Let me ask you: What do you want in a doctor?
Someone who can cure your ails but has the personality of Oscar the Grouch? Or someone who graduated next to last in his med school class but finished first in the Mr. Congeniality contest at the annual Medical Society meeting?
I have mixed opinions regarding the actions of the Asheville doctor recently called on the carpet by the state Medical Board for calling a patient fat and chastising her for getting pregnant within a year of giving birth without the wherewithal to birth and raise the child.
True, the doctor - an ophthalmologist - might have strayed from his specialty. But it's possible that, while his style was remiss, his intentions were well-meant.
Still, a doctor's lecture on a patient's lifestyle should be tempered by what the patient herself is doing to correct the problem.
Many overweight people are the victims of their genes, not gluttony. I have friends and relatives who actually suffer acutely in their efforts to lose pounds. They walk miles daily, swim laps, work out at spas and eat watercress and raw turnips three meals a day, and the pounds still cling to their frames like Elmer's glue.
That's not always the case, of course. I remember when a foothills relative who spent most of her days in her easy chair reading with a box of chocolates at her elbow went in for her annual physical.
The doctor walked in, looked at her lying on the examining table and said, "Woman, get up from there, put on your clothes and don't come back until you've lost 50 pounds!"
She cried all the way home and tearfully told her husband what the mean doctor had said. Did he report the doctor to the Medical Board's manners committee? Absolutely not. An ex-Marine, he wanted to go posthaste to the doctor's office and beat the living bejeebers out of him!
But cooler heads prevailed. And would you believe it? At the next Snow reunion, the talk wasn't all about Aunt Zetta's tasty cheesy-chicken casserole or Cousin Yvonne's scrumptious strawberry shortcake. The talk was about how great Mary Lou looked after losing all that weight.
As to advising patients about the number and spacing of their babies, what's wrong with a doctor kindly educating them on the merits of contraception, even handing them a package with the instruction "Use one at bedtime"?
Yes, there's only a fine line between medicine and meddling, but I'd opt for a doctor erring on the part of the latter in the interest of my health and longevity.
My best byline
The tree men came and removed the huge oak that stood at the edge of the woodland behind the house. I hated to see it go, but it had died, of old age and internal rot, and marred my wife's view from the kitchen window.
For decades, it had housed families of squirrels. Farther up the trunk, a couple of red-bellied woodpeckers regularly nested. From our windows, we watched their coming and going in the cycle of seasons as they fed and trained their young to survive man and nature.
The tree itself had withstood the rage and ravages of Hurricane Hugo and other notable storms.
To the trunk of the tree, my late neighbor Ed Green and I had anchored the corner of the children's treehouse, a one-day rush job awaiting them when they came home from school one beautiful April day.
Not long ago, I came across a copy of the house rules adopted by them and their neighborhood friends:
1. Do not shout in the club except when necessary.
2. Do not stick your body out the windows.
3. Do not jump out of the club. Use steps.
4. No jumping up and down.
5. Safety first.
A few days afterward, I discovered that the 7-year-old had printed on a 2-by-6 timber under the tree house: "By Ed and A.C." It was my best byline ever.
I'll get used to the gap that the tree's absence leaves on the face of nature, much like a missing tooth in the face of a little boy. It will take longer to adjust to the small gap in the landscape of the heart.
