I need a new doctor and I'm apparently biased against men

This is my soon-to-be former physician, Dr. Spech-Holderbaum. She would probably think it's funny that I'm posting a photo of her on my blog.

My primary care physician, the wonderful Michelle Spech-Holderbaum, M.D., is retiring in a week. I have been seeing her since the 90s, as has my wife. She has also been my father-in-law's doctor for many years.

There was a part of me that looked forward to annual check-ups because she was always so nice and always took the time to answer questions, give advice, and really just listen.

So now I need a new doc, which is cool. Dr. Spech-Holderbaum deserves her retirement after many years of being very good at her job.

Dr. Spech-Holderbaum worked for the Lake Health medical system, but rather than look there for her replacement, I first checked out the local branch of the Cleveland Clinic that's near my home.

I went onto their website, where you can select physicians by specialty; whether they treat adults, children, or both; and by gender. And without giving it a thought, I automatically set the parameters to internal medicine, adults only, female.

It's not that I looked at the gender box and said, "What, have a man poke and prod me? Forget it!" I just subconsciously picked "female" because that's all I've known for many years.

And there were, by the way, many female physicians there from which to choose.

Are female doctors more attentive? Better listeners? More in tune with their patients' fears and worries? Maybe. Those are all stereotypes, and they're certainly not universal (I know men in many professions who possess those qualities in spades.)

But for whatever reason, I'm almost certainly going with a woman as the next person to whom I will, once a year, ask dumb questions about vitamins, my horribly scarred hamstrings, and if I'm really OK at my current weight or whether losing a few more pounds is a good idea.

As a man, all I can say is that I would not want the job of caring for neurotic me.

Five reasons I would have a hard time being a woman

(1) You have to have nice handwriting: There are exceptions to this, of course, but they're relatively few and far between. Why is it that the vast majority of women have such nice handwriting? Do they work on it more in school? Is it genetic? My handwriting is terrible (or, as my buddy Chas Withers once put it, "your penmanship is atrocious"), so I'm jealous of anyone who writes neatly. Which means I'm jealous of roughly half the planet. That's not a good place to be.

(2) You're expected to wear funky shoes with unnatural heels: Who decreed that women are supposed to balance themselves on heels that are four inches high and a quarter-inch wide? I'm certain it was a man, and I'm certain he did it as a joke just to see how many women he could fool into actually trying it. Then, when the whole thing blew up and became a fashion trend, he was too embarrassed to admit he was kidding in the first place. I'll bet he laughs when he's on his way to the bank to cash another royalty check and sees a woman tottering down the street on one of his inventions.

(3) There are periodic biological occurrences that would annoy me to an amazing degree: You know what I'm talking about. Ugh.

(4) You don't make as much money: Not that I'm all about the dollars or anything, but it's hard to ignore the fact that, statistically, women don't make as much money as men. The figures vary from 77 cents on the dollar on the low end to as high as 91 cents if you control for various factors such as the fact that men tend to be over-represented in highly dangerous (and therefore higher-paying) jobs. If I was an ovary-bearing person, it wouldn't be so much about the money for me as it would be about the principle. I would get angry just thinking about it. Incidentally, there are those who would argue vehemently against the existence of this wage gap. I have heard their arguments and have yet to find any merit to them. But then again I'm no economist. And even if I was, I would make more money than female economists. Boys win! Boys win!

(5) The law says you cannot legally bash someone in the face with a hammer: There are jerks everywhere. And they represent both genders. But for whatever reason, women have to put up with a lot more from the male jerk population than vice-versa. Which I have to believe means I would be angry a lot of the time if I went through life as a woman. My instinct would be to hurt someone (I'm not proud of that, mind you), but for whatever reason, there is no provision in most local ordinance books for inflicting debilitating injury upon a deserving man-jerk. Ergo, my assumption is that women are in a constant state of checking themselves from committing first-degree felonies. That's gotta be tough...

I'm not saying all women are smarter than me, but...

I don't have a lot of "rules to live by," but one that I follow religiously is to always do whatever a woman tells me to do.

This is a corollary to my unwavering belief that the smartest, most organized people in the world are women without children. Seriously, these are the people you want to turn to if you need something done.

Why women without children? Because once a woman has children, she becomes mentally disabled. I say this with no disrespect, but it's true. Mothers -- especially mothers of multiple kids -- are usually shells of their former selves in terms of their mental faculties.

(I have a theory as to why that is, by the way. When a baby forms inside its mother's womb, it obviously needs brain cells, right? There can only be so many brain cells in the world at a given time, and I believe the baby simply takes its brain cells from its mother. Good for the baby, but not so good for the mom, whose IQ drops 15 to 20 points with every child she bears.)

Still, this is all relative. Moms, in my experience, tend to lose their edge over time, but they're still a lot smarter than me, and probably smarter than most fathers in general. But I'll say this for we dads: We may start at a low level, but we pretty much stay there our entire lives. There's not the same dropoff you see with moms.

So, ladies, that guy you live with who consistently leaves a wet towel on the bathroom floor after he showers? Yeah, he probably won't ever stop doing that. BUT...he probably won't get much worse, either. You can take some solace in that.

In any case, whether they have children or not, I take very seriously the advice and/or outright commands I get from women, because most of the time they're right.

If I had any sort of ego, I might be offended when I hear myself say that. But I've been married for almost 20 years and I have five kids. Whatever pride and vanity I had was crushed long ago. Nowadays, I just want to know the right thing to do, and I don't care whether the person guiding me is a man, a woman, or something in between. When I need to be pointed in the right direction, who you are is of no automatic consequence to me.

Thus, I'm going with whomever seems to know what they're doing, and most of the time that's a female.

Not that guys aren't ever right. Some of the smartest people I know are men. But I'm just playing the odds here. I think back to when I was a kid, and I look at the decisions made, say, by me and my friends on one hand, and the girls I knew on the other.

When the girls got together, they would usually do fun, responsible, girl-type things. But my friends? Not so much. We would regularly put ourselves in mortal danger without any real understanding that we were even doing it.

Case in point: The railroad tracks. There was a period of three years or so (say ages 11 through almost 14) when we spent a lot of time hanging out around the tracks. There were at least 47 ways to kill yourself on and around the tracks, from falling off the light towers we always climbed to slipping under the slow-moving trains we used to hop aboard. For all intents and purposes, we were mentally retarded, but we sure had a good time.

The girls didn't do stuff like that. They were too smart. We would come home all muddy and smelly from the tracks (I would often jump into the dirty sewage runoff creeks around the tracks, did I mention that?), and I think my mom would sometimes wonder why God only gave her two daughters.

Anyway, I look back on that now and I realize my decision-making abilities were compromised at an early age, as were those of virtually every guy I know. So just to be on the safe side, I trust the women.

Except when it comes to why so many of them are afraid of tiny, harmless spiders. That part I don't get. But everything else? Yeah, ya gotta side with the estrogen, guys.