A wise man once asked me, “Erik, do you know what physicians are?” I thought about it for a moment and asked him to enlighten me, to which he replied “they are highly trained technicians who play the odds.”

This is perhaps the most concise and truthful definition of what physicians do. However, delusions of grandeur prevail throughout all ranks of physicians.

It starts in college when people get all charged to say that they’re pre-med, which is not an actual major, nor does it mean anything. I’m pre-rock star, but it doesn’t mean it will ever happen. Mad props for getting into medical school, but I don’t know if it’s any more difficult than any other graduate or professional school. All you have to do is memorize a bunch of stuff.

Once you’re a doctor, it doesn’t mean you’re a good doctor. I’ve seen physicians where I had to finish their sentences. This makes me really nervous. As a general rule, I stick to research hospitals where there is a much higher chance that the physicians are aware of recent developments and techniques.

Most importantly though, despite all the medical advances of the 20th century, the bulk of the things that doctors do today would be considered inhumane or crazy if doctors weren’t doing them.

Nearly all questions in medicine are still unanswered, and a lot of the time they have no idea what’s wrong with you.

Physicians knew this when they were in medical school, but this knowledge gets lost as they are indoctrinated into the medical profession. If you go to a teaching hospital, the physician brings along a resident and med student wherever they go.

The physician and resident have developed good poker faces, but the med student still has the “I can’t believe you’re about to do that to a living human being” look on his or her face. Back in the summer of 1997, I got some firsthand experience in modern medicine. I was playing Eagan rec-league softball with the infamous Rowdy Rednecks.

In our final game of the year, we were in a fight for pride against the Episcopalians. While I was trying to break up a double play, redneck and divine intervention met in a tie; the ball bounced of my head and landed in right field.

Four days later, I woke up to find my bedroom spinning in a clockwise fashion. I was so dizzy I couldn’t walk, turn my head or open my eyes without feeling like puking. So we piled into the car and made the 18-mile trip to the University of Minnesota. The ride featured dry heaves at every turn, of which there were many.

When we got there I talked to the doctor and then got wheeled upstairs to get a CAT scan, one of the few sane and reasonable things they do at the hospital. This revealed a nice bump on the side of my head, but nothing serious or problematic. Perplexed, they gave me some drugs, wrote a prescription and sent me on my way. I thought it would be some cutting-edge medication, but it turned out to be the same stuff you can buy at the grocery store.

While I never had it as bad again, things still hadn’t gone back to normal. So a month or two later, I went to see one of the hotshot otolaryngologists at the U of M. He walked in the door with his quintet of lab coat proteges and said that I could have a small hole in my inner ear.

He said I could either go have these unpleasant tests and maybe have surgery or he could go into my ear and look for a hole. If he found it he would fix it, and if he didn’t we’d know there wasn’t one all in one shot.

If you’ve ever seen the surgery show on TLC you never ever want to have surgery again. They can say what they may, but it’s pure butchery. I’m more careful about cutting food, and that’s on some lousy plate and not right next to someone’s liver.

The physician was itching to do some surgery, but the prospect of someone sticking knives in my ear was unappealing at the very least. I made some remark which included the phrase “slicing and dicing” to which everyone in the room laughed and the physician said “What do you think we do around here?” In the end I won, and they scheduled me for these new tests that are conducted at very few places in the United States. As I left, the receptionist said, “Oh yeah, it would be in your best interest to skip breakfast.”

When I went for my high-tech tests, the most humorless lady I have ever met put me in a parachute harness. She then made me stand on a platform, surrounded by a screen with a dairy cow pattern, and hooked me in.

She then fired up the computer that tilted the platform and moved the screen in a variety of different ways to try and knock me off balance while the computer red the amount of pressure I was putting on my feet. Man defeated machine in that test.

In the next room I sat in a barber chair and had electrodes stuck to my temples. I was then blindfolded, the room was made completely dark, and I was given instructions to look straight ahead at all times, which is hard to do if you don’t have anything to look at.

Then they started spinning the chair, in different directions. For the grand finale, they poured ice cold water on my eardrums, which made me feel like I was doing back flips. This made me very sick, and I thought for sure that I failed the test.

It turned out that it was exactly what was supposed to happen and I didn’t have a hole in my inner ear. The final decision was that this sometimes happens to people and they grow out of it, which I did, but no one is exactly sure why. As for their cutting-edge tests, it was basically computer-aided shake the hell out of Erik, nothing elegant about it.

The physicians at the U of M are some of the brightest and most skilled around, and I don’t think I could have received better treatment anywhere else. Still, if I told you this story without mentioning that it was at the hospital, you might think I was captured by Hamas. All physicians do is go through a list of things with increasing severity that won’t kill you in hopes that one of them works.

It’s a good thing we have doctors and they do a lot of good, but we would do well to have a realistic picture of them and they of themselves.

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Erik Hoversten is a senior in math from Eagan, Minn.