Take two pills and call me if you survive until morning

As Mark Twain tells it, he once had one of those nagging colds that just wouldn’t go away. He asked a neighbor what he should do about it.

“Drink a quart of whisky,” the neighbor said.

Unsure of the advice, Twain asked his doctor how best to beat his cold.

“Drink a quart of whisky,” the doctor said.

“So that made a half gallon,” said Twain.

He was probably only joking, but with Mark Twain, it’s hard to tell. But according to statistics, the only mistake Twain made that day may have been to visit the doctor at all.

That’s because, according to a recent report from the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 180,000 Americans die every year from “unintentional harm” at the hands of doctors.

In other words, imagine taking your car in to have the tires checked, and while it’s on the lift the transmission falls out.

Except it isn’t your car on the lift, it’s you.

And it isn’t your transmission. It’s your life.

Understand, this number does not describe patients whose condition fails to respond to treatment. That would be understandable. Chemotherapy can’t save every cancer victim.

No, these are folks who survived the condition but died from the cure — oftentimes, the cure for something else that wasn’t all that severe in the first place. Many had no condition at all, but died from a test to see if a condition existed.

To make matters worse, those 180,000 terminally medicated Americans come from data gathered on Medicare patients alone. If you add victims in the general population, the number would swell dramatically.

Stated another way, if medical “unintentional harm” were a disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have to list it as the #3 cause of death in America, right behind heart disease and cancer.

By contrast, alcohol kills about 75,000 Americans yearly – far less than half of those killed by well-meaning doctors.

Which means that Mark Twain’s neighbor may have dispensed some pretty good advice when he prescribed a visit to the liquor store instead of the hospital.

I had a cold recently — my first illness in years. Normally I am sickeningly healthy, to paraphrase my sneezing, wheezing friends. And I came down with the cold about a week after sitting in a doctor’s office. I was only there because I was taking my wife to an appointment. Normally I avoid doctors like the plague —which may be a pretty apt metaphor.

My wife laughs at me when I blame the doctor for my cold, but I think if you’re looking to get sick, your best chance is to go where sick people hang out.

I’m cured now, thanks to a week or so of sleep. And a liberal dose of some good Irish whiskey.

It may seem ironic that 180,000 Americans can die annually from medical treatment alone, especially in this day of advanced knowledge and technology. But that very advancement may be much of the problem itself.

That’s because everybody today is a specialist. While the old country doctor was a bulging bag of every sort of tool, today’s medical specialist is a single, finely honed instrument.

But using a single tool to build houses — or health — can be disastrous. If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it’s a nail.

Over the past five years or so, my wife’s health has gone on a wild and woeful ride that includes cancer, stroke, and heart conditions. And although we have some doctors to thank for her survival, we also have several of them to blame for much of their ill-advised treatment.

In one particularly maddening week, three different doctors disagreed entirely with the other two. Monday’s neurology doctor had his prescription nixed by Tuesday’s cardiology doctor, which was axed by Thursday’s physiotherapy doctor.

Frustrated, I asked Dr. Thursday, “Why should she take your advice more than theirs? You all have degrees from great medical schools, yet you all look at the same condition and see something different. I always thought there was supposed to be some science behind this medicine business.”
He flashed a smug smile and said, “Well, sometimes it’s more art than science.”

I managed to get out of there without slugging him, but only just.

Because if a painter cranks out some bad art, you can always take it off the wall and stuff it in a closet. But when your doctor’s artistry falls flat, you stuff it in a grave.One by one, my wife has fired all the specialists. Only time will tell if that is a good decision; all I know is that she is fed up with them, and from frustration, she has threatened to stop all treatment entirely. I have advised her against being too extreme, but one by one she has eliminated several medications and tests — measures that were meant to improve her condition but only made her feel worse with their side effects and unintended consequences.

And now that she has thumbed her nose at specialists and is down to a bare minimum of medications each day, she feels better than ever.

And I’ll drink to that.

• Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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