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Kevin Pezzi, MD

I developed technology to instantly
stop school shooters and other criminals,
such as rapists, robbers, home invaders,
and shoplifters. I also created ways to block
airborne germ transmission. Read more >

Iconoclastic views on economics, politics, technology, science, and life.

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

“What I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation, not people just casting aspersions at each other … it's unbelievable to me the way people act like third graders. And if somebody doesn't agree with them, they're this and they're that … it comes from both sides. And it's just so infantile.”
— Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon

“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

Doctors should report dangerous patients

Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and other conservative talk show hosts are outraged by President Obama's Executive Order encouraging doctors to report potentially dangerous patients. I'll engage the conservative part of my brain, keep the liberal part in check, and scratch my head in befuddlement wondering why they'd object to what seems to me to be a common-sense directive. Even in my 100% dyed-in-the-wool conservative years in which I worked as an ER doctor in very violent areas, I never thought my political opinions should interfere with me doing the right thing: reporting potentially dangerous patients to the government, and involuntarily committing anyone who seemed to be a danger to themselves or others. As I discussed in another article, I often did that, and always with justification.

Judging by what Dr. Keith Ablow said on Fox News after the Newtown massacre (as I mentioned in that article), some other ER doctors and healthcare professionals let potentially dangerous patients walk away, which of course gives them the freedom to go postal. How is that helping the patient? I had a duty to protect patients every way possible, so if a patient said or did something to make me question whether it was safe to discharge him or her from the emergency department, the patient was never discharged. I'm sure I saved lives by being cautious.

Levin's concern is that patients might shun doctors to avoid being reported to the government. I understand his concern, but I don't think it is valid because such reporting has been going on for decades in my state and patients still openly disclose what's on their minds. Levin has a brilliant mind, but he isn't a physician as I am, nor has he seen myriad patients with various degrees of mental illness, as I have. The common denominator in all that psychopathology is that people nutty enough to consider violent acts feel their anger and desire for revenge is justified. To them, it seems so normal and so justifiable no one would object to it, so why not spill the beans?

I was absolutely shocked by how candid violent nuts were in telling me what was brewing in their twisted minds. Sometimes they'd blurt out incriminating info spontaneously, while other times they would say something odd enough to make me question them, and when I did, I always found corroborating evidence confirming my hunches.

Doctors do not have crystal balls, but we should have the judgment that enables us to detect who is a ticking time-bomb and who is just harmlessly blowing off steam. Thus, I think President Obama is simply encouraging healthcare professionals to do what they should have been doing all along. The psychiatrist (Dr. Lynne Fenton) who treated Colorado movie theater shooter James Holmes is being sued; the lawsuit alleges she “knew Holmes "was dangerous" and had a "duty to use reasonable care to protect the public at large" from him.”

What is reported isn't always accurate so I won't second-guess what she and others did, but if Holmes were my patient, I strongly suspect the people he killed and injured would be alive and well.

Kevin Pezzi, MD

Doctors should report dangerous patients

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