The X-rayed Book of Medical Care is a carefully selected collection of medical essays. "Village rulers" (politicians), surreptitious academic researchers, and medical savants "know what's best for us." They give us the truth and nothing but the truth, but not necessarily the whole truth. What you don't know can hurt you.

"Death panels" (rationing of care), hospitalists, inane limitations in cancer screening, and frivolousness in heavily funded medical research are detailed. Issues as regards to use of over-the-counter herbs and supplements, alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana are discussed. Means are suggested to approach such fuzzy problems as hyperactivity, dizziness, psychiatric misdirection, retired tiredness, childhood insurrection, as well as irresistible or impossible sleep.

Sinister forces and preposterous political proclamations are insidiously trying to dumb down our medical IQ. Elitist leaders are justifying this by touting advances in software and sterile computerized medical decision making. Physicians are being made to fear the consequences of violations of "protocols of care" (algorithmic sequence).

Common sense, evidence-based medicine, experience, honest data analysis, tradition (custom), and receptive flexible logic need to be blended to make a more perfect union of human and cyber capabilities.

Our medical monolith is becoming a foreboding juggernaut of evolution and revolution. Thomas Jefferson was poignant when he stated, "it is safer to have the whole people respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science and the many in ignorance."