Doctors, Harp Lies, and Trump Talk

I first heard the phrase “harp lie” on Starlee Kine’s tragically short-lived podcast, “Mystery Show.” “If I tell you I’m a great piano player or a great singer, you can pretty easily figure out if I’m lying,” Kine explained. “It’s easy to find a piano, even easier to just ask me to sing something. But if I tell you I’m a great harp player, what are the chances you’ll be able to find a harp to see if I’m telling the truth? So I call those kinds of lies, the ones that you can never prove one way or the other, ‘harp lies.’” Am I the only doctor who’d hear such a thing on a podcast and reflexively think of talking to patients?

This past weekend, as the physician on-call, I fielded a number of phone calls that yielded some version of “harp lying” on my end. Someone wondered if her single episode of vomiting could be attributed to the antibiotic she’d been taking for a urinary tract infection. Sure, I replied. Someone else had five minutes of tingling in his fingers and toes, only on the right side, that resolved spontaneously. Had he slept on the right side the night before? I asked. He had, and he subsequently agreed to sleep on the left side