Patients to themselves, too

“For most of our lives we are all doctors to ourselves.  Not when we’re old, and everything feels so numb and dead, and decency and disgust forbid enquiry.  And not when we are young, and the body is an unexamined ecstasy.  Just the time in between.  Mark them, in coffee shops, on buses, wincing, wondering, doctors to themselves, medicine men and faith healers, diagnosticians and anesthetists, silent consultants to themselves.” — Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow