{Part 3 of a story about a very strange doctor I have been seeing as part of my last year on my parent’s medical insurance. Read Part 1 and Part 2}

This time I went into the office a good half hour before my scheduled appointment and ended up having to wait a full 50 minutes for her to finish up with another patient. This was rendered enjoyable due to a combination of the Erectile Disfunction magazines that litter the waiting roon and the Zoloft she prescribed me at a previous visit.

Eventually Dr. Hippy came out of her office to greet me (I’d never seen her step out of there before). She was wearing a bright purple velvet mini-dress with matching purple boots and a purple scrunchy holding back her blonde hair.

I was fully prepared this time and had written out extensive details in my paperwork. She also seemed more prepared for our meeting and pulled out all the lab work I’d had done weeks beforehand.

She shuffled through the paperwork and pointed out my levels of certain hormones in my bloodwork. To make things easy on me she drew little happy faces where things were good and little frowny faces where she thought I could use improvement. She tested

• Vitamin D
• Pregnenolone
• General Chemistry (Sodium, Potassium, Chloride, CO2, Anion Gap, Calc Osmolality, Glucose, BUN, Creatinine, BUN/CRE ratio, Calcium, Total Protein, T Bilirubin, SCOT-AST, Alk Phos, SGPT-ALT, Albumin, Globulin, A/G ratio, Calc GFR N-BLK, Calc GFR Black)
• Zinc
• Vitamin A
• Estradiol
• Progesterone
• Testosterone
• Thyroglobulin
• Thyroid Peroxidase
• DHEA

Chief among her recommendations was that I invest in 5-Dehydroepiandrosterone (5-DHEA). She said it was the essentially a longevity pill.

“This is a picture of me when I was your age,” she pulled out a glam photo from the 80s. It was well-worn photograph of a blonde, poofy-haired, 20-something that looked kind of like this:

So it appears that Dr. Hippy hasn’t always been a hippy. I heard from my cousin that she shows the picture to people all the time as an example of how she hasn’t aged very much. I almost busted up laughing as she held out the photo for me to examine carefully. What reaction was she looking for? She smiled politely at me as I feigned interest in the photo.

“Notice the scar on my lip there? You can’t even see it now hardly. That’s what DHEA can do.” Besides the fact that the span of 30 years is apt to reduce the visibility of scars, I could still see the scar on her face…

“Oh yeah, totally,” I said.

She began rapidly recommending supplements for me at a dizzying speed. Vitamin A, Zinc, Magnesium Citrate, Biotin. I began to lose track of suggested dosage and what each one was meant to treat. She also recommended I get a Progesterone Cream Pump…and that I rub it on my labia at bedtime. WHAT?

On top of that she casually threw in some Liothyronine–the most potent form of thyroid hormone (when I went to the pharmacy after the appointment to pick it up, the pharmacist looked at me with concern and suspicion).

Immediately following this, I made a conscious decision to never return to Dr. Hippy again. As entertaining as my visits are, I just refuse to drop $150+ per appointment to listen to absolute madness.

The End?