Since the polls seem to indicate that my politically oriented blogs have had little effect on solving the world’s problems, I have decided to concentrate on using what energies I have left, to do what we old folks do best. With decades of experience watching the world become even more screwed-up than it was when we entered the picture, we are in a position to become expert complainers. BONUS: now that we are retired, we have the time to exercise that talent.

COULDN’T I BE RIGHT JUST ONCE?
Unfortunately, as Barb can attest, in my zeal to exercise that hard-won ability, I usually become all puffed up, well-rehearsed, and ready to raise hell, only to be deflated when I find out that my complaint was not valid. Just today, I called ready to do battle with my trash collecting company because I thought they had come on the wrong day. I vowed not to be deterred from my mission by the sweet little voice who answered the phone, but as usual, I was wrong about the schedule. It seems the time spent rehearsing my vituperative speech was all for naught.

I DON’T GET NO RESPECT
This kind of experience happens to me all too often, especially now that my brain has been softened by the effects of the mild cognitive impairment that is common to us old farts. It is true that I have never been particularly adept at confrontation except when I am in control, as in the case of most therapeutic relationships. Teddy Roosevelt famously advised: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” I am a soft speaker, but evidently my stick is not large enough. Therefore, I envy those guys whose commanding voices garner instant attention while my feeble attempts at conversation are drowned. It occurs to me that perhaps this accounts for my choice of writing as a way to register my complaints (my shrink would have been proud of me for such an insight).

TIME TO LET IT ALL HANG OUT
Due to my limited capacity to vocalize my disdain, I now find myself bulging with unleashed bitching. Some of you who have read my previous blogs (there must be someone who has) may have noticed that I have already listed a number of complaints, but rest assured my reservoir is a bottomless pit. Previous complaints have been of national or global import but since they have had no effect on the screwed-up world, I have decided to start at the bottom and work my way up to the big stuff such as climate change, environmental degradation, bigotry, poverty, and crooked, lying or impaired government leaders.

THE WAR OF WORDS (OR LACK THEREOF): ACRONYM ASSAULT IS ON
With that in mind I have decided to start on an issue which many would consider minor, but which bugs me to distraction. It is the current fad that anything of importance must be abbreviated. In my opinion acronyms should be banned from everything except kid’s cellphones (most don’t learn spelling in school). They have their own phonetic system of short hand for their digital meanderings.

IT’S NOT THAT I AM SENILE
The use of its beginning letter as a substitute for a word has long frustrated me to the point of unexpressed profanity, but has become even more of a problem as I see my short-term memory decay along with the rest of me. It is unclear to me when the use of acronyms in the scientific literature first began, but as research became more complex the words got longer and the acronyms more frequent. It has now become SOP (see what I did there?) for every key word or phrase to appear once, thence its acronym is used throughout the rest of the paper. There are so many key words or phrases in any paper, that I find myself going back frequently to find the word which defines the acronym. Fortunately, my long-term memory is still intact and I do recall having the same problem when I was a young whippersnapper.

MODERATION WOULD BE GOOD
Now, I realize that DNA is easier to say or write than deoxyribonucleic acid, and that CRISPR is a much more sensible name for the process used in genome editing technology than “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.” Nevertheless, I challenge anyone to read any issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, for example without becoming confused by all the abbreviations. I can handle a few of these lingual abominations, but doubt that the use of words would take up so much space as to cause the use of more pages.

ETYMOLOGY
As to the origin of such ubiquitous use of acronyms in the scientific literature in medicine, I suspect that it has to do with the fact that prior to the digital age physicians spent endless hours writing reports, clinical records, treatment notes, etc., long hand. Since we were always in a hurry, it is not surprising that our writing would eventually become illegible. I was one of those dinosaurs who found writing BPH rather than Benign Prostate Hypertrophy was a time saver, likewise CHF for Congestive Heart Failure or COPD for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. There are abbreviations for every diagnosis or procedure imaginable, but in a time when most young doctors type faster than we can talk, or in many cases, Alexa types for them, why not use words?

FOLLOW THE MONEY
In 1969, the FDA in their infinite wisdom decided to allow pharmaceutical advertising and the drug companies jumped on the bandwagon presumably thinking that they would sound more medical with acronyms. The first such ad that came to my attention featured Viagra as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, or ED for short. It was endorsed by, of all people, Bob Dole, a senior senator who was defeated in a bid for President by Bill Clinton in 1996. It is true that following the divorce from his first wife, Bob married a much younger woman. Consequently, he may have become sufficiently impressed with the efficacy of Viagra that he became an ardent supporter and wanted to spread the good news to fellow ED sufferers.

I can attest to the fact that there are many such enthusiasts. I recall the first time I prescribed Viagra. It was so successful that my patient called less than a week later requesting a refill in spite of my having prescribed 10 tablets with directions to be used “as needed.” Nevertheless, in Bob’s case I suspect that financial rather than public service interests motivated him to share more about his personal life than we wanted to know.

I FEEL BETTER, HBU?
But the beat goes on for just last night I saw an ad on television repeated ad nauseum hawking medication for PE and DVT, and I won’t tell you what diagnoses they represent. See what I mean? In spite of the realization that my complaint will be “little noted or long remembered” and have no effect on how we communicate, I do feel some relief. Additionally, I am comforted by the belief that Miss Higgins (my high school English teacher) would be proud of me for she had described the use of the contraction “ain’t” in the place of “isn’t” as “a willingness to corrupt language in order to avoid one syllable.”