Flug
is seeking his Google medical degree
by
Robert LaFrance
I guess the time has come for those
in medical school to abandon their efforts toward an ‘MD’ after their names and
to just let Google take care of it.
At least that’s the view of my
friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation – I hope). The last time he visited
the doctor, for a mouth ailment, he saved the physician a great deal of time by
a neat self-diagnosis. “I think it’s Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever,” he told
kindly old Doc Hardistry. “No need for you to conduct any kind of blood test or
something and wasting our time. Just give me a prescription for Anemicogia and
I’ll be on my way.
“That’s what I found out on Google
this morning,” he went on. “It’s amazing all the information that’s available
now.”
“But Mr. LaFrance,” the doctor
protested, “I don’t think it’s Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever because you don’t
show any of the symptoms – except confusion. Also, I don’t know whether you
have noticed, but you appear to have scurvy.”
Flug was telling me this the day
after his diagnosis by a non-Google Dr. Emil Hardistry. “It just sounded like
my symptoms,” he said. “I’ve been reading up on diseases and Google has been my
main source of information.” And he was off to correct another doctor in his,
Flug’s, search for a medical degree.
I didn’t have the heart to tell Flug
that I had spoken to Dr. Hardistry only hours earlier. He had stopped by for
some apples, of which there aren’t many left now. “It’s getting so now that
half my patients think they know more about medicine that I do,” he complained.
“Before they come in, they check to see what Google says and then come armed to
my office where they make their diagnoses. Yesterday I had a guy tell me that his
shingles were caused by fleas and an allergy to watching Donald Trump on TV.”
This all goes to show us why there
is often signs around doctors’ offices and hospitals, signs that say: “Turn off
your &%$#@* smartphones! No Google!”
**********************
Before we go any farther with this
column, I would like to enlist your aid in solving a mystery.
Sometime in the last decade, our
provincial Department of Transportation, known as D.O.T., underwent some kind
of operation and became the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure,
known as D.T.I. My question is, what happened to the letter ‘O’ in D.T.I.?
I fought the change for a long time
because I (and you) knew that it was a simple matter of ‘rebranding’ that
governments and other organizations get into now and then. Like painting all
their trucks and other equipment. “They are catering to the optics of the
situation,” commented Flug, who must have learned that phrase on Google. He
also uses ‘impact’ as a verb.
Back to my request, please send any
comments or explanations to me at my Facebook page. We have to guard against
that sort of thing, because the new name should really be D.O.T.I.
**********************
Last week I was driving through
Plaster Rock, Drummond or Upper Kent – one of those places – when I saw a dog
driving a pickup truck.
If you were into 17th
century English words you could say I was nonplussed when I saw this. As far as
I know, that means: ‘Now I’ve seen everything!’ but that wasn’t even close to
true. There’s more to come I’m sure.
After the late model Ford F150
stopped a few hundred metres up the road, I pulled over to check whether I had
seen what my alleged mind had told me. Sure enough, a late-model Newfoundland
dog was perched in the driver’s seat. As I got closer I could see a male human
sitting in the passenger’s side of the pickup. (Just as a side note, the dog’s
massive feet resembled snowboards.)
The human was my old friend Mateja
Kezman, a former Serbian football (soccer) player whom I had known when I lived
in Chelsea, which is a rich part of London, England. “I say, Kezman,” I hailed
him. “Was the dog driving or what?” He strongly denied that such was the case
because his dog, Azeryzan, was clearly drunk and wouldn’t drive in that
condition. On the seat beside Mateja was an empty bottle of Screech. After a
short conversation I went back to my Corolla.
I couldn’t help thinking about it
though, and two days later I happened to be looking through the local court
news and sure enough, there was information that a certain Azeryzan Kezman had
been pulled over by a police officer and had bitten that officer on the nose.
It didn’t mention the driver’s species or the sentence, but the story indicated
that the dog had pleaded guilty.
-end-
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