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| Medical Information: If You Want to Stay Healthy Listen to the Sick |
| Nicholas V. Costrini, M.D., Ph.D. Medical Director Georgia Gastroenterology Group |
| In my family my brother and I are considered to be professionally successful. When we were growing up, my twin brother and I had the usual amount of sibling rivalry. We always hoped for the best for each other, but it was perfectly acceptable for either of us to enjoy greater success in whatever presented itself as a bit of brotherly competition. We each had our share of successes in the classroom, the playing field, and the social circle. We would happily report to each other just what goals, triumphs, and awards had been obtained during the course of our teen years and for the next several decades. We enjoyed each other's successes and looked forward to the next challenge or triumph in life. My twin brother is also a physician and between the two of us, we have obtained a whole room of awards, degrees, ribbons, and trophies. In truth, Anthony has more of these than do I, but who's counting? We have had loads of fun with this sibling dynamic, but we probably did not learn much from each other while living that common schizophrenia of rooting for and competing with one's twin brother. After about fifty years of this fun, the dynamic has changed. We expect a plan, the effort, and the accomplishment of whatever goal is selected. What we now share and compare are our respective screw-ups, miscues and monumental failures. "How you doin bro", I would ask during rounds at the hospital. Dr. Anthony might respond by admitting one event, project, or plan that fell apart. In response, I might offer, "You think that's bad, let me tell you the horrendous mistake I made last week." We listen closely to each other's failures, mistakes, and misadventures because we can easily see how we can make the same mistake. We learn much more from each other by sharing our failures, errors, omissions and miscalculation than from sharing all our successes. It has always been one of life's curious truths that we cannot understand exactly how success occurs, but we understand perfectly how and why failure occurs. It is also true that for every room filled with success, there is likely a house of failures. Dr. Anthony and Dr. Nicholas give each other house tours. I am sure all of you have no idea why I have chosen to tell you about the evolution of the Costrini sibling dynamic. Here is why. We all make mistakes regarding our health and well-being. The smoker, the diabetic, the patient with high cholesterol, the lady with the undiagnosed breast lump, the man with three episodes of chest pain during the past month, and the man whose father had colon cancer all making a big mistake by not listening to the folks who have made the same mistakes. In this country heart disease and cancer kill half our loved ones, half of our co-workers, and half of the anonymous souls coldly catalogued and shelved in the health text of statistics 2001. Lung cancer and heart disease would be dramatically reduced if we stopped smoking. The diabetic blindness, the hypertensive stroke, the breast mass, and the colon cancer can each be prevented to a large degree being screened by a physician before all hell breaks loose, i.e., the cataract, the stroke, the heart attack, and the cancer. In one way or another, the five hundred thousand Americans who died last year of heart disease, stroke, cancer of the lung, breast, colon, and uterine cervix are telling us what huge miscalculations they may have made in assuming it would not happen to them and perhaps in not seeking standard medical care which can prevent much of our health misery and death. Tonight, share your healthcare miscues and errors with someone you care about. You will love the competition and you both will win. As for the twins, the most colossal blunder award goes to Dr. Costrini. There is always next year!
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