By Jerry Harkavy,Associated Press Writer

AUBURN – One might think that the Placebo Journal’s outrageous humor detailing the weird-but-true foibles of the medical profession should be confined to the privacy of the doctors’ lounge.

But Dr. Douglas Farrago, the journal’s creator and editor, wants to expand his readership to a general audience, betting that patients as well as doctors will guffaw at gross-out stories about malodorous infections, rivers of nasty pus, foreign objects in bodily orifices and uncontrolled flatulence.

Farrago’s new book, “The Placebo Chronicles,” (Broadway, $12.95), is a compilation of jokes, anecdotes, illustrations and fake ads from the magazine that the family physician from Auburn started five years ago.

Likened to Mad magazine for docs, its goal was to point out some of the problems with medicine and have a few laughs at the same time.

More than half the journal’s 5,000 to 6,000 subscribers are doctors; most of the others are nurses, nurse practitioners, drug company representatives and others within the health care field.

By contrast, Farrago hopes the book will attract a lay readership that will be fascinated and entertained by his juvenile humor and satirical inside view of the profession.

“I’m giving people the backstage pass to the rock concert of medicine,” he said, “and I think it’s good for medicine in the long run. And if I give medicine the enema it deserves, I’m OK with that.”

The public’s wonderment about doctors seems boundless, he said.

“‘Scrubs’ is huge on TV, there’s House, M.D.’ E.R.’ then back to St. Elsewhere’ and Marcus Welby.’ Everybody wants to see what goes on in a doctor’s life,” he said. “We have this morbid curiosity.”

Farrago is quick to admit that his take on medicine will never be confused with that of the benevolent Marcus Welby. “I think that stuff is great to tug at your heart strings, but we’re showing another side – one that’s real.”

News stories about the Placebo Journal have made some of Farrago’s patients aware of his sideline, but there is scant evidence of it at his office. Waiting room magazines ranged from Sports Illustrated to Highlights, but there was not a copy of Placebo Journal in sight.

“I’m not afraid to put it out there,” Farrago said, although he has never done so. “I don’t want my patients to think they’re fodder for the journal,” he said.

Still, when one of his 2,500 patients brings up the subject, they’ll share a laugh about it and he might go on to recount one of his favorite stories.

Larry Sargent of Poland had been a patient of Farrago for three years before someone outside the practice told him about Placebo Journal. Sargent asked about it on his next visit to the office and was directed by a nurse to the Web site. He has since become a subscriber, and a fan of his doctor’s offbeat humor.

“I think it’s a great place for nonprofessionals like myself to see what doctors are up against,” said Sargent, who confessed that some of the material goes over his head because he’s unfamiliar with the terminology.

Rachel Campbell of Turner said she and her husband enjoy the humor, even though “it’s kind of crude” and some readers are sure to be offended. “It tells me really what it’s like to be a doctor or a nurse,” she said.

Campbell said the jokes and parodies give lay readers an insight into the sources of stress that doctors face in their everyday practice while providing them with a vehicle in which they can vent their frustrations.

In addition to the magazine, the book and the Web site, Farrago, 40, puts out the Placebo Gazette, a biweekly newsletter delivered for free online, and prepares radio monologues for his fictitious WKOM, which stands for King of Medicine. Most of the journal material is contributed by a network of hundreds of physicians around the country, but Farrago does all the editing.

His ground rules are simple: the stories must be true, they cannot depict harm to a patient and there can be no breach of patient confidentiality.

Married and the father of three, Farrago juggles his full-time practice with his work on the journal, which he puts in on mornings before work, at night after the kids have gone to bed and on Wednesdays, his day off. He also is completing a book about his first five years in practice, a memoir that combines humor with the serious business of medicine.

Farrago, whose writings target HMOs, drug companies and medical malpractice insurers, worries sometimes that he’s not getting enough negative feedback, especially from “snooty doctors” who might be expected to take exception to the journal’s tone. That leads him to wonder if he’s doing enough to “push the envelope.”

“Hopefully this book will get out there and ruffle some feathers,” he said.

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On the Net: http://placebojournal.com