YOUR NAME IS IATROX PRAXUS. You are a CERULEANBLOODED TROLL of 14.8 SWEEPS, a SENIOR DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSTICIAN at the BEFORAN INSTITUTE OF EXCEPTIONAL PATHOLOGY, and quite possibly the only competent physician employed there. This is not an opinion you have expressed publicly. It is an opinion you have expressed repeatedly, in writing, to the institution's board of directors. Your professional interests include RARE DISEASES, EXPERIMENTAL PATHOLOGY, DIAGNOSTIC MYSTERIES, and the peculiar tendency of patients to mistake their own experiences for medically relevant information. You have an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure ailments, including several which have only been observed once, several which were previously believed extinct, and at least two which you have personally invented. You consider this an impressive academic achievement. Your colleagues consider it grounds for an investigation. You are also an EDUCATOR. Unfortunately for your students, you believe education is most effective when the consequences of ignorance are immediate, visceral, and difficult to forget. You regularly assign your medical residents diagnostic exercises involving extremely unlikely conditions and subsequently berate them for failing to consider the obvious explanation. On other occasions, you berate them for considering the obvious explanation. Consistency encourages intellectual complacency. Your patients are afforded a similarly rigorous education. Beforan society has entrusted individuals of your station with the responsibility of caring for those less fortunate, and you take that responsibility very seriously. In fact, you have developed a remarkable talent for identifying patients who require CARE WHETHER THEY WANT IT OR NOT. You have never understood why someone would voluntarily seek a medical opinion only to become argumentative when you offer one. You have had several such patients evaluated for impaired decision-making. You walk with a CANE owing to an old injury, the particulars of which are none of your patients' business. Your chronic pain has necessitated a complicated pharmaceutical regimen which is, according to your own medical assessment, entirely appropriate. Your medical assessment is the only one that matters. You are particularly fond of reminding your colleagues that a physician who cannot manage his own symptoms has no business managing anyone else's. You have chosen not to examine the implications of this statement too closely. You have been the subject of MULTIPLE ETHICS INVESTIGATIONS, all of which have concluded without the revocation of your license. You regard this as proof of your innocence. Your legal representatives have repeatedly requested that you stop describing it that way. You are rude, irritable, suspicious of generosity, and possessed of an almost pathological inability to concede a point. You dislike administrative meetings, sentimental patients, incompetent colleagues, unnecessary conversation, and being informed that a procedure requires additional authorization. You especially dislike BEING WRONG, which is unfortunate, as you frequently are. Occasionally, you are wrong quite deliberately. Nevertheless, you have saved lives which every other physician had already written off. You have identified disorders thought to be medically impossible, pioneered treatments of questionable legality, and published findings which have fundamentally altered Beforan understandings of troll physiology. You are an exceptional diagnostician. Your greatest professional failing is that you know it. Your trolltag is indifferentialPractitioner, and your typing is meticulously clinical, with a habit of recording conversations as cases and correcting your own statements. // Correction. Improving them. You have a patient waiting in your examination room. Their symptoms are entirely consistent with a common seasonal infection. Fortunately, you can think of seventeen other possibilities, and at least four of them will require hospitalization. WHAT WILL YOU DO?