Behind Closed Doors: Why I’ve Decided to Leave My Barber-Surgeon

Ultimately, we’re all just cogs in the healthcare-industrial complex.

As a healthy man in his 40s, I’ve been lucky enough to not need to think much about my overall health. I eat well, I get my cardio from rollerblading to and from my weekly salsa dancing lessons, and I only vape at Coldplay concerts.

And like most responsible adults, I’d see my barber-surgeon every six months, so he can cut me and drain out excess bile, helping me to maintain a healthy balance of blood and phlegm. That is, until this past summer.

During our vacation to the Finger Lakes, while I should’ve been enjoying fishing and waterskiing with our boys, Kaelin and Callen, my wife Melinda noticed that my levels of melancholy and aggressiveness were quite high. This could only mean one thing: The black bile from my gall bladder and yellow bile from my spleen were out of balance. I would have to make an appointment to see the barber-surgeon as soon as possible.

Aldus, with his flowing robe and tonsure haircut, has been our family’s trusted barber-surgeon since he cured Melinda’s bronchitis in 2008. But when I entered his shop in the strip mall, I knew things had changed.

First, his receptionist Lorraine informed me that although insurance will cover the traditional blood-letting, leech application and boil lancing will now be out of pocket. Moreover, Aldus has stopped trepanning altogether, meaning I’d have to be referred to a specialist every time I needed a hole drilled into my skull!

Aldus’ bedside manner also deteriorated. First, his assistant Adelaide performed most of the bleed out. Although she was courteous, and sharpened the fleam between each incision, when I bleed out my biles, I’d like to be bled out by someone other than a common midwife.

When Aldus finally came in, he was distracted while applying the leeches to my abdomen, and was brusque with the enema. That’s when he dropped the bomb on me.

“I’m consolidating practices,” Aldus confided. “Although I prefer my independent bleedout shop, with mounting insurance costs and other overhead, I’m forced to work in a shared professional building with a dermatologist, two urologists and a chiropractor.”

I could just see it now: I’m walking into the medical building, simply for my cupping and bleed out, and I see an acquaintance who thinks I’m going to visit a chiropractor. It would be too much embarrassment to endure.

Where has our healthcare system gone, where a respected barber-surgeon cannot afford to hang his bloodied bandages and strings of teeth in his front window and bleed the biles of demented patients, without fear of bankruptcy?

That’s when I realized that barber-surgeons are just a cog in the healthcare industrial complex. And they’re being financially forced out of traditional practice, just like many respected cardiologists, obstetricians and phrenologists today. That means that either they’ll be shuttering their practices, or much worse, cutting corners like they’re forearms. I will not subject my family to that possibility.

That’s why I’ll be avoiding barber-surgeons like the plague. OSM