Apropos...

It was a critical moment in my life; I’d just made a discovery that had changed my world view forever. The discovery came during a year-long period during which I had been regularly treated by psychiatrists for extreme hypochondria. I’d passed a whole winter unable to sleep, focus, socialize, even so much as read a page of a magazine, so convinced was I that I was dying of some dread and mysterous brain disease. Psychiatrists who treated me tried to help me out of it by discussing my relationships with my parents, but I wasn’t cured until I had completed a battery of expensive physiological exams, including MRIs and countless X-rays and blood tests. What I found out during that period was that modern science, and modern doctors, knew almost nothing. If I was dying of some mysterious brain disease, they would never be able to tell me for sure. They openly admitted to me that their jobs, ultimately, came down to guesswork. By August I was coming to terms with the reality of being alone in nature, essentially left to fend for myself against the horrible things in life. A year later, believing that no life strategy was inherently safer than any other, I’d moved to Russia and then Uzbekistan, where I drank water out of the tap and quickly learned to thrive in the philosophy of Being Fucked.

Taibbi, Matt. "Combed Over." The Exile 10 August 2001