Dr. Charles Weijer is Assistant Professor and Bioethicist at Dalhousie University, Halifax. Both spend way too much time watching cartoons. A solicited editorial beginning on page 1476 discusses the issues raised in this article. These are hard times for physicians.
Governments blame doctors for spiralling health care costs as they slash spending.
Ethicists decry medical paternalism. And political correctness has changed the way we speak. It's enough to give your average doctor an identity crisis. Working on the premise that life imitates art, we searched for and found a role model for physicians to follow in these difficult times. We found him in a long-running cartoon series, The Simpsons , and spent many hard hours in front of the television, collecting and collating data for analysis.