It is with a heavy and broken heart (yes, both—imagine a massive boulder, pounded into bits of sand, then put in very large plastic bags and doused with water, rendering the bag so heavy that if you try to lift one, the plastic just stretches and tears—that heavy), that I am forced to concede, nay, withdraw, my potential nomination for a possible Head of the CDC post in a fantasy comedic Dave Barry presidential campaign. Sigh. It’s true, I was not tapped for the position. We here at Doc Gurley are such rabid Dave Barry groupies that a curt, snarky, even vicious (although it would certainly have been funny), refusal would have been better than the (choke, sob) absolute silence we received. Begging was an option, but it’s hard to cling tenaciously to the trouser-leg of someone’s Dockers from across the Internet tubes. However, it is a New Year! And we each have a New Leaf, waiting to be turned over. So while we here at Doc Gurley may be slightly twisted when it comes to Dave Barry (in a fixated, restraining order kind of way), we are also, if nothing else, perky and resilient–two traits that will stand you in good stead when it comes to your health (especially if you leave out the delusional part)! So here I present for my legions of loyal readers (yes, all three of you), the Doc Gurley List of Universal Truths Learned from Approaching a Comedic Genius About a Non-existent Potential Healthcare Position in a Future Fantasy Administration. Study these truths. Use them. Charge into your future, armed with insights gleaned from the heartbreak and plucky determination of others:
1) If you are in a situation where having your-people-contact-their-people is the norm (such as when approaching a celebrity comic genius, or, conversely, when filing a lawsuit against your insurance company for denying you a chest-hair transplant), make sure first that you have people. We here at the Doc Gurley empire are limping along with unpaid staff that consist solely of two surly teenage offspring and a husband who gives both a huffy breath AND an eyeroll whenever the name “Dave Barry” is mentioned by his otherwise adoring wife. Continue reading Tragedy!
 There are momentous turning points in every human life. The day you meet your one true love. The day you see the miracle of new life brought into the world as a physical manifestation of your love (or, conversely, if you’re a woman, the day you push a human out an orifice). For Doc [...]
That’s right, hands where we can see them. Nice and slow. Step away from the idea.
Whether it’s our habits, our health, or our relationships, we all want to heal something. What could be more tempting than a day where the world, all together, says “ready, steady, go!” and we charge en masse to our better, newer selves? When people join together, tremendous things can happen. Barns are raised, hay is harvested, novels are written in a month, and thousands of runners in silly costumes clog urban streets while fleeing lethal charging bulls.
Okay, so maybe not all mass activity is good.
Which brings us to those New Year’s promises. As seductive as the idea is, there is an ugly, slutty side to New Year’s resolutions. Few things are worse than a cheap, one-night stand type of resolution. A nasty hang-over feeling sets in around February when your best intentions have gone awry and you wake up feeling a bit used. If you go through that kind of experience enough times, despair takes root and the only successful resolution you end up with is a resolution to never again be a sucker enough to fall for a New Year’s romantic promise of change. No one needs that kind of psychic hit. So is there no true resolution love? Is it all a sleazy lounge trick? What’s an informed changer going to do?
Here are some science-based, practical Doc Gurley tips on how to make your New Year genuine and resolute. Read on, and feel the love.
Continue reading Stop Fondling the New Year’s Resolutions
 Here’s a Doc Gurley podcast on new flu facts, on Global Local Radio–for the listeners in the audience.
Cheers,
Doc in Your Ear
As we head into the last days of the holiday season, some people are feeling just a wee bit overloaded. Here’s a Doc Gurley questionnaire to help you decide if you too might be fraying at the edges:
Check which of these situations applies to you:
1) When another pedestrian wanders into the crosswalk just as the light turns green, do you–
- a) take deep breaths?
- b) clench the steering wheel and feel your palms get sweaty?
- c) roll down the window and scream, “Speed it up, slut, or I’ll give you a reason to be slow” at the wheeled walker-using grandmother?
2) When you spend all day shopping, do you–
- a) obsess about how you’re too young to be this breathless and wonder if maybe you ought to work out once before the decade is over?
- b) self-medicate with a cigarette every two feet until you are rushed to the hospital for tobacco poisoning?
- c) spend way too much time with mall security after tackling a motorized scooter driver and failing to make your high-speed getaway at 0.5 miles an hour?
If you answered yes to A, B, C or D (all of the above), congratulations–you’re fed up and about to blow. Conventional health wisdom often says that you should seriously meditate (or medicate) to get rid of these emotions. At a minimum we’re all taught that we ought to suppress these signals. But Doc Gurley is here to share with you that new research shows that maybe you should be, instead, encouraged by this groundswell of irritation. Why? Continue reading Are You Irritable? Congratulations!
A lot of spin is devoted to making global warming feel immediate. The earth has a fever is one of my favorite sayings, maybe because I’m a doctor. But I have to say, the fever analogy still just doesn’t work for me. Maybe it’s because, in some small part of my mind, I’m aware that fevers can be good. Or maybe it’s because a fever doesn’t seem as ominous as global warming should feel. So what analogy would work better?
 I think, instead, that we humans are evolving into cancer of the earth. The idea isn’t my own, but, instead, that of my 13-year-old daughter, who was almost incoherent with emotion when she found that her eighth grade English teacher had assigned the class an essay (four paragraphs only!) about whether “survival of the fittest” justifies whatever humans want to do to the earth. My daughter sat over her keyboard, her face twisted with emotion, literally sputtering because she couldn’t get her indignation out fast and coherently enough. It was as if she believed that this essay, this moment, was the time when she could convince everyone in her class to care. It represented an Oscar stage of attention, when the world stood still and listened, but you had to get it all out before the band started playing and the emcee started talking over you and the tall plastic-faced women pulled you off by the arm. Continue reading Health of the Earth–Are Humans Cancer?
This week’s New York Times has a good article with new facts about the flu. Seems that there have been very few experiments looking at flu transmission because there weren’t any good (read: cheap, and non-biting) animal models for flu spread. Even if you could infect them with flu, most animals then didn’t transmit flu to each other, except for ferrets, and ferrets are…well, ferrets. Want to stick your hand into a cage full of cranky, runny-nose ferrets? Nah, didn’t think so.
But someone read an ancient (yes, 1919!) article that mentioned the fact that guinea pigs caught the flu during the pandemic of 1918. Excuse me? When they were searching for an animal species to be a scientific guinea pig, how is it no one [wait for the thought here, people, I know it's a shocker] tried actual guinea pigs? Well, it appears no one did. Until now. Suddenly, I’m embarrassed for scientists everywhere. Let’s just ignore the 98-year delay, and move on to what scientists learned from the suffering of tiny coughing piggles (with Doc Gurley flu advice on how that information can help you): Continue reading Flu and You
 We launch the first Doc Gurley audiocast with a Homeless Gift Guide broadcast on UK’s Global Local Radio at http://www.canstream.co.uk/copperbeech/index.php?id=78 In this broadcast, we go on a fieldtrip and gift a homeless person “live”–just to show how safe and easy the whole process can be. Listen for yourself and see how much joy you [...]
This week’s Sunday San Francisco Chronicle includes an article by Doc Gurley about how to give a gift to a homeless person. Heavily edited due to space constraints (despite the impressive amount of space they gave me–when I get inspired, I go for it, but there’s only so much space on a Sunday paper [...]
Alien Invasion of Humans Proven by Scientist
Sigourney Weaver was right
Buried in what Dave Barry calls the “mainstream media,” was an article with this happy-face headline: “Babies protect mothers against breast cancer.” What could be more warm and fuzzy than that?
However, if you, like me, clicked on this article, what you found was something shocking. Scientists have documented that fetal cells invade and permanently set up shop, reproducing inside a woman’s body for decades. How did scientists find these fetal invaders? Well, they looked for male DNA floating in the blood of 60-year-old women who’d had sons.
As a physician, woman, and mother of two children, I can say that there is only one appropriate response to this news story:
You have got to be kidding.
Let’s just say that as I read this article, both my eyes sproinged out on their stalks, my back-end levitated off the chair and exclamation marks appeared over my head.
They’ve known for years that male (read: father) DNA sets up shop permanently in women after pregnancy, and no one said any more than this shocking understatement? Shouldn’t this be blared across headlines nation-wide? Think about it for a second. Who wants the collective genes of your in-laws living inside you? And, is this the real reason couples start to look like each other after years of marriage? Continue reading Most Explosive Medical News of 2007 Award
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About The Author  Doc Gurley is a Board-certified Internist physician and the only Harvard Medical School graduate to have been awarded a Shoney’s Ten-Step Pin for documented excellence in waitressing. Find out more.Doc Gurley Library of Medeos
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