Forget about professional distance. Physician David Watts talks to his patients about love and pain (often indistinguishable), about immortality and the crying needs of "the soft animal of the body." As he operates, he probes "these windless chambers inhabited by ghosts of worry, ghouls of sorrow and anxiety." And in The Orange Wire Problem, he tells funny, horrible, bewildering true tales of mismanaged care and health insurance insanity. As a patient himself, he reports from the business end of a colonoscope. Take a dose of philosophy, buffered by humanity, and call him in the morning.