Get That Thing Away From Me

Don't Diagnose Me - I'll Diagnose You

My physician on the Mainland is a close friend (and a conservative political reactionary). He recently requested that since I was always telling him that 'he had a problem' that I should state a succinct and defensible diagnosis. What follows is my attempt to sound like someone who has a medical education...


Dear Tom:

Please sit down and take a moment to gather your thoughts...

You suffer from an abundance of being correct.  Though this correctness exists largely in your own mind (and in the minds of those who think like you) you have projected it such that it is... Truth.

There is no known cure for this condition (although there are treatments - see below) and it manifests itself in virtually all cultures and nationalities and professions and races and . . .  any other false groupings one wishes to impose on individual humans.

In its terminal phase the malady is often mistaken as dementia. It causes the patient to view the world as a nominally hostile place.  A place in which the patient's preferences (viz: The Truth) do not seem to have been widely adopted. This results in an unshakable delusion that civilization is an enterprise doomed to decay and ultimate extinction.

This delusion - which has been codified in certain world religions - moves the sufferer to harbor points of view which are exclusionary, rigid, and impervious to logical appeals. Similar to those suffering from many more well understood psychological disorders, patients believe that there is nothing wrong with them - or that everyone is just like them, but unable to admit or recognize it.

As the disorder is almost universal it has never been described in the authoritative medical literature. For instance, the DSM has never included an entry titled Optirectumitus (ORS).  Scholars have speculated that since the vast majority of the species, including those responsible for maintaining disease category documentation, suffer from ORS (literally: Having one's head jammed into one's rectum) that the condition will likely never be properly described or subjected to the normal regimens of modern Western medicine.

ORS sufferers are unable to comprehend the world with sufficient clarity and instead view things from the perspective of their own navels - the only portal to the outside available to them. This is due to the gross anatomical physiology of the malady. This diminished sensory capacity results in a recursive failure cascade such that the condition literally cannot be deduced by those charged with detecting it. Prospects for the eventual development of an effective cure are bleak.

The true misfortune wrought by ORS accrues mainly to those few individuals not afflicted by the condition. Study of probable immunity mechanisms to ORS has been mostly anecdotal in nature (non-sufferers do not tend to be trained in the sciences.) Such study has typically focused on markers related to intelligence. There is suspicion that some more fundamental causality is at work as many highly intelligent people suffer from ORS. Accordingly the population immune from ORS (a group which might be described - given the almost universal preponderance of the condition - in terms of an 'inverse-morbidity') have incorrectly been thought of as being the afflicted rather than the well.

Can anything be done?  Probably not.

It has been proposed that ORS is generally not reversible. Certain prophylactic measures (perhaps more properly described as palliative) such as intensive reading, close and repeated interaction with non-ORS sufferers and dietary restrictions which lessen the production of bile (gall) may be of some limited effectiveness. This last treatment causes an increase in the lipid content of the stool which may aid in necessary lubrication facilitating the removal of the head from the anal canal.  Though success resulting from this regimen has been reported, it is incredibly rare. As such, the morbidity rate of ORS is believed to have been consistent at a level of approximately 99.8631% throughout of the existence of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens species.

The unaffected group of perhaps ten million people in a global population estimated at 7 billion have limited societal impact - which aggravates the inability to properly describe ORS. Many of the immune are believed to reside in aboriginal populations, live as hermits, or are others who, in the parlance of ORS patients, "don't get out much".

Interestingly no condition or disorder resembling ORS has been observed in any other animal species.

Next case.

Gregory House, MD

 - there's something wrong with everybody... except me

Editor's Note:  Readers interested in further information on ORS should see Mark Lee's monograph "People, the Problem That Just Won't Go Away" published in the Journal of  The Proceedings of the People Who Actually Do Know Everything.