Retrieved from: my library
(0767919491),2005
Suggested by: I cataloged it...couldn't resist
My Ratings: 5 Merit, 8 Interest, 10 Fun
If you expect doctors to be serious and "professional" (i.e. never laugh at their patients), you should probably avoid this book. These are the best submissions to the Placebo Journal, which purports to "bring some humor back into physicians' lives" through sharing the annoying and often bizarre stories of patients. The stories range from tracking down John Bobbitt for an autograph-plus (not very medical, but amusing in a very sick way) to several stories of morbidly obese individuals in dire straits to X-rays of many of the very bizarre things people put inside of themselves.
There are some truly disgusting stories that are somehow guffaw-worthy--one I won't go into that has a hard-of-hearing woman confusing the doctor's diagnosis of "maggots" with "magnets," to which she responds, "Magnets? How the hell did magnets get in there?"--and a lot of projectile vomiting stories.
Most of the stories are funny, but in a few there is a definite sense of repressed (or not) fury and frustration on the part of doctors towards the big Two Evils of modern medicine: HMOs and pharmaceutical reps.
The only part of the book I didn't find very funny were the fake ads, which are definitely aimed directly at a medical professional's funny bone. I see the point, but didn't find many of them amusing. Maybe it's because I sat through a Levitra commercial last night with Sparky who tuned in on the 'side-effects' and... Well, it was a moderately embarrassing moment.
This took me about 3 hours to finish, mostly read--ironically--in a doctor's office and blood center, and needed some major copy editing. Oh, well. I stumble over typing "pchysiast" too.
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