Doctors and Jack Handey Quotes

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.” - Jack Handey

I wonder if (most) doctors are truly so focused on treating patients, that they do not realise they have been co-opted to harm patients for the good of multinational psychopathic companies? It took me some effort to find out and verify aspects of that claim, and I had the time to spare. I made sure I had the time to spare, as I learned early on how harmful a lack of free time really is.

“The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.” - Jack Handey

I have been thinking about doctor's overloaded time ever since I was a teenager. We had lots of doctors - seeking safe results - wanting to work with us way back when it was a radical claim that diet and exercise was a major factor in healthy people . None of these laudable doctors managed to work their way past the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Association) threats (approximately: you will be kicked out of the profession if you work with those hippies). These were different times. The ‘authorities’ such as the CDC still overwhelmingly attributed sanitation to improvements in health. We were mostly doing deep tissue massage, yoga, pilates, reflexology, acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy and short courses on natural health. We could not assume that people knew what any of these words meant. Yet the fields were already robustly supported by a mountain of evidence, which informed doctors had to quietly refer patients to, or practice themselves with hobbit-like stealth. What pressure were they under? What sort of system did they work in?

Here's a good trick: Get a job as a judge at the Olympics. Then, if some guy sets a world record, pretend that you didn't see it and go, "Okay, is everybody ready to start now?" - Jack Handey

I mostly know about allopathic medicine second hand. My personal experiences were solely for broken bones via sports, and ranged from an amazing surgery for a badly broken radius/ulna, to being dismissed without an x-ray for a clearly broken fibula. (I walked back in and insisted that it was ridiculous that I find another x-ray machine, and asked if I could use it myself. The doctor relented, then disappeared never to be seen again when the print showed a cartoon-like break.) It seems to me that I look at doctors and see fallible human beings, while others see infallible experts, superior beings, immune to the pressures every other industry succumbs to.

Sometimes life seems like a dream, especially when I look down and see that I forgot to put on my pants. - Jack Handey

The confusing thing was how long it took me (a massage therapist or yoga teacher), to chat with, assess, palpate, stretch, explain to and make comfortable, then to check the treatment was helping, then to advise what to do at home, then to make notes and finally to look after yourself with food, water, stretch, rest, toilet. Then how different the medical system I read about was. How did they care for people so fast? How, I wondered, did it end up that so many studies supported freeing up doctors time to improve patient outcomes, yet real life went the other way? Why were my years of training considered irrelevant if they led me to be critical of a musculoskeletal consultation which took 7 minutes and involved no touch or palpation, no ROM test, and inevitably led to a pharmaceutical prescription - about 30th on the list of interventions which would honour the hippocratic oath? Why did the person doing that less effective work get full government funding while my clients had to pay full fare?

Marta was watching the football game with me when she said, "You know, most of these sports are based on the idea of one group protecting its territory from invasion by another group." "Yeah," I said, trying not to laugh. Girls are funny. - Jack Handey

Why did people respect me so much for being both healthy and curious, as long as I was not discussing health by avoiding pharmaceutical interventions, or widely read on why the holistic approach matches basic anatomy and physiology as well as our clearly limited understanding of intricate physiological interactions?

If you want to be the most popular person in your class, whenever the professor pauses in his lecture, just let out a big snort and say "How do you figger that!" real loud. Then lean back and sort of smirk. - Jack Handey

It was seeking these answers which led me to study Business and Economics. Almost immediately, I had the explanations which medical and natural health journals could never provide. By my reckoning, Economics - despite being completely made up - has far greater explanatory power in describing the world than Science. Treat people as biased and you get Science which leads to improvements - great on paper, rare in real life. Treat people as self maximising, game playing, opportunity costing, bundles of selfish heuristics and you get a world in which Science requires funding, and hence mostly trades one bias for another, while doctors who try to spend more time with their patients cannot compete - Not with other practices, and certainly not with their internal cost/benefit analyses. You know, messy, and a much closer definition of all our observations in real life.

"I hope that after I die, people will say of me: 'That guy sure owed me a lot of money." - Jack Handey

Supposedly, it was Economics (market forces) which, according to popular opinion back then, led to a small amount of time in every doctor's training being devoted to Natural Therapies. Not the decades of overwhelming scientific evidence that these options were commonly superior to pharmaceuticals. The story goes that the threat of litigation for doctors choosing pharmaceutical interventions with side effects was too high, when so many treatment options with zero side effects were available. This phenomenon was short-lived. While overprescribing pharmaceuticals has not gotten any less serious, any perceived threat of litigation has waned. Hence, we regressed to the Covid situation where 'accountability' is no longer a thing.

So can we make the many grey areas into a black and white situation? I think we can, and I think that process starts by recognising that doctors have the power of arbitrary attribution, which holy men across the ages would have killed for. If it works, I did it. If it doesn’t, you did it, and it would have been worse except for what I did.

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did." - Jack Handey

When you consider the investment bias doctors have after years of costly training, can you blame them? What really, can a doctor do to fight the system she is entangled in?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

When we consider the investment bias of families who would have to admit years of inferior care for their loved ones should their pharmaceutical choices be shown to be more harmful than necessary, can we really blame the doctor who also gains nothing by challenging this situation?

To me, it's always a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, "Hey, can you give me a hand?," you can say, "Sorry, got these sacks." - Jack Handey

When we have such seemingly robust institutions for regulation and safety around medicine, can you really blame an individual doctor for having faith in them, rather than scrutinising them in his limited time, as scientific rigour would demand?

“I'd rather be rich than stupid.” - Jack Handey

When we have a society bereft of too much critical thinking (or at least outsourcing it), can you really blame doctors for dismissing those of us who are seeking a consistent truth (as opposed to a truth which requires cognitive dissonance to maintain)?

If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger, screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave man, I guess I'm a coward. - Jack Handey

I, personally, say yes. I blame doctors. I think it is in the common good that a few of them (clearly otherwise nice members of society) get put in prison for criminal negligence, fraud, malpractice. I am incredibly positively biased toward nurses and midwives - I have known so many of them to be amazing, but maybe even they would push back harder up the chain if a few of them were exposed to true accountability. I doubt we will get any of the real malicious actors, but without a few good family men/women suffering some consequences for shirking their responsibilities, I cannot see any incentive for improvement. Yes, I would love to only focus on praising those brave doctors/nurses who did speak out, who did suffer the censorship, slander and persecution on behalf of their patients. However, I do not believe this alone will help. Negative incentives have their place in this world. 

“Laurie got offended that I used the word "puke." But to me, that's what her dinner tasted like.” - Jack Handey

But that is me. I think the more common opinion, one which has more humanity to it, is that doctors are not really to blame when the system they operate in is so warped. Dragging a few across the coals will achieve nothing. I get that this is more realistic than my own assessment. Yet there must be some mechanism to improve such a broken system. However we get there, think of what it could mean to free up the time of doctors.

“It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.” - Jack Handey

- Health might no longer be considered something you outsource.

- Doctors/pharmacists who make mistakes might no longer be the third leading cause of death in most western countries, or be so heavily implicated in failing to address, or exacerbating the first and second causes of death.

- We might regain mechanisms to treat patients or invest in actual medical progress, rather than invest in redefining an existing phenomena as disease, then marketing that disease to healthy people.

- We might regain genuine competition in health education, so that the failings of the allopathic model create demand for the holistic model, and vice versa - leading to health professionals with a wider and more effective toolkit on hand. 

- Public Health spending might regain a positive correlation with public health measures.

“I don't think I'm alone when I say I'd like to see more and more planets fall under the ruthless domination of our solar system.” - Jack Handey

Author’s note:

I wrote this piece to organise my thoughts, and because I regularly revisit Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts, which I find delightful. I did not provide many references, even to very specific and challengable claims, but will happily do so or if I cannot dig them out, retract if a reader requests. I am aware of, and ask forgiveness for the gross oversimplification of an entire health system and the myriad roles within it into the word ‘doctor’. Did you spot the quote not by Jack Handey?

“Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.” - Jack Handey