Sunday, March 09, 2008

Which doctor do you see, the new kid or the ones who killed a million patients?




When you are sick, you find that there are only three doctors to choose from.

One has been a doctor for a very long time. He has helped some patients but made many a lot worse by saying the best treatment was no treatment at all, and then moving the life-saving equipment to the room of a very wealthy patient getting a tummy tuck. When he would prescribe a treatment for regular folks, it was often because he got kickbacks from the drug company, and the patient did not necessarily get better--but he was still required to pay his bill. The one time the very seasoned doctor saw an irritated patch of skin on a patient, declared it a potential epidemic of flesh eating bacteria, and prescribed a cure that killed over four thousand of our troops, and a million Iraqis (but some drug companies did suspiciously well during the epidemic).

The second doctor has less experience but has a good record treating children and bandaging some knees. She did occasionally prescribe some drugs that seemed to help the drug-makers more than the patients too. Unfortunately, she strongly agreed with the first doctor about the big epidemic, and help administer the treatment that killed so many. Worse, she sees a nearby rash that she says will need the same treatment, and will likely lead to even more deaths.

Both say the third doctor is dangerously inexperienced. They admit that it was true he correctly diagnosed the irritated patch of skin as something that could have just been watched and treated with some ointment, but he does not have the long experience of killing patients that they do.

So who do you choose, the inexperienced but correct doctor, or the experienced ones who bury their patients?

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