I don't often write about my job, as you know, even though I may use medical illustrations at times, such as, "The Journal of Fretting Leprosy." But lately medicine has pretty much taken over my life--in fact it's the only reason I cannot blog regularly-or exercise regularly, sleep regularly, or even go to church regularly. I simply cannot be depended on to do anything other than medicine consistently and with quality. It has quite literally done what I feared it would do 30 years ago when I started. Not with crises as I envisioned, and dreams of the decay of all flesh, but just with the over-flux of information, expectations, and of course money, money, money; now more than ever. It has become an Overweening Abstraction much more than a benign- primum non nocere-force.
In the days of private practice, and even in the benign employ of a wonderful hospital and administrator, (all hatz off to Lynn KIein!) the postmodern practice of medicine has become a destroying angel. We rank 50th among the nations in health care effectiveness, yet we spends tons more money, and get further behind all the time. Many of the things upon which we have spent billions--including tons of medical records--have been shown to be ineffective or even harmful. A day doesn't go by in which people not get hospitalized and even die as the result of their own medications--regimens which require a constant flood of attention and study to manage. For instance, we have spent millions on niacin, fish oil, various diabetic treatments, fibrates and so forth--only to find out they do no good, do not prevent heart attacks or strokes, and have caused a myriad of side effects and even death for virtually no benefit at all.
And this same "science"; oh-so-sure-of-itself; and destined by evolutionary Might to rule and reign over us at every possible juncture; is what we are supposed to trust to define our very existence? "Imperfect" is certainly an understatement. True scientists who have an ounce of much-needed humility say that we know only an unimaginably tiny part of what could be known--never mind that which cannot be known.
Yet it depends intimately on law, lawyers, culture and society, to give it any existence at all, much less infinite credibility. The tail here is pretending it can wag the dog--but the assumption of materialism--not a provable hypothesis-- we have allowed largely because of the dubious largesse of tehno-wizardry, a religion unto itself-- and thus it is that we allow the cruelest of all possible Masters to rule over us, and throw out the only Manna we have ever had. A massive mess of pottage, indeed?
Now I have to decide, as a single individual before God, can I serve two masters? Generally speaking, no. But it takes a great deal of courage to throw oneself on the Greater master--the DOG if you will: in order to let go of the TAIL that has, ever so stupidly, declared independence from not only its Master but from the very Body to which it is attached; and without which it can only twitch for a few moments, then "dry; and die."
Even if we are no more important than a flea, as the world now tells us, while lying to use all the time to garner our money; c.f. "self-esteem" clubbery; it only makes sense, as we see the day approaching, to jump off the good-as-dead TAIL and make a flying leap of true faith to the very much alive DOG--Who is so great and so well balanced that He no longer needs, if ever He did, any kind of backwards appendage that ever points to the rear, and regress.
If thou art, not great, but a person of prayer, please pray that I will make decisions that are not only helpful but that please God in His Perfect Will and somehow in some minor way if not minor key, glorify Him and His and Heaven, leaving the tail convulsing in the dust from which it came and to which it still goes.
(Forgive the verbal excess--but I am very much a "man on fire" about this after a particularly horrible call. The Caller should trump "call" unless I very much have missed my calling."Hear what the Spirit says to the churches." )
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