My Extremely Fancy Colonoscopy

Because of my age, positions of influence, birth order (first of seven) and other factors, I tend to trust those in authority. Whether I’m buying a car or a puppy, a novel or a computer, I’m content to deliver myself into the hands of an expert. Instead of spending decades learning Russian with run-of-the-mill comprehension, I count on Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky for versions of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov more subtle and poetic than I could ever in a hundred years hope to come up with on my own. The time I save not trying to parse Count Lev’s upper-caste syntax or Fyodor Mikhailo­vich’s born-again Slavophile ravings, to say no­thing of the Cyrillic alphabet, al­lows me also to read The Mahabharata, the Iliad, My Name is Red, and Love in the Time of Cholera, albeit in translation. Not that the world wouldn’t be a better place if I mastered Sanskrit, Ho­meric Greek, modern Trojan, and Colombian Spanish and thus partook of those cultures directly; on the other hand, bro, life is short. It’s for much the same reason I don’t cram for the MCAT, attend and pay for medical school, then do a six-year gastroenterology residency when I come down with diverticulitis: because any board-certified specialist worth her sodium chloride knows infinitely better than I ever could what sort of shape my intestines are in, better still how to heal them.

One obvious downside of this way of thinking is that millions of postmenopausal women who took estrogen with progestin were following the same logic, and they were often fatally misled. We found this out only in July, 2001, after the Department of Health underwrote the Women’s Health In­itiative’s randomized control trial, which showed that the numbers who developed breast cancer, heart attacks, strokes, or blood clots in the lungs were higher on the E Plus P regimen.

Likewise the Cardiac Ar­rhythmia Suppression Trial in 1991 re­examined the conventional wisdom that certain antiarrhythmia drugs helped prevent second heart attacks. The trial involved 1,500 heart-attack victims: half received antiarrhythmics while the other 750 were slipped a placebo. These mortally vulnerable patients thus had the same odds of getting the lifesaving therapy as they’d get on the pass line of a craps table. How darned unfortunate, then, to be randomly shunted into the placebo group, condemned to crap out by a computerized roll of the dice! Yet researchers have to break eggs to make omelets, right? And so, in the interest of medical science, the trial was scheduled to run for at least two years. The early results were so dramatic, however, it was halted...