I don’t know what fake physician Mark Leyner does on Thursday mornings at 8, but you can find real physician Billy Goldberg behind the microphone on Sirius/XM radio broadcasting from the lobby of the NYU Langone Medical Center. An emergency physician by trade, Goldberg hosts “Doctor Radio,” where he combines humor, irony, scalpel-sharp timing with – and this is the most important – accurate and insightful medical information.
Dr. Billy and Leyner, as they call themselves in “Let’s Play Doctor,” dance the same kind of jig in their book as Goldberg does on the radio. Authors of the hilarious “Why Do Men Have Nipples,” they have now created the “Why Do Men Have Nipples School of Medicine.” In this fake medical school, just like in the real one, your brain is filled with minutiae, you study the body’s secrets, you learn to diagnose and you take trivia-filled examinations. When you reach page 207 you even receive a “Real Fake Doctor of Medicine.” Of course if you fooled around this much in a real medical school you might find yourself with a janitor’s spot rather than a residency position.
“The secret to sounding like a real M.D. is having a versatile repertoire of juicy tidbits of information about the body,” they write. “A little knowledge goes a very long way” because all “it takes is one – that’s right, only one – carefully deployed anatomical fact for you to achieve instant “I’m sort of like a doctor’ credibility.”
This method of impressing others is described in the following bar scene where “Bob” meets “Laura” and tries to woo her.
LAURA: Are you all right?
BOB: I think so. I think I’m feeling you deep in my dorsal caudate, and you’re stimulating my ventral tegmental areas to pump out dopamine.
LAURA (coyly): I am?
Of course, Leyner and Goldberg don’t really expect you to learn how to practice medicine by reading this book. Or do they? Goldberg does offer this compassionate disclaimer: “Although it’s easy and completely harmless for Leyner to go off advising people to diagnose and dissect, I am bound by something called The Hippocratic Oath to do no harm .ñ.ñ. please read this in the spirit it was intended, and don’t go and give your roommate a colostomy because you’re bored some rainy afternoon.”
“Let’s Play Doctor” is interwoven with real experiences, including the difficulty of being a medical student in the OR during along operation, “It is not uncommon for the haggard, sleep-deprived med student to actually doze off with the retractor still in his hand. The abuse for this surpasses anything that’s happened to the student up to this point.”
The book also renders the difficulty of being a patient in managed care times. “What’s the longest you’ve ever waited in the exam room until the doctor finally arrives. By that time, you’ve done everything possible a human being could do in that room to kill time .ñ.ñ. You’ve even drained your own festering carbuncle – which is the reason you were there in the first place!”
Leyner and Goldberg also offer suggestions for which magazines doctors’ offices should keep in their waiting rooms: American Cemetery, Unzipped and Bite Me.
When you’ve finished reading this laugh-out-loud book you are not really ready to practice medicine, but you’ve learned what the authors have known all along – a good doctor must know how to laugh at himself.
Marc Siegel is a Fox News medical contributor.
Let’s Play Doctor
by Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg
Three Rivers Press