From Introduction: The Cure for What Ails You

Being a doctor filled with wanderlust has taken me on some remarkable adventures and given me some splendid insights. I feel fortunate to have embraced a career that allows me to take drugs (so to speak), a stethoscope, and some barely used tongue depressors and go sweat like a sumo in the jungles of Vanuatu, cavort aboard a warship during the Persian Excursion, march into an Olympic stadium, and yes, even practice medicine in a more conventional role in hospitals and clinics.

But wherever I lay my size 7½ latex-free rubber gloves, I have practiced medicine with a touch of humor—perhaps, as has oft been suggested, because I am touched. As such, this book is a unique compilation of fascinating yet sound medical advice explained in a way that may well make you herniate something.

That being said, laughter is not the best medicine. Sorry, but no matter how hard I, as a physician, snicker and snort at a sagging sigmoid, hoot and holler at a hookworm, or chortle and chuckle at a charley horse, the problem gets no better. Healing requires hospitals in commotion and surgeons with notions, potions, more potions, and oceans of lotions, not a gaggle of giggling gigglers (eat your myocardium out, Seuss).

No, laughter is not the best medicine. Medicine is the best medicine. But that doesn’t mean that doctors have to be dour, dreary, and mirthless. They can be like me: incompetent. I have discovered that a vast depth of incompetence can be covered up if a patient has a whopping good time. They lie there, thinking, “This guy with an arrow sticking out of his head is undoubtedly a buffoon, but I think I feel better.” As one of my favorite philosopher fools, Willy Wonka, put it, “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”

Famous clown-doctor Patch Adams, modeling a sartorial taste that resembled the result of a high-speed collision between Krusty the Clown and Elton John, once looked me in the eye and said, “Dave, you’re standing on my freakin’ foot,” followed by a kinder, gentler, “You need to realize that humor and fun are two of the greatest antidotes to human pain and suffering. Now please get off my foot.” His size 28 clown shoes were hard not to stand on, but they remain very hard to fill. Before long he even had me smelling the water lily in his lapel. Now I wear one.

I have realized that Patch Adams is right. Learning is better when you’re having fun. Teaching is better when you’re having fun. And yes, even being ill is better when you’re inclined to see the funnier side of life. Laughter, it turns out, is hazardous to your illness.

When I graduated medical school, the dean took me aside and said, “Son, first of all, don’t ever let me catch you practicing on my family. Second, remember that 50 per cent of what you have learned is right and 50 per cent is wrong. Problem is, we don’t know which 50 is which. Now go out and practice.” And I have come to find out he was right. Medicine is such a dynamic field that it changes seemingly by the nanosecond.

By the time your retinas hungrily scan the words on these pages, the treatment for head lice may be a single pill from moss grown only on the sunny side of the Tasmanian tea tree during kookaburra mating season—or perhaps it will simply remain a blowtorch. Heart attacks might be cured by an antibiotic that Fleming forgot was brewing in the lint of his pants pocket.

By taking a drop of blood and running it through a biochip we might soon be able to predict illnesses that rest in your genes. Then, hopefully we can prevent you from ever getting these diseases by putting you in quarantine until, say, George Clooney and Hugh Laurie come up with a cure. But in the meantime, this is as good as it gets.

As I travel the world learning, teaching, and speaking, I am always thrilled to discover that the cure for what ails you (or what will soon ail you) may include the new, exciting, highly advanced technological diagnostics and treatments evolving in research centers and tertiary care hospitals.

Then again, it may simply involve… a good hoot.