What are they good at? That is what we must ask ourselves.

Techno-wizardy like surgery has made immense strides since anesthetic was discovered in 1846. But this leads to surgical interventions, like cardiac bypass surgery, which does little good and can cause harm.

Don't get me wrong: there's never been a better time to recover from falling in a combine, heaven forbid. Reattaching limbs, arthroscopic surgery, and delicate eye operations are all possible now, and that is great! But there is very little surgery can do for the great scourge of our time, metabolic disorder.

Pharmacuetically medicine is like a bombed out city. There's some buildings where people can shelter, but rubble is far more common. Discoveries like insulin and antibiotics gave rise to the "magic bullet" theory of disease; that we can come up with a "pill for every ill." But this is currently aimed far more at managing symptoms than it is actually curing the patient, and has become a cesspit of heedless profit seeking and disregard for highly serious side effects. They prefer to throw yet another pill at the problem, which creates elderly people on a dozen medications and probably not needing any of them.

I had an appointment with a "top" endocrinologist associated with a medical college; and within ten minutes of our discussion he had dismissed all my symptoms, ignored my charts and lists, and wanted to put me on Lipitor, Ambien, and Prozac immediately. No testing, no listening, no actual assessment of what I really needed.

Which leads me to another common problem: their diagnostic skills often suck. They have become so wedded to their blood chemistry printouts they won't listen to the patient. And what is so stupid about that is:

• how much these baselines vary by the lab which performs them and what country they are in
  
• how much the values vary according to what they measure, like blood, saliva, or urine
  
• how no one pays enough attention to how they can change from day to day, time of day, and what someone last ate
  
• how unscientifically these baselines were often arrived at, like "thirty young white male medical students in probable good health" and this tiny, skewed sample is now used for everyone!
  

I'm grateful for modern medicine, which has certainly saved my life a couple of times. In the middle ages that infected tooth, case of pneumonia, and kinked kidney artery would have probably doomed me. But that let me live long enough to become prone to things they handle very badly indeed.