Welcome

The above is G. K. Chesterton, one of whose books I am finishing up. I recommend his writing.

As I've invited readers of Michael Kirsch's blog to wonder over here, I probably should post something every now and then to make the trip worthwhile. I've forbidden myself from posting until I've written a Primer for Patients: Colonoscopy Coding, and perhaps I'll do it today or tomorrow. Michael, you shouldn't have challenged me to do this own my own. I really can't be responsible for what might show up here.

Proceding with great peril

In simpler times man would have his need to "hold forth" at a bar or cafe or perhaps even sitting by the campfire. My opinion may not matter much, but by golly I need to express it to whoever might listen. It matters not that anyone actually listens, only that holding forth serves a primal need. Blogs are good for that sort of thing.

A physician blogs with great peril as everything he writes is potentially discoverable. One might know better than to declare that "Wow, there was a colossal blunder at the office, and I sure hope I don't get sued over it". One might, in an unguarded moment, state that, for instance, "Using a hot biopsy forceps is substandard", only to use a hot biopsy forceps and have it generate some complication. Under those circumstances the plaintiff's lawyer need not hire an expert witness; you yourself, along with your blog, will serve quite nicely in that capacity.

Any small business owner, which a solo doctor is, needs to exercise some discretion in his public statements lest he offend some advocacy group and they show up at his office with "boycott" and "protest" signs.

Using a blog as a personal journal is also fraught with danger, unless you're a recluse or independently wealthy and have no concerns over what anyone might think about your state of mind. A patient of mine might not be reassured if I were going through a cataclysmic existential crisis and declared that all thoughts and actions are inconsequential and that no life is fulfilled or can be judged complete until we die. I don't believe that, but if I did it would not be wise to air such angst in a blog which could be read by millions.

The winds of change are blowing through the medical field like an F5 tornado. I might rail against the "corporate takeover of medicine", only to sign on with a corporation next week. It would look bad.

I've worn out my welcome on three forums, two of which were music-oriented and one of which was sports-related. Public forums are not welcoming to conservatives (unless it's a conservative forum), and a writer who is capable of typing out venom will not last long, unless he's a progressive.

No matter. For all the good that most public discussion accomplishes, one might as well air them on a blog and leave it at that. That's what I intend to do.

I will comment on politics, but by intention only in broad and philosophic terms. I'll comment on medicine, but of all the things I could talk about, I am the most uncomfortable discussing medical topics. The more I learn about medicine the less confident I am in expressing an opinion because I truly grasp the depths of my ignorance, unlike religion, music and cycling.

Before I was banned from the Internet Cello Society, I issued a challenge that the politically-oriented members there read Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue". It had been about five years since I had read it, and I suggested that the most relevant chapters were the first three and the final one.

I took up my own challenge and I'm working on my third reading of the book. My recollection was correct. All of the book is an excellent read, but the first three chapters state our dismal state of affairs better than anything else I've come across. If I might offer an extended quote from the end of the third chapter:

[Political] debates are often staged in terms of a supposed opposition between individualism and collectivism, each appearing in a variety of doctrinal forms. On the one side there appear the self-defined protagonists of individual liberty, on the other the self-defined protagonists of planning and regulation, of the goods which are available through bureaucratic organization. But in fact what is crucial is that on which the contending parties agree, namely that there are only two alternative modes of social life open to us, one in which the free and arbitrary choices of individuals are sovereign and one in which the bureaucracy is sovereign, precisely so that it may limit the free and arbitrary choices of individuals. Given this deep cultural agreement, it is unsurprising that the politics of modern societies oscillate between a freedom which is nothing but a lack of regulation of individual behavior and forms of collectivist control designed only to limit the anarchy of self-interest.

The more things change....

G.K. Chesterton died before WW II but one might have thought he wrote a weekly column for Townhall or some other soon to be outlawed conservative outlet from this passage:

For the whole  modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. 

Oops!

Saturday @5. 

Happy birthday, dude!

Today is Tom's 18th birthday! We are planning a family birthday party on Friday at P.F. Changs. Mom has made reservations, but I don't remember what time they are for. Call her. 

Anya and I counted her worldly cash collection yesterday: $69. She is insistent on buying a "very good" present for Tom with her own money, along with Valentine Day presents for her sisters, whom she adores whether they know it or not. Thank goodness there are 3 Walmarts within a 6 mile radius of our house. 

I finished Chesterton's book on St. Thomas Aquinas. Someday I'll have to go back and reread the last chapter because I didn't understand a word of it. 

Having mastered that, I'm now halfway through "Orthodoxy", Chesterton's spiritual autobiography and opus. It is not an easy read, and I realize why he is not as popular an author as the more-accessible C.S. Lewis. 

Here is a striking quote from the book:

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will rick it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life,  for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life. 

Back in the house

Our power came on last night although we didn't move back to our home until this morning. Almost miraculously we came upon an enterprising arborist from Cincinnati who is in the area helping with the clean-up effort. He is clearing out the yard even as we speak, at a fraction at what the local arborists were going to charge. I'm proud of how Karin has been able to orhestrate this process. 

Two nights ago we watched "Fireproof". It's a great little movie. As Katy said, it won't be nominated for any Oscars (many of the actors were local volunteers, and the movie had a low-budget feel to it) but it was a good-hearted film that made me think about my own marital behavior. 

Just don't tell my wife or she'll expect me to be nice to her. 

Winter wonderland

Last night Kentuckiana was hit by an ice storm for the ages. I'm a sound sleeper and was oblivious to it all, but my son stayed up all night listening to cracks and crashes as our trees were covered with two inches of ice and then collapsed under the weight. To make matters worse, we woke up to no electricity. Fortunately Katy and Mike invited us over to their nice toasty warm house. 

I'm afraid we might be seeing our summer vacation landing on the ground as we contemplate how we're going to get this mess cleaned up. Unless one of the teetering limbs falls on our house, we're thankful that we didn't sustain any structural damage. 

I'm also thankful that I'm getting to spend time with my grand-daughter and commiserate with my son-in-law Mike, the businessman, who is pondering just how I might make a living in our current reimbursement climate.