Some of you have heard this story, but I will reiterate to make a larger point. I had a mysterious voice problem that I accurately diagnosed using Google after several doctors were baffled. I woke up one day thinking my voice problem might be related in some way to my hand problem - a writer's cramp called focal dystonia. So I Googled "voice dystonia" and up popped a link to a video of a person speaking with exactly the same speech defect I had at the time, something called Spasmodic Dysphonia. That diagnosis was later confirmed, and I tried the recommended treatment of Botox shots to the vocal cords, which had limited success in my case. And I did voice therapy which helped some, but I was far from fixed.


I've used the Internet dozens of times to diagnose various minor medical problems, or to find out what things are dangerous or not. It made me wonder how far the Dr. Google trend can go, and what impact that can have on society's medical costs.

Obviously there are plenty of examples where seeing a trained doctor is going to give a better result than using your own flawed judgment plus the Internet. Let's agree those cases are many and somewhat obvious. But the real question is whether there are just as many or more cases where using the Internet instead of a doctor gives you a BETTER result.

Let's say for the sake of argument that we're not talking about emergency room or trauma situations where a doctor is obviously the best solution. I'm talking about all the trips to see the doctor where you essentially say, "Something hurts. What is my problem? Do you have a pill for that?"

In those cases let's say we can break it down into two general categories: common and uncommon problems.

With the uncommon problems, such as my spasmodic dysphonia, I have to wonder if Google (or WebMD, etc.) can do a better job than a doctor, if not now then maybe in the near future. If you could call up videos of people with identical symptoms, couldn't you diagnose most of your own problems?

For example, are you any worse than your doctor at looking at High Definition pictures of a skin problem and comparing it to your own skin problem?

My guess is that the Internet could equal your doctor in diagnosing uncommon problems. WebMD for example asks a bunch of diagnostic questions and narrows down your symptoms just as a doctor would. That system will only improve over time.

Common problems are even easier to diagnose, give or take someone looking in your ear or down your throat. And I'm imagining someday you can buy a home kit that takes a picture down those orifices and puts it on your computer for easy comparison to stock medical pictures.

This leaves us with the issue of dispensing meds. Your first reaction is that obviously you want a doctor to do that because otherwise people will abuse the system or diagnose something deadly for themselves. But perhaps there is another way to approach this safely.

Suppose as a patient you simply needed to answer a series of questions on your other health issues and medications to determine if a drug is safe for you. Once you establish your medical database, you have fewer questions the next time you need a prescription. The database plus your pharmacist would be enough to keep you from killing yourself accidentally. In some cases you still need a doctor if the meds are especially risky, but that would be rare.

You still have the risk of a patient requesting things he doesn't need. The pharmacist plus your database can flag most of that abuse. And perhaps you could have a system where a doctor "approves" patients to handle their own prescriptions if they appear to be responsible, up to a certain age.

I don't have the details worked out, but I think Google will be your new doctor in some fashion.

I use Google Alerts to tell me when there has been some mention of Dilbert or me on the Internet. It's the digital equivalent of being a fly on the wall because no one really expects me to be one of the six people reading their blog.

Yesterday I came across a blog post about a prediction I made in 1998. I will link to it because I think the post is well written.




When I started my first restaurant I was surprised how easy it was for someone with no experience to succeed in that business. I hired the right people or companies for every facet of building the business and my operating partner put all the pieces together. The restaurant was an instant hit and lines wrapped around the block when it opened.

But you know the rest.

The fact that it was easy to enter the business is exactly what eliminated the margins. Scores of independent restaurants opened in the general area in the next few years and all cannibalized each other. With our current economic downturn, I predict 40% of the restaurants in my area will shut down within three years. Their margins had disappeared even before the economy imploded.

My theory of confusopolies had a lot to do with my involvement with dilbertfiles.com. It's a business with lots of competitors, and the options and features are confusing. Most of the comments on this blog about the service took the form of "Why would you need a car when a horse can do the job!" In other words, the competing services had confused people about exactly what they offer to the point of equating a horse and a car.

My involvement with dilbertfiles.com is different from the typical celebrity endorsement in an important way: I actually use the service for my own work, and did so long before I had the notion to partner with sendyourfiles.com for a Dilbert branded version of their product.

When you see a tennis star endorse a tennis racket, there is no chance that star uses that actual racket. Pros use heavier rackets, tricked out for their preferences. You couldn't buy Roger Federer's actual racket if you wanted.

I could give other examples, but the point is that you rarely see a case where the celebrity was already using the product before the endorsement or licensing deal was initiated. Sure, he might play professional games in the sneakers that have his name, but there is little chance he would have chosen that particular shoe if his name wasn't on it.

Obviously I could be risking my reputation and lying about a product I use, trying to make a few bucks, but my incentive to do that isn't high. I see my role with dilbertfiles.com as "a guy you know (sort of) who is already using the service and is happy about it." If you don't want to wade through the confusion and do the research yourself, that can be helpful to know. And realistically, no one has time to research every little decision.



2. Tuesday is your day in the barrel.

3. Would you hold this camel for me?

4. Keep the tip.

How did you do?

Add your own punchlines without jokes in comments.
Dec 2, 2008 | General Nonsense | Permalink
For Thanksgiving my family and our new dog piled into the car and drove to Reno to visit relatives. If you are not from around here, allow me to explain a few things about Reno.

Reno is between California (God's country) and the black hole that is the rest of northern Nevada. Reno is sort of like God's taint.

We checked into the only hotel in the area that allowed dogs, and discovered we had to give up a few luxuries. For example, I assume the carpets were not always black. I tried to fashion my own stilts with duct tape and chopsticks, but that didn't work out. Plan B involved concentrating real hard to see if I could hover above the floor the way I sometimes do in dreams. Unfortunately that superpower hasn't kicked in yet. I realize that sounds insane, but the only difference between insanity and optimism is luck. And I was feeling lucky. Don't judge me.

A sentence you rarely hear from kids at the higher end hotels is "I just got under the covers and now I have bites all over my legs." Luckily I came prepared with some cortisone cream and some lies about the Reno air drying out your skin. Evidently our blood was so full of turkey triptothan that the attackers dozed off after the initial offensive. Problem solved.

I had more than usual to be thankful about this Thanksgiving. My recent surgery fixed my speech problem after 3.5 years of spasmodic dysphonia. During those years I dreaded every human contact. Simple tasks, such as ordering a meal at a restaurant, or making a phone call, were beyond my powers. This was the first social gathering since 2005 in which I could speak normally. I am a ghost who got a second chance among the living, and for that I am thankful beyond measure.

And I am joking about the hotel. It was clean and perfectly adequate. But Reno is still a taint.
The day after the Thanksgiving holiday in America is called Black Friday, when it is said many retailers begin making a profit for the year, hence being "in the black." The media closely follows the retail sales on Black Friday as one gauge of how the holiday season will unfold. This year sales were up 3% over last year despite the recession.

Or so it has been reported.

We also heard media reports of people being injured and killed in shopper "stampedes" this year. Those are the sorts of anecdotes that stick in your head better than sales statistics.

I mention this because the normally popular store I shopped at this weekend was empty. Sure, it was just one store. Still, that's mighty strange for the biggest shopping period of the year.

My favorite conspiracy theory involves a secret society of powerful people managing the news to create trading opportunities. When things get too peaceful, this group invests heavily in weapons manufacturers and then uses the media to sell a war. When the stock market is in the crapper, the puppet masters buy retail stocks and use the media to paint the holiday season as rosier than it is so they can cash in on the market bump. And so on.

Big money is made when markets fluctuate and when you have better information than other investors. What better way to game the system than to cause the fluctuations yourself?

Now you might argue that such a conspiracy would have to involve so many people that it would be impossible to keep it a secret. I'm not so sure about that. First, you would only need to succeed in manipulating the media 55% of the time, just to pick an example number, and that would be enough to reap huge profits over the long run. And there could still be plenty of dissenting voices and competing points of view, so the manipulation could get lost in the noise.

The key to making the manipulation work is making the manufactured crises more compelling or more "sticky" than the plain vanilla stories that are competing for attention. For example, the story about the shopper stampede only needed to be picked up by one influential news source in order to be copied by all. It could as easily been ignored.

And the stampede story is "sticky" because I will probably remember it for the rest of my life, whereas I won't remember a report of some particular store having lower sales this season. It's the same process used by trial lawyers when they argue their cases in terms of human suffering to have a larger impact on the jury.

It wouldn't require the involvement of many people to control the source of economic statistics. At some point in the process of tabulating the results I assume there is literally one person who sees the total before anyone else. Hypothetically, the "story" of brisk retail sales for Black Friday and shopper stampedes might involve only a few paid conspirators beyond the inner circle of the puppet masters.

I don't actually believe the theory I just described. At least not yet. But if your comments tell me the stores you visited in the past week were empty too, I might revisit that position.

















Researchers think they found the body of Copernicus. This raises many questions for me.


To begin, the article identifies Copernicus as the guy "whose theories identified the Sun, not the Earth, as the center of the universe."

I'm no astronomer, but I'm pretty sure our sun isn't the center of the universe either. The current thinking is that the sun is the center of our solar system. Apparently Copernicus died in vain. I wonder if his skeleton was spinning in its grave when it was discovered.

I also wonder what the researchers plan to do with his body. I recommend attaching a generator to his bones and then reading the Yahoo News report to them once a day. That should solve our energy problem.

I wonder if Polish law allows you to buy a guy's skeleton if there are no known relatives to claim it. That would make a great conversation piece for some billionaire. If I owned them I would hang them from a moving track around my office so Copernicus always revolved around me when I worked. And I would refer to my office as the universe, because apparently that word can mean anything.

People often ask me where I got my inspiration for one thing or another. Or what possessed me to do something. Or why I have a passion for a particular project. The assumption behind those questions, I think, is that if one could find out where such causes originate, it would be possible to pick a promising field of endeavor then activate the inspiration to spark higher levels of achievement.

But it doesn't work that way. In my experience, I do the project I can't stop myself from doing. Passion is the thing you can't control, by definition. It's the same with inspiration. At any given time there are dozens of projects that I think make sense, but sooner or later one bubbles to the top on its own, logic ignored, and takes over my schedule.

Dilbert was like that. It drove me; I didn't drive it. It felt as if some invisible hand was pushing me. You can label it passion or inspiration if you want. Religious folks might have a different interpretation. The only point is that it controls the person, not vice versa.

If there is a logical component to chasing these passions - beyond the thin rationalizations I tend to layer on them - it is the fact that sometimes you have to get them out of your system to free yourself for the next one. For me, this was most true with my book God's Debris. It was my first non-Dilbert book, at a time that writing such a thing seemed like a really bad idea to all observers. But I had no choice. The book sprang fully formed into my head one day while I was showering, and I couldn't do anything else until I got it out. That meant writing it.

So when people ask how they can find their passion, the answer is that your passion finds you, as long as you can free up your schedule from the "must dos" enough to let it in. When I had a full-time job, before Dilbert, I awoke at 4 AM, sat alone in a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee, and waited. I did that for a year or two, just emptying my mind and freeing my imagination. I don't remember the day I picked up a pencil and started drawing instead of sitting during those hours, but I'm sure I didn't have a choice.
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