Avoiding the Third Doctor
Dolors & Sense
by Sanford Rose
KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—12/12/11—As G.M. Trevelyan once put it: “I have two doctors—my left leg and my right.”
Those who don’t use these two doctors are condemned to visit a third—a man in a white coat with a waiting room filled with anxious, needy people. That doctor will not generally be nearly as qualified to help as the other two, and he is far more expensive.
Some 10 percent of the population accounts for 65 percent of the nation’s ballooning medical bill. They are the chronically sick. They eat too much. They eat the wrong things. Some still smoke. And nearly all are seriously under-exercised.
The chronically sick suffer principally from the diseases of insidious, low-level systemic inflammation—diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, cancer of the colon, and cognitive dysfunction.
If they survive into their 70s and 80s, their list of disabilities expands to include inflammation-related orthopedic maladies, including hip, knee and back osteoarthritis and chondral deterioration. Many of these diseases have mutifactorial etiologies, but prominent among these is the pernicious influence of inflammation-generating fat molecules that have invaded and ravaged the skeletal system.
The chronically sick spend most of their waking hours parading from doctors’ offices to testing facilities to hospitals.
It is not an old-fashioned callithump.*
It is a parade of pain.
Indeed, the chronically sick are actually “pain people.” Their pain defines them and, because of the operation of the glial system, it is largely self-feeding.
It’s no way to live, if it can be called living at all.
Yet it is avoidable.
People must begin using their two God-given doctors far more extensively than current literature or medically sanctioned propaganda suggest. They must use them not just in leisurely walks but rapidly and against resistance—say, of a hill, natural or artificial (treadmill).
Only by using these two doctors can they avoid largely unavailing trips to the third.
People who do not use their legs must end up on their knees.
Sanford Rose
Sanford Rose, of New Jersey and Florida, served as Associate Editor of Fortune Magazine from 1968 till 1972; Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972; Senior Editor of Fortune between 1972 and 1979; and Associate Editor, Financial Editor and Senior Columnist of American Banker newspaper between 1979 and 1991. From 1991 till 2001, Rose worked as a consultant in the banking industry and a professional ghost writer in the field of finance. He has also taught as an adjunct professor of banking at Columbia University and an adjunct instructor of economics at New York University. He states that he left gainful employment in 2001 to concentrate on gain-less investing. (A lifelong photo-phobe, Rose also claims that the head shot accompanying his Weekly Hubris columns is not his own, but belongs, instead, to a skilled woodworker residing in South Carolina.)