I'm leaving work early today to go to the doctor and get a physical. I haven't had a proper checkup like that in years and years. I'm somewhat nervous about it, just because I hate doctors and think they're quacks. No, really. Think about it -- you live in your body constantly. You show up at a doctor, they see you for five minutes, and suddenly they know more about your body than you do? That's crap.

Back in the early nineteenth century, when doctors were still treating things by bleeding patients, a doctor named Sylvester Graham began a revolutionary movement where he encouraged people to start taking care of themselves. Dr. Graham is best known perhaps for his invention of the Graham Cracker, which was part of a healthy, vegetarian diet he invented (partly to curb masturbation, which was bad in his universe; sure, he was a nut). Graham and his followers, including John Harvey Kellogg, would revolutionize American eating habits, although the damn doctors got everyone's confidence back by curing a disease or two (...lousy penicillin...). Kellogg, too, was a nut:

It's quite likely, though, that the doctor was in some way dysfunctional... After breakfast every morning, he had an orderly give him an enema. This may mean he had klismaphilia, an anomaly of sexual functioning traceable to childhood in which an enema substitutes for regular sexual intercourse. For the klismaphile, putting the penis in the vagina is experienced as hard, dangerous, and repulsive work.

Ok, alrighty then. I got to thinking about Graham, Kellogg, and the wellness movement through history because I found this link by nutty doctor Joel Wallach. Wallach thinks that doctors are quacks, too, motivated solely by insurance money and inflated prices. This speech is called "Dead Doctors" and focuses around hotshot doctors that drop dead while normal people keep on chugging. He believes that every single natural death is caused by a nutritional deficiency. I had a lot of fun reading this piece imagining Ross Perot as the speaker.

Well, when I practised for 12 years up in Portland, somebody'd come to me with a headache. Never had one, and I'd just walk up to them and tap them on their sinuses, and if they collapsed to their knees, they'd know they had a sinus headache. "Oh Doc, why'd you do that?" Well, that's a cheap lab test. Then if they had blood dripping out of their nose, it would take a $35 x-ray to see if they had a cancer in there. 35 bucks and a free lab test as opposed to 421 bucks.

Nonetheless, this article is not only highly entertaining, but you never know; he could very well be right.
On the other hand, these "do it yourself" health types are the root of our societal preoccupation with the bowels, and they scam our money, blah blah blah. So my bottom line is to remain skeptical and hope nothing major is wrong with me.

Assuming everything about you is average, you can get the date of your demise via the Death Clock. Featuring settings for Normal, Pessimistic, and Sadistic. Assuming I'm normal, I'll kick the bucket on December 29, 2048. (Link found via a very old MeFi post.

If you need to know whether "normal" is the right setting, why not ask a Magic 8 ball? The twist on this one is that it claims to use a robotic cradle to actually turn the 8ball as you wait. It's pretty cool. Via Blue Ruin. (Crap. It says I should have used "pessimistic," meaning I'm supposed to croak on December 7, 2033)