We Need More Doctors in the House

Is it just a coincidence that both Ron Paul and B.J. Lawson are physicians?

I have decided that it isn't. Although there is no guarantee that a doctor will be more liberty-minded or wiser than a politician coming from the legal profession, there are philosophical reasons why a GOOD physician would tend to appreciate the advantages of an individualist versus collectivist form of government; a free market versus managed economy; a non-interventionist foreign policy, and so forth.

(First a disclaimer, I am also a doctor. A family physician with NO desire to run for public office. However, I think my professional experience might give me a special perspective into the mind of the physician/politician.)

"Primum non nocere", "First, do no harm," is one of the oldest and best known principles of medicine. It seems a simple concept, but the reasons behind it are very profound.

When dealing with a system as complex and finely tuned as the human body, it is VERY difficult to make things better through intervention.

Even today, after all of the tremendous strides that have been made in the practice of medicine, the option of doing nothing is very often the BEST option.

A good physician knows that what he does is clumsy tinkering compared to what the human body is designed to do AUTOMATICALLY. He knows that he cannot "cure" the patient; at best he can help the patient's body heal or cure itself.

The best physician is humble. He knows that there are natural and normal reasons for pain, fatigue, sleep, and even depression.

He knows that there are risks associated with masking or suppressing some symptoms. A patient with a headache just might have a brain tumor. Giving the wrong patient endless prescriptions for painkillers could be doing him a disservice. A doctor giving a tired patient on the verge of collapse a shot of methamphetamine to ward off sleep is sued for malpractice. A Federal Reserve banker who lowers interest rates to prevent a recession is praised as an economic genius.

What libertarians call "the law of unintended consequences"; physicians call "side effects", and deal with them on a daily basis.

A physician that treats a viral infection with an antibiotic (the medical equivalent of a "preemptive war") knows that he won't cure the illness and runs the risk of breeding a "superbug" or causing an allergic reaction that could end up killing the patient. Does this sound like "blowback"? It does to me.

The medical equivalent of a "managed economy" would be a patient in intensive care receiving parenteral (intravenous) nutrition, dialysis, and on a ventilator. Everything is "controlled". Nothing is left "to chance".

And yet every physician knows that this is a very dangerous and unstable situation. We only do this as a last resort, and for as short a time as possible.

Our goal is to get the patient back to eating when he is hungry, drinking when he is thirsty, and sleeping when he is tired; and the sooner the better.

So does all of this make every physician a good politician, or even a libertarian? Sadly, no. But it should raise the odds, especially if he is worth his salt as a healer.

And all lawyer jokes aside, there is something a little scary about a government composed almost exclusivelyof professionals trained to think of "Truth" as being anything that can be sold to a jury. When a lawyer convinces juries to acquit his guilty clients, he retires a rich man. When a doctor prescribes or operates with the wrong diagnoses, his patients die and he is a failure.

Think about it.