I AM NOT SO SURE

The absolute only thing I know for sure is that almost everything I know is either wrong or only right by accident. Anyone with even the slightest sense of history knows that at one time we believed that the Earth was flat, sitting in a wheelchair out in the fresh air with a blanket in your lap at a sanitarium can cure Polio or Tuberculosis, and witchcraft can be stamped out by the judicious use of the ducking stool. As a member of the medical profession, I must conclude that everything we know for sure today will be considered abject BS in a few decades and perhaps, retrospectively, barbaric torture.

There was a time when the term Exploratory Laparotomy was commonplace. This is a surgical procedure in which a surgeon opened up your abdomen with a big incision so he could see if there was anything wrong inside. Today we use MRI or CT scan or at worst laparoscopy through small puncture wounds. Someday in the not too distant future we will have a device that sees inside you without exposure to radiation, and shows details of anatomy almost as clearly as this young lady's dress, which will be interpreted by a computer, a treatment will be recommended and delivered at more or less the same time, and you can go back to playing tennis that afternoon. Alternatively, I don’t know what I am talking about and 100 years from now we will not have made much medical progress but at least everyone will have insurance that covers 100 year old technology.

Getting back to the one thing I am certain about, I desperately argued for a polarized point of view today about young people and how they dress. I was on one side and other family members were on the other and the desperate need came over me to be right and to convince them that they were wrong… for the following 27 reasons. Looking back, not only was I probably wrong, but they probably were too. To add insult to injury, not a single young person on the planet was aware of our discussion nor did they change anything as a result. Hence, wasted energy, or as Shakespeare would say “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Next time you are tempted to pontificate on anything, take a couple of deep breaths, pour yourself a glass of wine, sit in an easy chair, take a sip, close your eyes and visualize George Clooney (for the women) or Katy Perry (for the men) and chilax. I could be wrong about this too, but I am willing to take the chance. Scientific advancement depends on it.