I dig a decent “whodunit” movie. A plot-twisty, the-killer-was-here-the-whole-time kinda caper. Practicing medicine in the South is like one of those movies sometimes. We have characters as colorful as Noah’s rainbow and mysterious causes of ailments as eye-opening as peeing on the electric goat fence. Think that foot rash is basic athlete’s foot? Nope. Didn’t have powder, so he used grandma’s cornbread mix to dry the inside of his boots out. Think that 9-months-pregnant, broken foot at 3 a.m. is from a dark room stumble to the bathroom? Nope. Wrecked her 4-wheeler going to get smokes. (BOTH true stories, btw.)
My love for mystery thrillers may be one of my best incorporated skills in my practice. I know to look deeper than the obvious answer. Here in the Pollen Capital of the World, I know that the majority of you blame your goopy-gooberness on the yellow that cakes our windshields in the spring. But I have just as many (if not MORE) snorty-snotty cases in the fall and winter. Well, that’s just gotta be the temperature change, right, Doc? Sure. The butler did it, huh? Ah, just what the movie WANTS you to believe! Let’s dig deeper.
Many don’t realize that the yellow pollen of spring, while delightful to local car wash businesses, is NOT from the dreaded Southern curse words of “ragweed” and “goldenrod.” These words are taught to children in the South like we’re speaking of “Dracula” and “the Boogeyman.” But the yellow that’s completely encasing your car is actually PINE pollen. And although taking a large snort of it off our hood would certainly produce sneezy-snotties, it’s actually quite large, heavy, and rarely just floating in the air to clog your sinuses. Rather, a smaller, invisible-to-the-eye pollen such as ragweed, which floats in the wind easily, is the more likely culprit. Sure, none of this changes the fact you should be taking your allergy medicine consistently, but I just want to help you place the blame correctly. Ragweed is also the most likely cause of fall/winter pollen sinus infection. Invisible, and happily letting you blame the cold weather.
Wanna hear a really cool one? I have a larger-than-you’d-think group of patients comprised of students and teachers who get sinus infection/bronchitis/asthma flares the first weeks of school. The ole clinical cliché of “back in school around others and swapping germs,” right? After years of patterning these patients, it turns out the REAL killer is their sensitivity to the harsh and necessary chemicals they use to “deep clean” the schools right before opening. (Insert the “Dun-dun-dun!” reveal music here). We’ve since placed these patients on a back-to-school regimen to counteract this. But until we revealed the real killer, they spent years shrugging it off as “school germs.”
Not sure what to do with this information, I just simply want to depict the detective work that the deductive practice of medicine demands. Sometimes we need to look past the obvious to get the answer. Now where is that pregnant patient with my smokes? I casted that foot hours ago…
Yours in Health and Christ, Dr. Kirk
