When in the U.S., do as the French do

Commentary. By Michael Greenberg, MD, AMNews contributor. Aug. 13, 2001.

COMMENTARY

Observations on the state of medical practice and medical life

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We are a nation of unhealthy citizens enmeshed in a diseased health care system. Since no one to date has offered a workable remedy for what ails us, my solution, humbly proposed, is to send everybody in the United States to live in Paris.

The habits of the French are completely paradoxical to what U.S. physicians believe to be a healthy lifestyle, yet the French seem to thrive on it. Parisians are uniformly thin and look fabulous despite the fact that any randomly chosen 50-yard segment of a residential street in Paris contains three bakeries, two pastry shops, an assortment of bars and a store selling roasted duck legs preserved in rendered fat.

Parisians smoke like fiends. They also eat beef at precisely the rareness at which E. coli thrives. The toxic tobacco fumes must be bactericidal.

Parisians don't die. Actually, they can't, because there's no room in their cemeteries. Jim Morrison got the last available space.

Parisians are horrified by exercise. I once foolishly mentioned to our hotel concierge that we had walked from Sacre Coeur to our hotel, a distance of three miles. He looked concerned and asked if we had been robbed. When I assured him that we had wanted to walk, he turned ashen.

Well, I exaggerate a bit.

But we've been struggling with the same issues for years and are sorely in need of creative solutions for our problems, especially those created by the absurdity of managed care.

"Good luck, but I think you're crazy," Geoff, a colleague, said when I told him I had filed suit against an IPA that was months behind in reimbursements. [...]