Dr. Nuance versus the Crusaders of the Lost Art

By SAURABH JHA, MD The two writers who got inside my head were polar opposites. Christopher Hitchens was an atheist, who mocked religion incessantly, and spared few sacred cows – he went after both Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton, though for patently opposite reasons. G.K. Chesterton, the sardonic, plump Englishman, went after heretics. Hitchens destroyed orthodoxy. Chesterton mocked radicals. Hitchens once quipped that “what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Chesterton quipped that the rebel, the infinite skeptic, was in fact a decerebrate orthodox. If both were on Twitter they’d be trolling each other, non-stop. Though fighting on opposite sides, they had a commonality – they punished sloppy thinking, one with prose and the other with wit. I’ve long wondered who would be healthcare’s Hitchens and Chesterton. Physician writers have generally been disappointments, because they veer, almost uncontrollably, towards tedious self-flagellation, ever keen to internalize medicine’s original sin – an imperfect science, a stubborn art. Unlike prophets of yore who risked harm in expressing their views, medicine’s prophets moralize from the comfort of their six-figure salaries. “We do too much”, they say, even as they’re grass fed by the excess they so disdain – count me in this army of hypocrites. For many years healthcare watchers have been fed a steady stream of Disneyland economics, trite platitudes, which have simpl...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs