On Switching Recession Treatments In Mid-Course

Last year I spent a week in the hospital, fighting off a nasty cellulitis infection in my left leg.

It was swollen, looked a grotesque purple, and was as painful as anything I ever experienced.

Being someone who trusts doctors and the medical profession generally, I went in with the expectation that it would get better. Yet for the next three days, the pain intensified, the infection spread, and all the things the staff tried just weren’t moving quickly enough.

Believe me, I was tempted to walk out. (Rather, to hobble out, since only my right leg could sustain any pressure at all.) All their expertise, their confidence, their expensive drugs, and I was not getting better.

Late in the afternoon of the second day, the docs started me on a course of the strongest possible antibiotic.  So powerful that I was warned it could literally burn through my skin, causing awful scars. Yikes!

By the next day, the infection stopped spreading. Gradually over the next several hours, the temperature came down, the blood work showed reduced infection levels, and the purple began to soften to a dark pink and red.

Even though I knew I was getting better, and that recovery was underway, I deeply resented that the doctors and nurses took so long to get it right. Already I felt as though I should just tell them I was doing better, didn’t need them anymore, and thus I was leaving.

Dumping them, I was sorely tempted. Figured I might just get by on common sense and street smarts. But deep inside, I knew better. Frustrating as it was, the best course was to continue working with them at the hospital, until I was truly ready to go home.

By the end of the week, I was indeed healthy enough to leave. It took several weeks of therapy and rest at home, but eventually I was back, walking and enjoying two normal legs again.

Our national temper tantrum of the past year, culminating in the disastrous elections, has been a lot like my cellulitis experience, except that we collectively have decided to ignore the doctors, and just walk out and hope for the best.

It’s enormously frightening to experience nearly 10% unemployment, shaky prospects if we do have a job, and more.   The temptation to constantly fire one doctor and move to the next is understandable, from an emotional point of view.

Just as in medicine though, it rarely pays to react with fiery anger.  The truth is that while our economic recovery is just getting under way, we might well have chosen a course that brings the disease back, only worse.

Instead of allowing the medicine to work its course, and possibly agree to another dose of stimulus, we have decided we don’t need any more help. We just hired Dr. Let the Chips Fall Where They May.

Walking out on treatment mid-course and deciding it will work itself out rarely succeeds, in medicine or in economics. Experience and true common sense show that it usually leads to things becoming much worse.

I hope this is wrong. Unfortunately, I suspect not.  If we try slashing our way back to economic growth, as the new team of doctors we hired last week suggest, I suspect we’ll have such a high unemployment rate that 10% unemployment will be seen as the good old days.