Why I don't like going to the doctor...

I'm generally a healthy male. Yes, I am overweight and boarder-line hypertensive, but I really don't have any health problems at the moment (aside from a slight head cold.) However, I really don't like going to see physicians, why? Let me explain.

I'm not afraid of physicians, I respect what they do, their years of training and their ability to diagnose and treat some problems.

I am lucky enough to get to interact with physicians in training quite a bit and honestly, they terrify me. Not because they are bad people or anything like that, but because the medical school curriculum is so demanding, I get the sense there is little time to really fully learn anything. If there's one thing that I've learned from watching FOX NEWS, it's that a little bit of information is extremely dangerous. Further, many seem to regard their training as the ultimate accumulation of knowledge regarding human biology. Further, I'm not really how many of these individuals ended up in medical school anyhow, with little knowledge of chemistry, physics and a moderately passable knowledge of biochemistry. Maybe anatomy and physiology is all that was studied as undergrad pre-med major, but this hardly qualifies you to authorize people to take potentially dangerous chemicals into their body. Sure, there's Medical Chemistry and Pharmacology taught in med school, but evidence of a working knowledge of these subjects has eluded those with whom I've interacted.

Now not all physicians are fresh out of school, some are actual practicing physicians who've been seeing patients for years. These guys scare me the most! Sure they can be amicable and have excellent bed-side manorisms, but I always find myself wondering whether they've kept up with the advances of modern medicine. A major part of what I do is to read the most current literature, synthesize new ideas and put those ideas to the test. If a physician was trained 30 years ago, I wonder how current their knowledge really is. Are they going to seminars every weekend? Are they just listening to pharmaceutical reps pushing drugs? Do they even have a concept of molecular medicine?

I'm amazed every time I speak with a physician how little the average physician knows about modern scientific research. If medicine is to be practiced effectively, it should be the pinnacle of knowledge the base of which was laid in high school and college. The human body consists of systems, systems consist of organs, organs consist of tissues, tissues consist of cells, cells consist of biochemical molecules, biochemical molecules are fundamentally chemicals with biological properties that ultimately follow the rules of physics. Without knowing physics, chemistry, biochemistry and cellular biology,how can one hope to understand tissue, organ and system biology? Further how can one possibly contemplate how a drug designed to stimulate or repress a biochemical pathway without adequate, current knowledge of how cells, tissues, organs and systems act, communicate and counteract that drug?

This is what goes through my mind in the waiting room...