The Placebo Chronicles: Strange But True Tales From the Doctors' Lounge

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About The Placebo Chronicles: Strange But True Tales From

Product Description True Tales of the ridiculous, the silly, and the just plain weird cases doctors face—lampooning the medical bureaucracy that makes practicing medicine and getting medical care such a headache. Doctors have a sick sense of humor. This is the deep, dark, and hilarious secret of the medical profession revealed by the irreverent Dr. Douglas Farrago in his popular satirical magazine, Placebo Journal—affectionately known by its thousands of fanatic readers as “ Mad magazine for doctors” and called, by U.S. News.com, “raunchy, adolescent, and very funny.” Now, in The Placebo Chronicles, Dr. Farrago has compiled the best of the most outrageous and uproarious true stories to come out of the ERs and examination rooms of doctors all over the country. Submitted by actual physicians, these are the stories they tell each other at cocktail parties and in doctors’ lounges, trading sidesplitting and truly unusual tales of their most embarrassing medical moments, the grossest things they’ve ever seen in medicine, their favorite Munchausen patients, and much more, including “The X-Ray Files”—mind-boggling anecdotes and images of the oddest foreign objects doctors have removed from patients. Not for the faint of heart, the humor in The Placebo Chronicles is brutally funny—just what the doctor ordered to guard against the ill effects of an M.D.’s worst enemies: the Medical Axis of Evil, a.k.a. drug companies, HMOs, and malpractice insurers. Fully illustrated with fake advertisements—for pseudopharmaceuticals like OxyCotton Candy and Indifferex (the mediocre antidepressant)—this refreshingly honest collection invites doctors and patients alike to share the laughter, a liberal dose of the very best medicine. From Publishers Weekly In this admittedly vulgar but entertaining compilation, family physician Farrago brings together some of the most ridiculous doctor jokes and real-life medical stories sent in by readers of his bi-weekly Placebo Journal. Like the journal, the book is intended as comic relief for physicians who could use a pain pill or two. The stories and anecdotes are organized by the stage that they are likely to apply in a doctor's career (during medical school, residency, etc.), but that doesn't keep the book from feeling like a jumbled assortment of annoying patient complaints (irregular bowels, etc.), jokes about pharmaceutical reps and false ads for items such as "The First ADHD Medications for Children In-Utero" and Cameloft, an antidepressant cigarette ("It's chic, it's uplifting and it's just what the doctor ordered"). But each section does include some unifying themes like "X-Ray Files," x-ray images of items stuck in unusual places, and "Those Darn Narc Seekers," stories of patients who seek prescription drugs for non-existent ailments. As Farrago points out in his introduction, the Latin definition of the word "placebo" is "to give pleasure," and those who appreciate the occasional crude joke will find a little of that here. However, this book is not recommended as waiting room reading. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review High praise for Placebo Journal: “ Placebo Journal is juvenile. It's immature. It's politically incorrect. It's also very funny.”— Washington Post “Raunchy, adolescent, and very funny.”— U.S. News and World Report From the Inside Flap Doctors have a sick sense of humor. This is the deep, dark, and hilarious secret of the medical profession, a secret revealed by the irreverent Dr. Doug Farrago in his popular satirical magazine, Placebo Journal—affectionately known by its thousands of fanatic readers as "Mad magazine for doctors." Now, in The Placebo Chronicles, Dr. Farrago has compiled the best of the most outrageous and scathingly funny true stories to come out of the ERs and examination rooms of doctors all over the country.Sent in by real physicians, these are the stories they tell each other at cocktail parties and in the d