Family (physician) values

I know I’m fakin’ it. I’m not really makin’ it. This feeling of fakin’ it – I still haven’t shaken it. – Simon and Garfunkel

Bill James is a world-renowned baseball analyst. After laboring for years in near-obscurity, his views are now near-gospel in many professional circles.

For four years we were contemporaries at the University of Kansas. He was the last Kansan drafted for the Vietnam War; my lottery number was 313, so I was safe. He went on to fame as a statistical genius; I passed on that internship at Sports Illustrated to attend med school.

C’est la vie. Look who gets to blog for Family Practice Management, Bill! Can you hear me now?

Bill once wrote, and no truer words have ever been writ: “One of the unwritten rules of economics is that it is impossible, truly impossible, to prevent the values of society from manifesting themselves in dollars and cents. This is, ultimately, the reasons why athletes are paid so much money.”

Allen Barra, writing in the Wall Street Journal, adds this: “It isn’t some vague indefinable ‘they’ who pays the players. It really isn’t even the owners. It’s you, or rather, it’s us. If we put our money where our mouths are and support cancer, AIDs or Down syndrome research and then buy our tickets with what’s left over, athletes and rock stars will actually be paid what we pretend they should be paid.

“The fault lies not in our All-Stars, but in ourselves.”

Barra is quoting the Bard, as I was on June 1. It all comes back to Shakespeare, and ourselves, in the end. Society gets what it deserves; doctors get what we deserve.

Since I’ve fallen into a rut of quotations, let's make it a little deeper by paraphrasing Lincoln: "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that profession, or any profession so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

Week by week, we’re watching it play out in Washington. Will family medicine survive? We are met on a great battlefield of that war. It’s an ugly process. It’s unbelievably messy, and contentious. Winston Churchill said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others."

For all its inconsistencies, sham, pretense, inefficiency and corruption, democracy always beats tyranny or oligarchy, just as free markets always beat central planning. Sometimes it takes a long time.

In the end, all you can control is what is under your own thumb. Society is going to get the health care it wants and deserves, and you are going to get the medical career you want and deserve.

Make no mistake: You are not a helpless pawn in an inscrutable system. Our situations are all different, but we have this in common: We are free moral agents, and our actions (but not our passions) will always have an effect.

Are you fakin’ it? Are you murmuring and complaining about the System, or the Man? Get off your keister, and make something happen!

Posted at 09:50AM Aug 18, 2009 by Doug Iliff  |  Comments[0]