{"id":8093,"date":"2015-05-13T07:02:35","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T12:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8093"},"modified":"2015-05-13T07:02:35","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T12:02:35","slug":"more-probable-than-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8093","title":{"rendered":"More Probable Than Not"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

More Probable Than Not<\/a><\/h3>\n

My father was a doctor who spent his entire career in a small hospital built by the Tennessee Coal and Iron company in Fairfield, Alabama. He was an ER doc way before emergency medicine was its own thing, which meant that he saw a wide gamut of cases, from knife fights to car wrecks to heart attacks. But it also meant that he saw a lot of ordinary colds and various infectious diseases, as the emergency clinic then \u2013 as now \u2013 was the only on-demand medical facility available for people who couldn\u2019t afford or didn\u2019t have access to private physician practices. Now one of my father\u2019s great joys in life was watching sports on our grainy black and white TV, miraculously upgraded to a grainy color TV when I was 12. I\u2019m sure he spent hundreds, if not thousands, of happy hours watching sports. Unless, of course, the hapless TV commentator made the mistake of excusing the absence of, say, Larry Bird from a Celtics game by saying that Bird \u201chad a touch of the flu\u201d and so was too sick to play, which was guaranteed to send my father into a 10-minute tirade.<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
\u201cA touch of the flu? A touch of the flu? You mean he has contracted the influenza virus? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea what it means to have the flu? Do you have any idea how sick you are if you have the flu? People DIE from the flu, you moron! What does that even mean \u2026 a touch of the flu? Is Larry Bird in the hospital? Because if he has influenza, you sure better get him to the hospital! I hope you\u2019ve got a saline IV hooked up to Larry Bird\u2019s arm right now! No, he\u2019s not in the hospital. Do you know why? Because he has a COLD. That\u2019s right, you idiot, he has a COLD! Not the flu!\u201d<\/div>\n
\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More Probable Than Not My father was a doctor who spent his entire career in a small hospital built by the Tennessee Coal and Iron company in Fairfield, Alabama. He was an ER doc way before emergency medicine was its own thing, which meant that he saw a wide gamut of cases, from knife fights […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[5405,5327,3977,927,1426,655,5406],"class_list":["post-8093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-honesty","tag-language","tag-lying","tag-manipulation","tag-misinformation","tag-propaganda","tag-responsibility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8094,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8093\/revisions\/8094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}