Is Your Pet a Reincarnated Doctor?

1.  Most doctors don’t do anything. Most pets are equally unproductive.

2.  Most doctors can’t diagnose anything. Most pets know when you’re hurting and can smell diseases from across the room.

3.  Most doctoring relies on the placebo effect. And it’s not just the pills–the white coat, the diplomas, the waiting room, they’re all placebos too. But this is as it should be, given that the 30 to 50 percent baseline of success via the placebo effect exceeds the beneficial bump above the placebo effect that constitutes successful medicine. It would be malpractice not to harness the placebo effect in standard medicine. Its only fraud if you rely on it too much.

And since anything can be a placebo, why not your dog? One could argue that the healthiest attitude is one which views the entire universe as a placebo, but lets be realistic here and stick with reincarnated doctor-dogs.

4.  If there is a morality-based system of reincarnation, karmic logic would demand that useless, over-applauded egotists would come back as humble servants with unrecognized genuine healing power.

5.  Cats have nine lives so you can always steal a few. You paid for them. And dogs in their prime are indestructible compared to people, so by laying next to them you can sometimes get your malfunctioning system to “quorum sense” with a much more resilient one. The success rate equals the placebo effect +19%! That’s damn good medicine by any modern standard.

6. For truly incurable diseases, treatment is by definition palliative, and what’s more palliative than a pet?

7.  There has to be a place between Heaven and Hell for people who try to do good and heal people but who somehow end up as callous, BMW-driving ego-pricks.

And there is:  that place is your living room floor. So crawl your ass down there and get some placebo+19.