I'm a big believer in Good Real Doctors. I have found in my life that the secret to my good health is to have a good primary care physician with whom I have a rapport — someone I can talk to, someone who likes me as a patient. I have left several physicians because I felt I was merely the 10:45 AM appointment and he (or one she) had to get through with me and get to the 11 AM appointment who was already waiting in the adjoining examination room.
That primary care doc is key because he refers me to good specialists for certain needs and these men or women communicate with one another and I have my little M.M.C.N. (Mark's Medical Care Network) working for me. I do not expect any of them to be infallible but they kind of cross-check each other and they all know way more about medicine than I do and it all works fine…for me.
And I've come to feel that a key reason the M.M.C.N. works for me is that I never take medical advice from sources outside the M.M.C.N. This would include friends who think they know more than doctors. It also includes things one reads on the Internet, no matter how credible the website may look. I mean exactly what I say in the following sentence: I have had friends who I believe killed themselves by following medical advice from sources other than Good Real Doctors. That's "killed themselves" as in "died" and some of them didn't have to.
So I don't follow the advice of non-doctors or of online sources even if they are doctors. At most, I may take what I get from those sources and then ask the appropriate person within the M.M.C.N. about them…and sometimes, they say, "Yeah, that's right" but I don't assume that until they say so. I think when it comes to your health, you have to trust those who know more than you do, not those who merely claim to know more than you do.
I've been thinking about this lately as I watch Dr. Anthony Fauci go about his current assignment, which seems to consist of arguing with people who don't know what the hell they're talking about. I think when this whole Pandemic thing is over with, he will be seen as the True Hero of it all, which is not to say he was right about everything from the get-go but nobody was or could have been.
One of the things I've come to admire about doctors — especially the ones I dealt with during my mother's and my friend Carolyn's illnesses and deaths — was the skill to say just the right thing. There is a diplomacy and a sense of scale involved in telling the patient what he or she needs to hear and not to give false hopes or false fears. And you have to make sure that when you err, as is inevitable, you err on the side of caution and restraint.
And poor Dr. Fauci is trying to do this in an environment where people with personal and/or political agendas are desperate to misinterpret or misrepresent his words…or to corner him into saying words they would prefer. Here's an article about Dr. Fauci and others in his profession discussing the challenge they face in this area.
Clearly, among the abilities a Good Doctor needs to have is the ability to select just the proper words. It kinda figures a writer would be impressed by this since that's the main thing we do…or try to do.