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I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.

Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased.

After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law.

A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.

Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. If we took doctors seriously as human animals, we might hurt them - and they might hurt us - a lot less.

What we should care about is health - reduction of morbidity and mortality. Too often, we instead pay attention to whether something is 'normal.' A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins, even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.

Using medicine in the service of cosmesis is generally bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for democracy. The only exceptions are when we know the intervention will actually reduce suffering, as with a primary cleft lip repair.

After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law. I probably would have made a lot more money and died of boredom by now.

If we are going to have to worry all the time that we might offend some students' sensibilities, we are not going to be able to teach in a way that actually matters. We're not going to be able to teach about sex, gender, race, religion, or violence.

As a kid, I did some running but especially loved biking and swimming. I grew up on Long Island, and our mom took us all the time to the ocean, so I grew up doing open-water swimming in the Atlantic.

You can't go into new life experiences without the understanding that yeah, you may fail, but knowing you might fail can't stop you from trying.

I don't know what has caused this reawakening in academia. Obama? The GOP's assaults on science and on patients? Jon Stewart? I'm not at all sure. I just know I don't feel nearly as alone in academia as I used to. I'm feeling increasingly surrounded by fellow Ph.D.'s and by M.D.'s who seem to be taking a lot of things personally.

Want to be a well-paid bioethicist, with one, two, or even three university appointments? Just get yourself a two-piece navy polyester suit and follow these three simple rules: (1) Never name names. (2) Screw principles; just follow procedures. (3) Bury the money.

I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.

My mother has told so many times the unbelievable story of how, as a toddler, I would demand raw onions and eat them like apples, I think that, at this juncture, it is a story that just has to be believed.

According to my mother, there pretty much wasn't anything I wouldn't eat as a child. Not just try, but eat. I was even inclined to dig into stuff about which she expressed open disgust - lobster and other shellfish, and cheap Chinese food with pepper so hot it made your gums feel like a medieval dentist had been at them.

I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food.

So many times I've heard people say that the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples won't really change anything other than some legal and financial stuff. It's a dumb argument: those legal and financial effects matter.

You know what Oprah taught me? Unless you count as changing your life having a neighborhood dad say to you every morning at the school bus stop, 'You sure don't look as good as you did on 'Oprah!', being on 'Oprah' doesn't change your life.

Ironically, when I've asked my straight friends to join me in hanging a rainbow flag, they answer, 'But someone might think we're gay,' not realizing that is exactly the point. To be mistaken for the oppressed is to momentarily become the oppressed.

Being a parent of a boy who wants to wear sparkles and grow his hair long - especially when you don't know where it's all going to go - it's hard stuff. I'm not being politically incorrect in acknowledging that, am I?

When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.

A democratic medical establishment does not alter people's bodies to fit regressive social norms; it advocates for patients by demanding the social body get its act together.

Having a child is not like taking a spouse; there is no mutual agreement entered into. It is up the parent to make the commitment.

Being gay is not a terrible, tragic disease that requires prevention or treatment chosen for you by your parents.

You want a child who never makes you anything but proud? Please. Don't bother taking on parenthood if you can't handle the fact that sometimes your child's identity won't be what you would have chosen. And if you want to prevent a child from ever suffering? Well, then don't have a child. No one is born into the world never to suffer.

Ok, here goes: I'm going to see how many people I can offend by suggesting that maybe many little gay boys, like many little girls, are made up of sugar and spice and everything nice.

Conjoined twins simply may not need sex-romance partners as much as the rest of us do. Throughout time and space, they have described their condition as something like being attached to a soul mate.

To be perfectly honest, I follow football the way I follow television. I read about it.

Purposefully exposing young people to increased risks of major brain problems - even death - for sport is surely even more ethically complicated than sending young people into this same neurological danger zone as soldiers.

No matter how little we think anatomy should matter to one's social and political rights, surely we can't pretend biology doesn't matter in sports. Surely there's a reason we don't let adults play in the t-ball leagues, and a reason most women athletes want their own leagues.

Regardless of the cultural system, social pressure to appear straight seems to be fairly intense cross-culturally. Indeed, one is inclined to wonder, if being straight is just natural, why does it require quite so much policing?

We don't really know where human sexual orientations come from yet. What we do know is that the evidence we have that sexual orientation includes an innate component doesn't seem to point to the existence of simple 'gay genes' and 'straight genes.'

When I ask my medical students to describe their image of a woman who elects to birth with a midwife rather than with an obstetrician, they generally describe a woman who wears long cotton skirts, braids her hair, eats only organic vegan food, does yoga, and maybe drives a VW microbus.

Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous.

I don't have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.

If we have a situation where a man is particularly graceful in a sport that rewards grace - say, for example, figure skating - why is it that we don't say to the man, 'Well, you're too feminine to compete?'... I don't understand why we don't find it offensive also to say to a women who's very strong, 'You're too masculine to compete.'

We say, 'You may drink at the age of 21 but not at the age of 20.' Why? Because humans like to create terribly neat categories out of nature because it allows us a nice, tight social organization. The truth is, nature doesn't care that we like nice, neat social organizations. Nature likes variety.

Doctors and scientists, being part of that two-sex culture, have done everything they can to try to force people who are in-between into one of the two clear types. Intersex people themselves have also generally wanted to fit into one of the two clear categories; most are not interested in being in a 'third' type.

I think it is fine to have sports divided into men's and women's, just as it is fine to say a fifteen-year-old is incapable of consenting to sex. But we should recognize these are social distinctions based on biology, and not categories foisted upon us by nature.

We now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature.

I am led by what I find to be true, not what I find to be popular.

When I talk about intersex, people ask me, 'But what about the locker room?' Yes, what about the locker room? If so many people feel trepidation around it, why don't we fix the locker room? There are ways to signal to children that they are not the problem, and normalization technologies are not the way.

Instead of constantly enhancing the norm - forever upping the ante of the 'normal' with new technologies - we should work on enhancing the concept of normal by broadening appreciation of anatomical variation.

The funny thing is, when I ask people with dark skin if they would change their color, they tell me no, and when I ask women if they would rather be men, they tell me no, and I get the same response when I ask people with unusual anatomies if they would take a magic pill to erase their unusual features.

Surely, sport is not fundamentally about the safety of athletes. If it were, we'd probably have to ban professional football, right after boxing.

The safety argument against steroids may be a good one, but let's be honest. It isn't the one that motivates most officials and fans to frown on steroids. Steroid use does not just seem risky or unnatural, it seems to disrupt the level playing field.

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