Loving doctor spam
With special healthcare offers
Jeffrey Denny
I remember the good old days in healthcare.
Like back when Boomers like me were cured by sawbones, leeches, mustard plasters, tinctures, potions and salves.
Not to mention crystals, aromatherapy, non-touch biofield therapy, “blow” and even cooler drugs, BMWs, punk rock and small local farm-raised supplements instead of greedy corporate capitalist Big Pharma poison like aspirin.
Those days, we didn’t mind waiting six months to see a doctor about a weird pimple that turned out to be a weird pimple, it’ll go away if we stop messing with it. If it hurts, take aspirin.
No, I’m not cheekily referring to Canada’s superior healthcare system today where the world’s best treatment is always available and free like a lunch.
But even in America, despite our #1 rating in healthcare satisfaction by the American Medical Association, it’s still harder to get what you need than Mick Jagger seeking satisfaction from a placenta shot.
Divided Americans are united in feeling victimized by corporations that run our healthcare system.
When instead our system should be run by our highly efficient, divided government that Americans hate, especially when it gets to “assist” your OB/GYN.
But AI has magically transformed our healthcare challenges into opportunities, like it does for whatever ails humanity.
Now millions of Americans are enjoying calming benzodiazepines to manage the incessant flood of doctor email and text spam competing for our healthcare dollar like late-night Fox News ads suckering old people like its prime-time personalities do.
They’re saying that free enterprise competition lowers costs and improves outcomes. In my medical experience, the doctor spam I receive proves it:
My gastroenterologist
After our third colonoscopy together, my GI (five stars on Yelp!!!, a customer review site for the reluctantly impaled) knows me more intimately than even my phone, Trump’s Russian bots or mate does. Mate assures that, in all due respect, they don’t need to know me quite so well.
In any case, my latest alimentary genociding produced not just a benign polyp but also an email for a $1 coupon on my next Biden inflationary $100 box of Nature’s Path Smart Bran.
Seems that my GI’s AI also found a way around medical privacy laws to share my results with Roto-Rooter, as it repeatedly sends a special limited exclusive opportunity to “save up the ying-yang” on plumbing issues if I act now.
My dermatologist
I suspect that after my latest skin exam — and desperately seeking Mohs surgery wealth from patients like me who boldly go outside where no man has gone before without spatulating SPF infinity sunscreen like wedding cake frosting — her bots used AI to scrape my old Facebook, LinkedIn, passport and Match.com profile photos.
That’s probably why her emails invited me to experience the latest exciting life-changing treatments for what the American Academy of Dermatology scientists call SD, Superficialis Deformitas, or in lay terms, fugliness.
Applying every powerful adjective and adverb in the AI thesaurus, her emails pitched amazing incredible beautifying anti-aging serums that are blowing up Instagram like an inflamed sebaceous cyst. Which also roughly describes Instagram.
Applying this cure every day, I could look up to a day younger and avoid traumatizing today’s Instagram-anxious teens with my natural onset Beetlejuiciness.
My primary care physician
Every year I bend over forward to please him during our annual “covfefe.” We joke that the prostate is like democracy — nobody cares about it until it goes bad. He also reminds me that, like a decent Republican voting to reelect Trump, he hates this even more than I do.
My inbox is now jammed up the keister with coupons for the #1 lubricant for PEEPs (People Experiencing Extreme Probing, not the Easter treat). Let’s Get This Over With® is recommended by the American Academy of Extraterrestrials in strategic partnership with Jiffy Lube, and highly rated on Yelp!!!
My ophthalmologist
After fitting me with Clockwork Orange headgear, she looks into my eyes so long and deeply I worry she’s going to propose. Cataract surgery, that is. Instead she interrogates my soul and notes that, in her medical opinion, my very being could use an “existential colonoscopy.” I pretend to understand, like I do with Sartre’s landmark treatise on colonic being and nothingness.
I also asked her about my eye floaties. She said, eh, don’t worry. They’re there to remind you that you’re decaying and will be dead soon enough.
Worse, now I get spam for different floaties — those inflatable armbands kids and I use to avoid drowning at pool parties. Also for kitschy, googly-eye novelty products, like those glasses where the eyeballs pop out on springs. Endorsed by the American Academy of Ophthalmology and always a hit at their annual convention.
My orthopedist
After my recent tennis-related hip replacement, my surgeon followed up with emails and texts concerned if my body rejected the custom ball joints he special-ordered from Advance Auto Parts.
If so, he would gladly replace my hip replacement and charge my insurance for another Lamborghini, this one a Bianco Monocerus (white) to go with his Rosso Efesto (red) and Verde Selvans (green) collection. He’s not Italian but oddly loves the stunning getaways of Amalfi, Positano, Portofino, Capri and Cinque Terre.
Ok, that’s not true. He really cared. Also not true: His hold music is the classic spiritual, “Dem Bones.”
My therapist
After I droned for yet another 50 minutes about how doctor spam is triggering my anxiety, my therapist asked, “Tell me more about that. How does that make you feel?”
After counting to 2,000 to resist my hereditary amygdala hijack and self-expression of obscenities and eat up our 50 minutes, I replied in a frighteningly serene way, “Listen, ‘doctor,’ I don’t know what kind of narcissist DMS-5 gaslighting scam you’re running here, cashing in on making people feel crazy, but I’ve been telling you for two years how doctor spam makes me feel sicker than I am.”
She reminded me that I have the power to get off email and texts. Go outside. Take a walk. Read a book. Have coffee with friends. Take up Pickleball. Leave your phone at home.
I heard her. So did my phone. Before I left her office, I received email offers from Gooutside.com, Takeawalk.com, Barnesandnoble.com Coffeewithfriends.com, Pickleball.com and the American Orthopedic Society with specials on Pickleball-related hip, knee, shoulder, spine and soul replacements.
And now the American Psychiatric Association texts me 12 times a day like a presidential campaign. They’re making me crazy! Surely not on purpose.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
