an apple a day...

doctoring is a funny term to me when I imagine how it came to be. I follow this thread of imagination every time I see a doctor as well as every time the profession is referred to as something fine and noble, when it is being bragged about or esteemed, and then I cannot help but to cringe a little for it. It is the doctor who is said to cure disease and save lives, thus it is also the necessary affectation of doing so which becomes inevitable, as doctors are necessarily human. Every patient a doctor sees is a test of his ability to diagnose and treat. The test can only be passed or failed without gradients of success; there are, however, gradients of consequences to failing, and in between degrees of said gradients are the spaces in which doctoring occurs. Each doctor’s ability and experience differs quantifiably. To think numerically, if one hundred graduating medical students were to take a test consisted of identifying then treating one hundred diseases from common to very rare, none would be able to identify all of them, maybe ±12 would identify most of them, the majority would, by definition, identify 75% of them, and the rest would know what half of the diseases are. Then perhaps half of the 12 top percent would know how to correctly treat all the diseases in theory while the others need to mess up once or twice in practice to get it down. This would break down in much the same way with the rest of the ±70 majority and the ±12 dregs of the class as well. These test results would be fairly normal and widely acceptable in any other class taking a test, but when it’s a doctor, and every patient is a test, these numbers become less and less acceptable. In the worst case, the doctor would diagnose wrongly and treat incorrectly, or diagnose wrongly and treat the wrong disease correctly, or diagnose correctly and treat the disease wrongly. Whether a doctor is very wrong once, resulting in extensive bodily damage or death, or habitually wrong with milder cases resulting in failure to heal, his career is seriously threatened. As most doctors are, by definition, average, so would society’s view of medical professionals be as well..if not for doctoring; so also would their salaries and the prestige be lacking. But this is not the case, I realize, as I also realize that every time a doctor makes a mistake, he can “doctor” up a reason that lays the blame elsewhere i.e. “complications.” For example the only way to know a surgeon did not kill a patient is to have another surgeon catch him in the act AND rat him out, because if a surgeon accidentally kills, he would lose everything his life is built on, and of anybody on earth who could move some organs and vessels around to make a death look, well..any way he wants it to it would be a surgeon. And were there to be a surgeon standing next to the one who messes up, he would not likely speak up due to the fact that he has either: 1) messed up before as well, 2) hasn’t messed up yet, but realistically realizes he will probably do the same one day, 3) been buddies with the other guy, 4) doesn’t want the hospital he works at to close down from being sued, 5) doesn’t want another case for raising malpractice insurance rates for himself and all struggling doctors. Or most of the above. It also doesn’t help that whenever a doctor makes a mistake the integrity and superiority of all doctors and the respectability of the hospital he works at suffers and is lessened. This is why I think that when a doctor makes his first major mistake, which I am sure all do, the choice is predictable if not easily made. Throwing away 10+ years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in schooling, losing the house and cars, marring the family name and having to go to South America to perform illegal plastic surgery for the rest of your days is the one choice. The other is to unfortunately lose another brave patient to unforeseen and unforeseeable medical complications despite having tried everything humanly possible…AND by not being malpracticated you get to save more lives in the future(quantity, not quality), while saving the innocent hospital you work at undue shame and humiliation. When the fat, tired looking nurse sticks that needle into my iv and tells me I’ll be conveniently unconscious for my minor surgery, I look at the masked surgeon nearby and absently think of other professions which involve masks and sharp knives but no prestigious degree(slaughterhouse guy, serial killer, assassin) and I think I understand doctoring; I just hope I don’t get doctored, which absurdly would be my last thought in the case that I do, haha.

advertising is as natural a part of life on earth as any of the other essentials required to maintain a healthy, functioning, and robust society of interacting, interrelated beings. it is the method by which each living thing presents itself to the universe, and is a condition so deeply innate that advertising has itself evolved in its role within the life process, in addition to having always been an integral part of it. it largely shapes the way, the quality, and the successfulness of life as one of the major organs of the corpus societal. those in the business of marketing have long since noticed that promoting anything relies upon fabricating and/or indicating the essence of its appeal to those who themselves want to be more appealing. consumers can but feel, when newly exposed to any idea, either gravitation towards it, or repulsion away from it; both for varying reasons of all kinds. there is a full range as to the intensity of the feeling with either response, to be sure, but the slightest tug or nudge will make the absolute difference in influencing the final assessment. therefore, each such tug or nudge should engender the very soul of meticulousness finely honed, with a diligence so keen as to be ascribed to the same painstaking precision as that of a decisive, master-stroke of a surgical scalpel’s razor edge, expertly wielded by the surest, most deftly intuitive of hands to consummately demand a substantial enough measure of motivational stability from the tempestuous inconstancy of the patient’s fickle-mindedness, aggravated exponentially by the chaotic storming over a murky sea of emotional detritus; and such is what pure advertising would then be. to draw the most appeal by whatsoever means possible, to be able to distill the most beautiful, most desirable, and most exquisite essences of a thing, and translating it perfectly into the urgency of desire. for, there is no such reaction as perfect indifference, after all.

while ‘advertising’ in general has always targeted the majority of consumers in general, and likewise the majority sets within each specific market group, it would be most absurd not to note that many a thing being advertised for the consumption of this majority is so done via the endorsement of alpha beings, the most perfect samplings of the populace, depicted amid the enjoyment of these products. such advertised products are appealing to most due to the superficially imposed desire to emulate those who are endorsing in the way of aspiring to better lives. thusly, there has been a brooding spirit of malcontent amongst the masses who have been denied entry to the upper echelon, despite constant exposure to it, that has back-lashed against the marketing of these dream-worlds.

to be fair, advertising has also lately been bent over to assume the ‘scapegoat position’ for certain societal ills such as girls being “pressured” to have nicer bodies, and kids on killing sprees because they “saw it on tv,” and that kids are fat and stupid because they are immobilized by idiot programming, etc… honestly, the (1)fat, ugly girls, the (2)whiny, loser, friendless kids, and the (3) stupid, fat kids, will always remain in those same sad, pathetic states with or without tv, perhaps with slightly less attention called to them for amusement purposes without, but who cares? maybe if we got the tv watching fucktards from all three groups together and call them commercialized sellouts, it would discourage them! this is why the term “commercialism” is so very pejoratively, yet popularly peddled nowadays. it is, essentially, the repulsion from beauty by those supremely lacking it; which is worsened by the abundance of advertising showing all the varieties of beauty in people effecting a constant reminder of what they are not, as well making beauty seem more commonplace than it truly is-a false raising of standards to the increased sorrow of all below them. in a move away from this, the TIVO and other such devices are now available to record television programs, free of commercials, to moderate the somewhat-excessive and literal inundation of commercials i.e. “commercialism.”