I’ve posted a great YouTube video below that shows in excruciating detail how to deal with a hostile interrogator in the media. The only thing is that this interrogator wasn’t hostile; she was very nice, just not very smart.

I was once told by Reid Buckley (Willaim F. Buckley, Jr’s younger brother and a famous debater in his own right) that the most potent force one has in dealing with a hostile interrogator on TV or radio is silence. Silence is death to them. Silence makes them keep on jibbering and end up looking the fool. But most people fall into the trap of the much more experienced talking heads and end up looking the fools themselves. In the clip below, you can see what I mean about the silence and one word answers. Watch the poor woman conducting the interview struggle.

MD and I have been on many, many TV and radio shows, and what we’ve learned from it all (plus from talking to a lot of people in the biz) is that it’s all entertainment, pure and simple. Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, all of them, are all entertainers. If their shows aren’t entertaining, they lose ratings, and they ultimately go off the air. Many people think of these folks as hard news people, but they’re not, they’re entertainers. So they’ve got to be entertaining. And the way most of them are entertaining – especially the Sean Hannity types – is by attacking their guests.

Most guests who go on these shows are experts of some kind and they know their stuff, so they figure they can hold their own with O’Reilly, Hannity or any of the rest because the expert knows that he/she knows way more than the interviewer about the subject in which the experts are expert. What the experts don’t count on, though, when they walk into the lairs of O’Reilly, Hannity, Matthews et al are that they are experts in doing live TV and in savaging guests whose opinions they don’t like. And the guests pay the price for their hubris.

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When I took my parasitology course in medical school I was exposed for the first time to all the loathsome diseases that are unheard of here but are a part of daily life in other parts of the world. Here people go nuts and rush to the emergency room if they find pin worms in their kid’s stool; there having a Loa loa worm creep across your eye is a common occurrence and only a minor bother.

I was fascinated with my study of liver flukes, roundworms, tapeworms and all the other parasites afflicting primarily those in tropical areas. The most vile yet amazing of these creatures was to me Dracunculus medinensis, the Guinea worm. This parasite causes untold misery to those it afflicts, and is now, as this BBC piece relates, on its way to extinction. For people living in areas the Guinea worm infests, I’m sure this is wonderful news.

What the BBC neglected to mention is that the eradication of the Guinea worm has been effected in large measure by none other than our former president, Jimmy Carter. Carter, in my opinion, wasn’t much of a president, but he has been a terrific ex-president when he avoids politics and sticks to humanitarian issues. This Carter Center he and his wife founded has been instrumental in educating people in areas where the Guinea worm is common to take the needed steps to intervene in the parasite’s life cycle and disrupt its ability to reproduce. The BBC reports: Read more »

Since I seem to be on a roll writing about rear ends (politicians and fatty stools) I might as well go ahead and post this piece now that I’ve gotten all the results in. As near as I can figure, I’ve got about 7,000-8,000 people reading this blog daily, so given the percentage of people who are afflicted with hemorrhoids, this should be of interest to at least a couple of thousand. If you don’t have a hemorrhoid, if you don’t know anyone who has a hemorrhoid, and if you don’t think you will ever get a hemorrhoid, you can quit reading now.

When MD and I were in Dallas a month of so ago visiting our kids, I went to visit (as I usually do when in Dallas) a friend I’ve known for years (let’s call him Jack, not his real name). As we were talking he was squirming around on his couch, looking like he was in some kind of discomfort. I asked him if he was having a problem, and said no. At that point his wife, who was bringing us some coffee, said, “Tell him; he’s a doctor for God’s sake.” Jack then sheepishly told me that he had a bad hemorrhoid that was intensely painful. I asked him all the appropriate questions and diagnosed him as having a thrombosed hemorrhoid that needed treatment.

Jack said he would call is doctor and try to get in. I told him that I had fixed countless thrombosed hemorrhoids, and that if I had the tools I needed, I could fix it for him in a flash. I made a couple of calls and found out that I could get all the necessary equipment at a drugstore nearby. Off we went to gather the stuff. We returned with a latex gloves, a scalpel, a couple of syringes and needles, a bunch of gauze 4X4s for packing after the surgery, and a bottle of xylocaine (an injectible local anesthetic). I recruited Jack’s wife as my assistant, and we got him down on the bed. I had his wife spread his cheeks so that I could get to work. I immediately realized that I had made one of the cardinal errors of doctoring: I had failed to examine the patient before I made the diagnosis.

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A study came out a couple of weeks ago that has thrown the statin worshipers into a blind panic. The study, published in an obscure journal, indicates that people who have low LDL-cholesterol (LDL) levels have a higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease (PD). The authors of the study didn’t actually test to see if statin drugs caused the lower LDL levels that are associated with PD, they simply made the case that patients with PD have lower LDL levels than those who don’t. In fact, the control group (the subjects without PD) contained many more people taking statins than did the study group of patients with PD, which could conceivable lead to the conclusion that statins somehow prevent PD. The authors made such a case:

In summary, our study shows an association between lower LDL-C and the occurrence of PD. This may be interpreted either as linking lower LDL-C levels etiologically to PD, or as cholesterol-lowering agents having a neuroprotective effect as regards PD. [My bold]

Despite the authors making this statement and the data itself showing what could be considered a protective effect, the pro-statin folks went ballistic. Just the idea that perhaps lowered LDL might be a factor in PD was enough to set them off at full bellow on the idea that should people actually believe this and stop taking statins, thousands of them–no, millions–might die of heart disease and/or stroke.

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