Kevin Pezzi, MD

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.

Sex is part of medicine, so better doctors know more about sex

Researchers found that sex can enhance brainpower by stimulating hippocampal neurogenesis (the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, “a brain area involved in learning, memory and emotional processing”) and “more sophisticated connections among existing neurons” (Scientific American Mind, September/October 2011, pages 36 - 43). With research suggesting “that sex builds more complex brains” (ibid.), it is reasonable to wonder if better sex might build even better brains, and if people who object to discussing sex have cognitive and emotional deficits.

An army of far-left bloggers spearheaded by Media Matters sought to discredit my political opinions by mentioning my sex books. Those smears make them sound like immature children giggling about sex.

As I mentioned in one of my other sites, sex is part of medicine, so it is taught in medical school. I graduated at the very top of my medical school class, so I learned more sex in addition to more of everything else: anatomy, physiology, endocrinology, pharmacology, biochemistry, embryology, pathology, genetics, nutrition, histology, microbiology, etc.

My professors stressed that what we learned in medical school was just a foundation we must continually build upon the rest of our lives. When I worked as an ER doctor, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could improve the success rate of codes (cardiopulmonary resuscitations), which averaged less than 5% for patients taken to an ER for cardiac arrest—what we called outside-the-hospital arrests (OTHA). In other words, over 19 out of 20 OTHA patients ended up in the grave.

You could read every textbook and journal of emergency medicine and cardiology and still strike out 95% of the time. There was no inside-the-box magical answer for how to significantly boost that success rate, but I was so depressed after losing my first patient as an attending ER doctor that I knew I had to find a way to save more patients—and I did. While working in a busy ER that handled codes every day, I've gone over 18 months without losing one patient while other ER docs put patient after patient into the ground.

My premise is simple: better doctors know more and do more for more patients. Any arguments?

Only from the nitwits at Media Matters and their followers, who do their juvenile best to make the world think that a doctor who knows more about sex is worse than doctors who know less.

Fathom the odd hypocrisy of far-left liberals who feign to be appalled by discussions of normal sexuality yet scream bloody murder over intolerance of homosexuality. My medical school professors convinced me it is wrong to demonize people on the basis of their sexual orientation; indeed, physicians have an ethical obligation not to do that. In another article, I explained why no one is justified in discriminating against gay or lesbian people.

Doctors are supposed to treat people, not judge them. Sounds easy, right? It isn't always. One of my friends, a nurse, is so horrified by homosexuality that her face cringes in disgust whenever that topic comes up. If she were a doctor instead of a nurse, would she be able to suppress that reaction? Strong emotions are difficult to fully camouflage. People readily detect physician uneasiness, which can deter patients from receiving the care they need.

Want an example? One of my medical school patients waited far too long to get help and presented with a fungating breast cancer: a cancer that caused the skin and underlying tissue to die, eroding through it, with a foul-smelling discharge emanating from the rotting, infected tissue. The term fungating stems from the fact that such cancers often look like a fungus or cauliflower (images).

I asked her why she waited so long to get help. She explained that her doctor seemed uptight about anything to do with sex. I never met that doctor, but I've seen another doc wince her face with repugnance and shudder while describing breast and pelvic exams she performed—even common ones! (I performed a pelvic exam that caused a female police officer to pass out while she acted as a chaperone for a prisoner. How would the intolerant doc respond to that?)

My medical school professors wanted us to be so comfortable with sex that we would treat it the same as any other part of medicine. One of the side effects of my education was that I am not uptight about sex or anything to do with the body, health, or the million-and-one concerns real patients have, which are not always conveniently demarcated from body parts that might bother doctors educated shortly after the Stone Age.

Sexual problems are very common, and modern doctors are trained to handle them, but the quality of their care is just as variable as the success rates of codes. What some doctors know about sex wouldn't fill a thimble, but my sex books total about 700 pages of densely-packed information that will grow to thousands of pages once I complete my mountain of pending additions (which my readers will receive at no additional cost).

The key to communicating with patients

Some physicians have a poor understanding of how doctors should interact with patients, mistakenly thinking that acting robotic or superficially friendly is the key to professionalism. Wrong. People aren't stupid; they see right through put-on, fake niceness, just as I can easily differentiate genuinely friendly waiters from ones just acting that way to get bigger tips. And who wants to open up to a robot?

True professionalism is doing whatever it takes to do the best possible job for patients. Communication is universally regarded as the primary tool that physicians use to establish rapport with patients, and to obtain information from them that may help with diagnosis or treatment. Anything that hinders fully open communication is therefore bad—even unprofessional.

Many patients said they felt as if they could tell me anything—even things they'd never told their spouse or the family doc they had for decades—even five minutes after meeting me in a busy ER. Establishing instant candor helped me help them. Similarly, countless people have opened up to me via the Internet, disclosing things they'd never told others. From this, I know that many doctors are squandering opportunities to get patients to fully open up about everything from A to Z, including sex. So while many doctors are patting themselves on the back for acting coldly robotic, in the ER or on the Internet I'm using my down-to-earth methods to get patients to fully open up. This has given me the chance to help people with problems that other doctors never even see, so by mocking my openness, Media Matters demonstrates their immaturity and profound misunderstanding of how to facilitate communication.

The practice of medicine boils down to helping people with problems. Better practitioners can do more for more people. That's obvious to everyone with common sense, yet Media Matters was so desperate to discredit me—clearly a sign they feared the impact of my writings—that they spent days bashing me instead of their usual targets: Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham, and Monica Crowley.

I've seen how sexual inhibitions can shatter lives, but I've never seen or heard of anyone who was hurt by a doctor openly discussing sex. Just as drugs have side effects, social inhibitions do, too. Some patients are so inhibited about sexual matters that they died or almost died from waiting too long to see a doctor.

If so, please tell me about it.

In short, sex is just as much a part of the practice of medicine as is cardiology, neurology, and dermatology. Many people live their entire lives without needing a cardiologist, neurologist, or dermatologist, but virtually everyone will eventually develop one or more sexual problems. Importantly, many sexual difficulties result from diseases that require medical treatment, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, pernicious anemia, atherosclerosis, liver or kidney disease, hemochromatosis, and various genetic disorders. Consequently, the sexual problem is a manifestation (sometimes the only one) of the underlying disease. If people do not seek professional care, the disease might ruin their health or even result in death. Good doctors will thus do everything possible to make patients so comfortable with sex that they won't hesitate to seek treatment. When the difference might be between life and death, medical practitioners have a moral obligation to facilitate care in advance, since patients obviously do not have crystal balls that tell them how their physicians react to sexual matters.

Doctors are taught to lead by example. If we want our patients to overcome their sexual inhibitions, we can't behave as if sexual matters should be swept under the rug or something to be cautiously whispered. Instead, sexual subjects should be discussed just as openly as heart disease, high blood pressure, or diabetes.

No healthy society treats sex as pornography. If doctors shouldn't write about sex, who should? Porn stars? Guys who pass along tips they learned in the locker room? Beautiful young “sexperts” who think their affinity for sex and attractiveness qualify them to teach others? Or should no one write about sex so we usher in a sexual Dark Age?

The high cost of sexual ignorance

The pleasure that you obtain from eating is obviously affected by what you consume and how your food is prepared. Chefs can earn more than doctors for knowing how to make food tastier. Indeed, various industries have been spawned and profited immensely from the quest to maximize oral gratification from ingested substances even though that pleasure is ephemeral and without many secondary benefits: food may give you delight for the few seconds it is in your mouth, but whatever enjoyment you reap does nothing for your spouse, children, or society.

Sexual pleasure is different. By mitigating stress, it can foster health. By helping cement the bond between men and women, it lowers the divorce rate and therefore reduces the myriad problems stemming from or associated with fragmented marriages. Marriage is a human construct that has proven to be of such enduring value to society that it assumes a central role as the backbone of civilization. Governments regulate marriage so much that saying “I do” does more than tie a knot between a man and a woman; it really creates a three-way bond between the husband, wife, and the government, giving it the power to involve itself in your personal and financial matters by scrutinizing things off-limits to the bureaucratic regulation of single people. In contrast, governments couldn't care less about your non-spousal best friend.

Marriage is obviously important to people and society, but its most important underpinning—sexual pleasure—is something that most people know very little about. I've had patients with one foot in the grave who were still avidly interested in sex. In fact, unless you're a child or have serious problems that may erode your health in other ways, just about everyone is intensely interested in sex. The desire for sex is one of our most basic instincts, along with eating, drinking, and survival, yet most people don't know how to increase their libido or sexual pleasure. In fact, judging by what I've learned from speaking with countless women, most men don't even know Rule #1 in how to please women in the bedroom. However, fearful of shattering the fragile male ego, most women keep mum about that dissatisfaction.

If we exhibited the same backward approach to auto racing, drivers and mechanics with a profound desire for more speed would yearn for it without bothering to look under the hood and see what might be improved to obtain more speed. We would laugh at such an illogical approach, yet few of us question the wisdom of living a life filled with sexual ignorance. Everyone could benefit from knowing the thousands of tips in my sex books. Those tips can do more than augment sex; many can also directly improve health (not just indirectly via stress reduction) and even amplify certain facets of brainpower. For example, after discovering how an uncommonly used spice could spice up my sex life, I found that it also sent my creativity into overdrive. I have many more specific tips for improving health and brainpower in my books on those subjects, but the inextricable link between the body and mind necessitates that I discuss topics that outwardly may seem to have nothing to do with sex. Sex seems so simple that most folks delude themselves into thinking they are masters of it even when they are just blissfully ignorant. This ignorance comes with a catastrophic cost, yet few remedy it by reading my books (not the ones filled with insultingly obvious info).

In contrast to the short shrift typically given to sex, we're fascinated with and often obsess over food. Some people buy several dozen cookbooks, hoping to find even better recipes. We watch chefs making food on TV, buy magazines that feature yummy food on their covers, read about food in newspapers, consult dining guides, scan grocery store aisles like a hawk looking for ever-tastier choices, and spend an increasing amount of time in restaurants.

What, really, can restaurants do for you? Help you pack on the pounds? Yes. Load your body with chemicals that titillate your palate but degrade your health, mood, and sleep? Absolutely. Clog your arteries with fat? You bet! Fill your lungs with smoke when the smoking section is just feet away? Uh-huh. Endanger you by being more cavalier about food safety than an informed individual preparing his own food at home? Definitely. Drain your bank account by charging much more than what comparable food would cost if prepared at home? Yup. Expose you to germs from people coughing and sneezing? I see it all the time in our increasingly sickly population. Make you wonder if the chef tasted your food? Yes, but some chefs do things to food far worse than tasting it. One of my brother's friends, now a cardiologist, used to laugh about what he did while working as a chef years ago in an upscale restaurant when a customer dared ask, for example, to cook her steak more. He'd cook it, alright, but spit on it afterward, then smile with delight as he watched her eat the steak—and his saliva. Various restaurant employees have been caught and prosecuted for similar offenses, such as the fast food cook in Pennsylvania who spit on the burger he made for a state police officer. A television program with hidden camera footage showed what even more sociopathic minds conceived as tools of revenge against customers they didn't like (learn how to spot a sociopath). The pinnacle of depravity was a waitress who removed a hot dog from its bun, inserted it into her vagina, and replaced it on the bun before serving it to the unsuspecting customer.

People are not shy about—or do much to rein in—their pursuit of pleasure from eating even though it is fleeting and helps no one but themselves. If you are smart and ponder this matter, you may be struck by how illogical it is to put so much emphasis on the pleasure of eating but not the pleasure of sex, which can improve health and strengthen marriages that are the cornerstone of civilization. Thanks to government involvement and various factors, the health of an individual affects others directly and indirectly. Marriages affect spouses and their children, who in turn affect others. Good to great marriages are more likely to produce people who create fewer burdens on others, so marriages clearly affect society. Hence, when governments stick their noses into the lives of people in troubled marriages, it is given that power because most of us believe that the repercussions from those unions warrants societal involvement.

A guest on The Big Idea Show said there are three factors that make for a lasting relationship: respect, sense of humor, and sex.

Without sex, there would be no need for marriage. We’d all be just buddies. A television newsmagazine show (I think it was ABC’s 20/20) acknowledged the paramount importance of sex when it said that marriage is about sex, not about sharing a bank account, a mortgage, and laundry. This may seem oversimplified, but great sex is a good foundation for a great marriage. And disappointing sex is the first step toward divorce court.

Given its importance, smart people would do everything possible to strengthen marriages, but too many folks are like racers who want more speed but are too lazy to peer under the hood of their vehicles.

It is easy to look back at history and mock others for their backwardness and ignorance. Tangible evidence of that ignorance can persist indefinitely. For example, the following picture shows the graveyard for the witches of Salem, Massachusetts. They were not witches, of course, just innocent people sentenced to death by county courts filled with people who brains were filled with strange ideas.

People of the future will surely mock those of us who turn their backs on something that could help us—sexual pleasure—while obsessing over food that sends most people to an early grave after a life filled with less joy and success than is possible. When our eyes focus like laser beams on food but we too often live in sexual ignorance, are we really as sophisticated and cerebral as we presume? As I discussed elsewhere, our society is suffering from a prevalent sexual neurosis. In an attempt to mitigate the anxiety from that neurosis, it created ridiculously artificial and indefensible boundaries that make sense only to neurotic people who are not bright enough to figure out that our society is as misguided about sex as the people in 1692 and 1693 who believed in witches. If you want people of the future to laugh at you, just keep clinging to those bizarre taboos.

Educated people know that the repressed sexual mores now prevalent in the U.S. are not found in all other cultures, past and present. For a glimpse into this difference, Google Lewis and Clark sex. Some of the sexual customs of the Native Americans encountered by Lewis and Clark during their expedition would raise the eyebrows of “free love,” drug-crazed hippies in the 1960s. Here's a sample, given credence by its NPR source:

National Geographic presented another tidbit: Lewis and Clark encountered native tribes whose men frequently offered their wives and daughters to the explorers.

The National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers presented an article, Sex and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of illuminating one aspect of how much sexual customs have changed. Of course, people are still very fond of sex. In a Playboy interview, Meghan McCain said:

Who doesn't love sex? Children, and adults with significant medical problems. The loss of libido that occurs with aging is not an inevitable result of it, but a manifestation of various diseases and conditions, most of which can be corrected.

Just as doctors must know very well what symptoms such as coughing and chest pain might signal, doctors should also know that various sexual problems can (and often are) just the tip of the iceberg of medical problems that might otherwise never be solved, or might not be addressed until it is too late. However, whether the problem is a loss of libido, a loss of sensation, sensation that starts OK and quickly fizzles out, abbreviated (too short) orgasms, or orgasms that don't knock your socks off, too many docs don't know what to do other than prescribing Viagra^® or some drug like it, even though they rarely are appropriate therapy. Many cases of erectile dysfunction can be treated naturally, without expensive prescription drugs with potentially serious side effects. So if Media Matters and the fools who fall for their foolishness think they can shame me for knowing more about sex and writing about it to help people whose doctors need more education, they can think again.

Bill O'Reilly launched a “campaign to hold the smear merchants accountable [because they] have been using personal attacks and smears to try to marginalize people with whom they disagree.”

Media Matters did their best to make sex seem like a radioactive topic, thinking that conservatives are so allergic to that subject they would tune me out. Their tactic is backfiring: my messages are resonating with more people than ever—people tired of reading the same old pundits rehashing the same old ideas. I offer fresh perspectives on everything I write about: from sex to enhancing brainpower to economics and much more.

Far-left liberals do not understand conservatives. They view them as simple creatures with brains the size of a pea. Smart people know that greater knowledge and openness to sex can strengthen marriages and reduce the divorce rate, so they don't break out in hives when doctors discuss sex. When I asked a patient the secret to her youthfulness (she was 98 but looked 60), she smiled and said, “Great sex!” While treating an elderly celebrity patient, out of the blue he revealed to me the secret to a long and happy marriage: never be a prude.

Cognizant of the importance of sex in marriage, some churches sponsor weekend retreats in which couples learn to spice up their sex lives.

I turned my radio on last summer and found that a friend had tuned it to a Christian radio station. The host and guests were frankly and unabashedly talking about the importance of sex in a marriage. Their discussion was refreshingly open and mature; they and the callers were clearly smart people who embraced the natural role of sex as a way to bond men and women together for a lifetime of commitment.

These folks were too intelligent and mature to fall for the smear tactics used by Media Matters. Despite what they say, they aren't interested in the truth—only in what works to help them achieve their objectives of helping politicians erode our freedom and paychecks.

Media Matters did their best to make it seem that talking about sex was as shocking as talking about roasting small children over a fire. Their fake shock over a doctor writing about sex—one of the med school topics—is so transparently phony they must think their readers are gullible or stupid. Or both.

As I mentioned in another article, an affinity for sex didn't stop Albert Einstein and other brilliant thinkers from making this world a better place, but one needn't be a Nobel Prize winner to realize that sex is an integral part of life that can and should be intelligently discussed to make one of life's greatest pleasures even better.

In my life, I've seen how hate, intolerance, and bias often stem from a lack of education and a reluctance to see things from another's point of view. Arthur H. R. Fairchild said:

Why is the supposedly tolerant left so shockingly intolerant? Could it be they are not as cultured as they purport to be?

I agree with liberals on several issues, but I am aghast at their frequent intolerance and bigotry.

The far left is so bigoted that they often manifest effusive incandescent animosity toward those with different beliefs, such as myself, and they are so desperate to score cheap political points that they are willing to lie through their teeth. For example, Media Matters grossly distorted my opinion on Native Americans by writing that I claimed they “should have been grateful for their subjugation by whites.” That's absurd and a good example of their carelessness. I am part Native American, so to suggest that I or my ancestors should be grateful for their subjugation is pure lunacy. (Read more)

Related articles:

When will adults grow up, or wise up, regarding sex?

Liberals claim to be more tolerant and civil—but are they?

This is one part of a series of articles exploring how far-left smear merchants use ad hominem attacks and character assassination when they can't substantively counter their opponents, which range from ordinary liberals to independents, libertarians, and conservatives. The far-left is at war with the world, facts, and reality.

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