponentially in
cases of more serious illness or injury.
I think this very phenomenon of blind trust (mass hysteria?)
is frighteningly common. Consider the
Crisis in Education, kindly brought to our attention by Mr. Perot some years
ago. In response to the billionaire,
witness the convoluted and overlapping system of standards and measurements
that we now call schooling. Acronyms
aplenty, high stakes testing galore, and the flavor of the month comes with
value-added projection. In other words,
more cutting-edge gadgetry, though not of the thermometric variety. This gadgetry and its proponents purport to
measure the intellectual and scholastic status, mostly of adolescents, a subset
of our species genetically programmed for rebelliousness and other forms of
stubborn illogic. Methinks these
Pedagogical Physicians are using a yardstick to monitor this fever of
crisis. This approach seems
counter-intuitive, if not downright dangerous – even painful.
If we’re indeed wedded to this gadgetry and the theories
behind it, perhaps Mr. Youngman again
provides us a way out … Take My Wife, Please!
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