Trust Me, I’m Dr. Ozzy

Pool Cue (1)	Diagnostics
Stink Bombs (Novelty Pack Of)	Indigestion (Severe)
Warm Vegetable Fat (Tub Of)	Earache
Whiskey (2 Bottles)	Anything

*Might not be legal where you live

The Doctor Is In… sane Introduction A Note to All Patients

If someone had told me a few years ago that I’d end up writing a book of advice, I’d have punched them in the nose for taking the piss. I mean, unless the advice is how to end up dead or in jail, I’m not exactly qualified. I’m Ozzy Osbourne, not Oprah fucking Winfrey.

But here I am: “Dr. Ozzy,” as people call me now. And to be totally honest with you—I love this new gig.

I suppose it all started just before my last world tour, when a bloke from The Sunday Magazine in London came over to my house and asked if I wanted to be their new “health and relationship” columnist. When I’d finished spitting out tea over my Yorkshire terrier, I asked him, “Are you sure you’ve got the right person?” He said yeah, they were sure. If I wanted the job, the guy added, readers would write in with their problems—everything from stubbed toes to tearaway kids and fall-outs with the in-laws—and I’d give my answers. I wouldn’t even have to put pen to paper: someone would call me up every week so I could dictate my words of wisdom over the telephone.

“Look—are you absolutely 100 per cent sure you’ve got the right person?” I asked him again.

He just smiled.

The funny thing is, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense in a crazy way. I mean, by all accounts I’m a medical miracle. It’s all very well going on a bender for a couple of weeks, but mine went on for the best part of 40 years. At one point I was knocking back four bottles of cognac a day, blacking out, coming to again, and carrying on. Meanwhile, during the filming of The Osbournes, I was shoving 42 different types of prescription medication down my neck every single day. Each one of those drugs had about twenty or thirty different side-effects, so at any time, there were about a thousand things wrong with me just thanks to the pills. And that was before the dope I was smoking in my “safe” room, away from the cameras; or the crates of beer I was putting away; or the speed I was doing before my daily jogs around Beverly Hills. I also used to get through cigars like they were cigarettes. I’d smoke ’em in bed. “Do you mind?” I’d ask Sharon, as I lit up a Cuban the size of the Red October. “Please, go ahead” she’d say—before whacking me with a copy of Vanity Fair.

Of course, I’ve also taken a few… well, not-exactly-legal things in my time. There are probably rats in U.S. Army labs who’ve seen fewer chemicals than I have. What’s amazing is, none of that dodgy shit ever killed me. On the other hand, maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise, given all the other things I’ve also survived: like being hit by a plane (it crashed into my tour bus when I was asleep with Sharon in the back); or getting a false-positive HIV test (it turned out that my immune system was knocked out by booze and cocaine); or a suspected rabies infection (after eating a bat); or being told that I had Parkinson’s disease (it was actually a rare genetic tremor). I was even put in the loony bin for a while. “Do you masturbate, Mr Osbourne?” was the first thing the guy in the white coat asked me. “I’m here for my head, not my dick!” I told him.

Oh, and yeah, I’ve been dead twice: it happened (so I’m told) while I was in chemically induced coma after I broke my neck in a quad bike accident. I’ve got more metal screws in me now than an IKEA flatpack—all thanks to the amazing doctors and nurses at the NHS.

I always used to say that when I die, I should donate my body to the Natural History Museum. But since accepting the job as Dr. Ozzy—which snowballed into a gig at Rolling Stone, too—I don’t have to any more, ’cos a bunch of scientists from Harvard University offered to take sample of my DNA and map out my entire “human genome.” “What d’you wanna do that for?” I asked them. “To find out why you’re still alive,” they said. Thanks to them, I now know for sure that I’m a “genetic anomaly”—or at least that’s what they told a room full of mega-brains at TEDMED, a medical conference in San Diego, California, when they announced the results in 2010 (see chapter 7).

The fact that I’m still alive ain’t the only reason why I decided to become Dr. Ozzy, though. I’ve also seen literally hundreds of doctors and shrinks over my lifetime—and I’ve spent well over a million dollars on them, which is fucking ridiculous—to the point where I’m convinced that I know more about being a doctor than some doctors do. And it’s not just ’cos of the insane lifestyle I’ve led. I’m also a terrible hypochondriac. I’ll catch a disease off the telly, me. Being ill is like a hobby. I’ve even started to diagnose my own diseases with the help of the Internet (or I should say my assistant Tony, who does all the technical stuff, ’cos I ain’t exactly Stephen fuckHawking when it comes to using a computer).

Of course, the question I always get is, “If you’re such a hypochondriac, Ozzy, how could you have taken all those drugs over the years?” But the thing is, when you have an addictive personality like mine, you never think anything bad’s gonna happen. It’s like, “Oh, well, I didn’t do as much as so-and-so: I didn’t drink as much as him, didn’t do as much coke, etcetera, etcetera…” Now, that might be fine in theory, but in my case, the “so-and-so” was usually a certified lunatic like John Bonham. Or, even worse, Mel Gibson. Which meant they’d put enough up their noses to blast off into outer fucking space. Another thing I’d always tell myself was, “Oh, a doctor gave me the drugs, and he must know what he’s doing.” But that was ignoring the fact that I’d administered the stuff myself, usually at five hundred times the recommended dosage. It’s honestly a miracle I didn’t end up like Michael Jackson, or any number of other tragic rock ’n’ roll cases. In fact, my friends knew me as “Dr. Ozzy” for years before I started giving advice professionally, ’cos I was like a walking pharmacy. I remember in the 1980s, a good mate of mine came to me for help with his leg ache, so I went to get my “special suitcase,” pulled out a pill the size of a golf ball, and said, “Here, take one of these.” It was Ibuprofen, before you could buy it over-the-counter in Britain. He came back a few hours later and said, “Wow! Dr. Ozzy, you cured me!” The only problem was that I gave him enough to cure an elephant. The bloke didn’t shit or sleep for two months.

He didn’t thank me so much for that.

But it ain’t just medication I’ve given to my friends. As insane as it sounds, a lot of people have come to me for family advice. I suppose it’s ’cos they saw me raising Jack and Kelly during The Osbournes, and they think I’m like an undead Bill Cosby or something. They ask me stuff like, “How do I get my kids to have safe sex?” or “How do I talk to them about drugs?” I’m happy to help the best I can. The only trouble is, when I talked to my kids about drugs, it was, (a) “Where’s your stash?” and (b) “Can I have some please?”

I’ve become a better father since then. I mean, during the worst days of my addiction, I wasn’t really a father at all, I was just another one of Sharon’s kids. But I’m a different person now: I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t