Some of my Thoughts

     Below are some of my medical observations, some recalled facts from journal articles, and some of my thoughts and speculations. As do many other people, I tend to generalize, so if I write "men" or "women", please mentally substitute "the majority of", or "most". Some of these comments have appeared in earlier blogs.

1) It is not true that turning the thermostat up as high as it will go will heat your house faster.

2) Similarly, it is not true that if you are running low on gas you should drive faster to get to a gas station before your gas runs out.

3) When you are dating, you are on your best behavior. So if something about the other person bothers you, do not expect it to improve.

4) The Federal Highway Safety Board (see its Congressional testimony) knew from experiments with crash test dummies  that airbags could  be lethal or injurious to young children fastened in carseats in the front passenger seat, but they were so anxious to get the carseat law passed that they omitted this from their testimony.

5) In almost every state where mandatory seatbelt laws were passed, the death rate for pedestrians increased the first two years.

6) When I asked one of my children how getting a driver's license changed his life, he replied that he was now a much more careful pedestrian because he realized how difficult it was to see them.

7) There is a higher death rate for pedestrians who cross against the light in the middle of the block rather than at the corners, because drivers subconsciously look for pedestrians at the corners.

8) In an informal poll, over 90% of adults questioned who liked chocolate ice cream as a child could curl their tongues, and those who preferred vanilla could not. Why and how the motor XIIth cranial nerve is connected to the taste part of the VIIth (anterior tongue)  and IXth (posterior tongue)  cranial nerves is a mystery.

9) We don't know why some people sneeze violently as they leave a dark movie house during the day and emerge into bright sunlight.

10) Your fingernails and hair do NOT grow after your death: skin retraction secondary to dessication just makes it appear that way.

11) The majority of women who do the family wash throw out their husband's t-shirts if  they have holes in them, and the husbands don't know why.

12) The women applauded and the men were shocked when Geena Davis threw the baseball game to her sister in "A League of Their Own". A male player would not even throw a professional game to his identical twin brother. And Early Wynn, a fastball pitcher for the Cleveland Indians who was known for his brushback and knockdown pitches was quoted as saying that he would even pitch his mother high and tight if she got a hit off him.

13) School rules are made by women for girls, and work rules are made by men for men and boys.

14) When a man tells another man or woman "I'll call you", it is generally understood by the other man but not by the woman that he means sometime between the present and his deathbed.

15) "Men are expected to be emotionally shallow"---Jerry Seinfeld.

16) In a study done at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, by looking only at blood types, it was found that in 10% of the live births it was medically impossible for the husband to be the father of his wife's child.

17) Why do schoolgirls usually have much neater handwriting than schoolboys? They both have equal manual dexterity.

18) Could Abraham Lincoln be elected president if he ran for that office today?

19) Pacific tuna is pink (as you see when you order sushi or sashemi tuna in a Japanese restaurant). Atlantic tuna, or albacore, has white flesh. Pink tuna was sold for years before white tuna came on the market, and people shied away from buying tuna with this new color. Then the white tuna sellers came up with a killer ad: "Our tuna is guaranteed not to turn pink in the can".

20) Brakes stop the tires, but the tires' friction with the pavement has to stop the car.

21) In my years in the Emergency Room of Columbia-Presbyterian I never saw a Cadillac driver with a fractured leg from an automobile accident, but I did see plenty of Volkswagen drivers. Moral: drive the biggest, heaviest car you can, such as an SUV. Probably half of your accidents are caused by the other driver, so you want him to bounce off you. In the same vein, I told all my children that I would never let them ride or own a motorcycle, and for the first six months after they got their driver's license I had them drive an old, heavy, Buick Estate station wagon.

22) No doctor ever got sued for doing an (unnecessary?) test, but many have been sued for not doing one.

23) Lawyers can charge for telephone advice. Doctors cannot, but they can be sued for giving bad advice over the phone. Some doctors refer all patients who call to the ER and/or tell them to come right away to their office for just this reason. In some states it is a violation of "sound medical practice" to give any medical advice if you have not seen the patient.

24) Why are seatbelts not mandatory in all schoolbuses in all states?

25) Did your money manager predict the 2008 bank crash? If not, why are you still allowing him/her to manage your money?

26) It is illegal to sell organs here, but not in India. Many patients with kidney failure both here and in England fly to India to buy a kidney and pay for the transplant.

27) On the island of Anguilla, there are five medical clinics: one family medical practice, one dental, and three plastic surgery.

28) New Jersey residents take their driving test in a parking lot. They do NOT take the test on a road with real traffic. To this day I have patients who will not drive on NJ highways because they never learned how to merge at high speed.

29) Why not mandate that the horn of any car in reverse sounds a beep-beep-beep as most trucks do?

30) All of us have emotional inertia, and hope/pray that the stresses of our job or our marriage will get better
without our doing anything about it.