You Bet Your Life.(bets as insurance)

My periodontist recently recommended a procedure that I feared would make my face swell up like a beached fish for weeks. He swore it wouldn't, because statistically it doesn't affect most people that way. But experience has taught me that my face is in the 1 percent that reacts violently to anything that begins with those jolly syllables, "perio."

Not that it matters. Ever since health care in America was hijacked by the insurance industry and their pilot fish, the malpractice lawyers, statistical norms that can stand up in court have taken precedence over personal truth. I've tried and tried to convince medical professionals that I understand my own body's idiosyncrasies. All in vain. The good doctors say no, the numbers show otherwise. And if that's infuriating in itself, even more infuriating is the fact that I always fall for it.

Time and again, I'm persuaded by a dentist's insistence that this or that procedure won't make me look like a poster child for spousal abuse. That is, part of me gets all girlishly hopeful. I start planning to go out in public unveiled before three weeks are up, and each time I'm disappointed anew at the battered sight of myself in the mirror. By the time my cheek is the size of a small pamplemousse and the color of a damson plum, I hate my doctor and the gurney he or she rode in on.

So this time out, when we decided to drill three titanium implant posts into my jaw, and my man--reputedly one of the best in the country-- swore I'd neither swell nor bruise, I bet him one hundred U.S. dollars that I would. For the next week I joyfully photographed my puffy, purple face every day and e-mailed the snapshots to him, pleased to be making money as a champion of statistical deviation. It delights me to imagine that my small "damage wager" will strike a small blow against the one-size-fits-all notion of medical science. But even if it doesn't, the bet soothed my sense of being wronged at a price my doctor could afford. I think it made the world a better place all around.

Now I'm considering extending the experiment. For example, lots of doctors double-book, scheduling two or more patients into each time slot in case one runs late or cancels. In cases of emergency, of course, it's reasonable to be asked to wait, but double-booking has been widely adopted as a method of profit maximization at patient expense. I once read about a lawyer who, when kept waiting an hour for a ...