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I contacted my coauthors1 about replying to these letters, but Christopher Patterson nodded off shortly after I began speaking to him, and David Hogan, who lives in Calgary, appears to have been kept awake only by his sense of grievance at other Canadians. To be fair, he shares these fulminations with his compatriot Albertans; apparently it is the chief consequence of their daily increasing wealth. I thus write on my own.
I could not understand why John Clifford should be so appalled at our conclusions about the deleterious effect of tweed wearing; surely he appreciates the difficulty in generalizing from clinical studies, so there is no need to take it personally. On the other hand, as a bow tie wearer myself, I find Catherine Collins's suggestion that such sartorial splendor somehow signals that I am an über-bore appalling and outrageous. I'd say more, but as a lowly Canadian geriatrician I know that I could never scale the height achieved by a British consultant to look down on others, so I will leave it at that.
Thomas Fuhrman's suggestion of an electrical device, especially one that is bothersome to subjects and might be vaguely dangerous, is excellent. Such instrumentation would be an important advance in making this area of inquiry respectable. Indeed, it might even lead to a billable procedure, which is of course the fantasy of all geriatricians, especially if we could begin by studying interventionists or hostile reviewers.
Reference
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