Stay out of those places

Which of the following actually happened?

Patient to doctor: “Doc! I broke my arm in two places. What should I do?� Doc: “Stay out of those places.�

“Patient to doctor: “Doc! It hurts when I do this. “Doc: “Don’t do that.�

“Patient to doctor: “Doc! The physical therapy exercises that you prescribed after my back surgery make everything hurt. “Doc: “Discontinue the exercises.�

Welcome to the Vaudeville School of Medicine. For a long time now we have heard the advice to “listen to your body and it will tell you what it needs.� They say that if a toddler is presented with a variety of foods, he or she will instinctively choose what is needed, craving greens at one point and then starches, etc.

Well, my body craves potato chips and ham sandwiches and likes a nap after a big meal and a beer.

I have been very conscientious about this stuff for most of my life and guess I can feel pretty good about myself now. Today we have learned all about nutrition, disposing of those “bad� foods that I grew up on: sugar and red meat. We learned about health foods, like wild rice grown in Asia.

I, of course, subsisted on a diet of Wonder Bread, Frosted Flakes, mayonnaise sandwiches, bacon, “steak tartar� (raw hamburger), butter and Kool Aid.

It’s a funny thing. When we evaluate the results of all of this, we seem to overlook a few things.

The whole time I was growing up all I ever heard was how much bigger and healthier we were. A 6-foot high schooler became common. Unexpectedly, life expectancy increased, to the chagrin of Social Security.

In the health food department, if you took a close look at the countries where they seemed to live almost exclusively on “health food,� you found a population that was short-lived, short of stature and in which malnutrition periodically carried off a fair percentage.

Curiously, with all our recent “improvements� in nutrition, we seem to have an epidemic of overweight people and inexplicable food allergies. Sugar substitutes are causing some people headaches and other issues. Gluten, a component of bread (the “staff of life�) is another villain.

Coffee, on the other hand, once vilified, is now good for us again. In the old Woody Allen comedy, “Sleeper,� which takes place in the future, they tell him that smoking, once thought to be bad for us, is now good for us. I rest my case.

Time for my cholesterol meds. I guess pizza is not nature’s perfect food after all. Oh yeah, of the three cases at the beginning, the third was the real-life scenario. The advice worked out just fine.

Bill Abrams resides (and considers the pros and cons of modern medical advice) in Pine Plains.