Words from my mentor, Dr. Philip Tumulty:
Just because someone is a hypochondriac doesn’t automatically mean they aren’t sick!
Oh MY!! That is ONE decent pair of salada’s there.
Bigger question though lieu is how you managed to find such a site…oogling the goolies for academic or personal reasons there?? 
Lown may have been a great innovator, but heart attacks were not an automatic death sentence in the 60s and before. My father had a heart attack in 1949 and lived another 20 years. I had a heart attack in 1965 and here I am wasting time on the I-net, 37 years later.
This reminds me of one of my favourite Far Side cartoons with the shrink writing “just plain nuts” on his notepad.
My sister is a medical secretary, and has worked in the New South Wales public hospital system on and off for over a decade: she tells me that it’s not uncommon for doctors to write “FITH” or “Fith Virus” on a person’s record. The next doctor will know what it means: “Fucked In The Head”. Sad, but still kinda funny.
I’m working as a full-time emergency doc. And most of the patients I see have a physical problem. A proportion of doctors believe any patient with a problem THEY can’t see must (by exclusion) have a psychological disease. This often turns out to be false but does wonders for the ego. I’ve never heard of FITH, but I know no gastroenterologist with a special interest in IBS.
Talking about nutty patients and emergency departments reminds me of the interesting syndrome of delusional parasitosis. People with DP are convinced that they have parasites. They will sometimes bring in their “parasites” wrapped in a piece of paper. But there’s nothing in the paper but bits of dust and lint. They may go from doctor to doctor getting negative test after negative test unable to shake their conviction that they have parasites. These people “have nothing physically wrong with them, but instead are … deluded…” But they are relatively rare.
“See doc, what bugs me…”
He taught new doctors for several decades, and according to his book watched the listening skills of recent graduates degrade enormously over the years.
Heh. Making assumptions about a book you haven’t read is bound lead to large, embarassing mistakes. Lown’s major point is that the usual medical training fifty years ago was much greater in the listening skills department, but that over the intervening decades this has decreased greatly, and is a major cause of contemporary malpractice incidents.
You’ll have to read the book. If the inventor of the defibrillator and a coronary physician with forty years of experience gives an opinion for survival today vs. forty years ago, I think I’ll believe him. If you survived a heart attack before heart drugs and DC defibrillators were in wide use, don’t assume that therefore heart attacks must be easily survivable. “If it happened to me, it must be common” is lousy reasoning. Call it the fallacy of taking too small a sample. If you and your dad were in the lucky percentage, how would you ever know how many heart patients DIDN’T survive? And if I win ten thousand bucks at a Vegas slot machine, should I reason that such wins have to be extremely common (since after all it happened to me), and promptly dump my winnings into slot machines? Better not!
lieu, do you think you could attach some kind of warning to that picture you linked to?
A picture of testicles belonging to a man suffering a serious medical complaint isn’t an entirely pleasant accompaniment to my evening meal.
bbleaty, you never answered the question, did Dr. Lown do a study of contemporary medical education or did he just figure “If it happened to me [or at the medical school where I work], it must be common”?
And bbleaty, the fact that the defibrillator saves lives and that Dr. Lown is such a brilliant and experienced physician doesn’t change the fact that “heart attacks were not an automatic death sentence in the 60s and before.” Before claiming that Hari Seldon doesn’t know what he is talking about, you should try getting some facts.
You mean like “Not for the meek”?
Sorry Narrad.