Doctor Curmudgeon®: Thoughts From a Chocolate Devotee

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By Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D. FAAP

Valentine’s Day is long gone and will not return for another six months. Just another annual day marking something or other. It left for this year, trailing its symbols of chocolate and roses. (Need I remind you that roses however are inedible.)

But, for many of us, every day is Chocolate Day. And well it should be!

If I could write prescriptions for two squares of dark chocolate every day…to be taken slowly and savored…

First to look at the beauty of that glazed piece

Then, just a little sniff.

Next gently placing it on the tongue….

Anticipating that first bite, that wondrous crunch and finally the explosion of flavor….

How happily would I write those Rxs, no pre authorization required!

Other physicians find chocolate to be one of the good things in life (of course, the dark kind, with as little sugar as possible and taken in reasonable amounts daily). I am not alone in this.

Back in 1662, a physician, Nicolas de Blegny (or was he a barber?) recognized chocolate. He even wrote a treatise about it. Best uses of Tea, coffee and chocolate.

And then, somewhere around 1679, he founded one of the first medical journals in France. Some thought he was a genius, while others thought he was a quack. (He thought chocolate did a lot of great things…including being a cure for venereal disease)

Maria Teresa, who married King Louis XIV, kept her chocolate consumption a secret, because, of course, woman weren’t supposed to consume chocolate in public. How improper of them!

But then, good old Louis hired Nicolas de Blegny as his physician and de Blegny found chocolate to be extraordinarily healthful, providing wondrous benefits to all who chomped it.

He wrote of the “therapeutic virtues…good against coughs and stuffy chest, good for bilious colic, diarrhea, and dysentery…especially good against fevers and indigestion…even syphilis”
His career ended badly as he was arrested for something and died, with the insult of a poor reputation

But, for me, at least, he was another doctor who found nothing wrong with a little chocolate every day, not just once a year!

Doctor Curmudgeon® is Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D., a physician-satirist. This column originally appeared on SERMO, the leading global social network for doctors.

SERMO www.sermo.com “talk real world medicine”

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