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Trust your doctor at your own peril. The old joke asks, "What do you call the guy who got a "D" in medical school?" The answer is, "Doctor."

We can't assume the guy or gal who graduated Magna Cum Laude from medical school is a "better" doctor than one whose academic rating is less than stellar, and it doesn't mean that academic credentials make for good doctors or good medicine. A well educated doctor may be a dismal failure at diagnosing and treating patients and a lesser educated doctor may turn out to be superb. Doctors must be judged by their performance and only a history of treating patients can discern that.

Underpinning that, we have the thrill of medical conglomerates dictating treatment, insurance companies restricting treatment, and pharmaceutical companies promoting treatment. Doctors are caught between patients' needs and corporate and institutional demands for profit.

Doctors spend a minimum of eight years to learn their trade, and a trade it is. As complex as the human body is with its vagaries of disease and dysfunction, it's not as complicated as the stock market or quantum physics, both of which take a lot less time to master and get a degree.

Doctors, like all of us, are fallible. They are, in spite of the AMA's rhetoric and the mystique of Latin terminology, trained in a useful discipline. While in past eons there was an altruistic factor to the practice of medicine, today's doctors are no more useful than an investment broker or a plumber. The doctor saves us from heart failure, the broker saves us from financial ruin, and the plumber, bless his heart, saves us from (God help us) an overflowing pot.

We're just plain dumb to throw ourselves in blissful ignorance at anyone who professes to be learned in medicine, money management, or toilet repair. There is no excuse for not educating ourselves to a minimum grasp of the suspected malady, a shift in markets, or the secrets of flushing. Not only are libraries full of very specific information, but the Internet can make us an informed amateur overnight.

Caveat emptor (buyer beware) isn't a new thought and modern doctors are trained to practice within that precept. Though many go into the discipline out of a sincere desire to heal, most (up to 70%, according to many studies since 1970) take up medicine to make money. Modern medicine teaches as many courses in the mastery of billing and collection as in patient relations. That doesn't mean your doctor

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