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THE ORIGINS OF MUFFIN MAN:
6:22 p.m. October 12, 1994, San Diego California
Surgery Rotation, University of California, San Diego Medical School
The previous day began in post-op clinic listening to liver
transplant patients with booze on their breath lie about how they
have not been drinking. It ended with my supporting the huge flank
of a morbidly obese woman who could not fit on even the extra-large
operating room table for a marathon operation to remove a lump in
her breast. There were many obesity-related complications. Overnight
call brought a new day which began at 2:04 a.m. with an operation to
clean up an infected wound on the ass of an heroin addict and ended
with another day in clinic cleaning diabetic stasis wounds and
having obese patients with all sorts of problems ignore my advice to
exercise and lose weight.
That evening as I sat numb in front of my
apartment’s television screen, a snippet of a documentary about
ancient Rome penetrated the fog of my day. It described how Mount
Vesuvius had erupted so suddenly that its lava had captured people
in the midst of everyday activities. These citizens and the details
of their lives had been memorialized in the lava-hardened stone.
Bitterly, I thought that if a mountain were to erupt and catch our
society unawares, all of us would be doing the same thing - sitting
on our asses in front of a television. And most of us would be very
fat.
This was the spark that generated the film Muffin Man, and I am
sad to say that despite the wonderful technological and humanitarian
advances our society has achieved, physically we seem to be headed
the way of the dodo bird. This film was created as a comedy not only
to get people to watch it, but also to start a dialogue - among not
just scientists, but the common man - about what we can do to
reverse the trend.
JD Eisner, M.D., 17 July 2003
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