There is more than enough talk these days about the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution, and the requirement that no person in this great country can be stripped of his or her rights or property without having an opportunity to appear before a judge and argue their case.

Reluctantly, then, I have decided to file suit against the medical profession. Well, not all of it. I’ll give my doctor a pass because I still need my blood pressure medication.

“It’s just a routine test,” she told me. “I want to check your cholesterol. You can go to the lab and take care of it right now.”

If I’ve learned one thing in my twelve years in public school, my three years in grad school and those seven years I spent working on my Ph.D., it’s that taking a test without studying for it is hubristic.

The only exception is if you are a jock in which case studying is hopeless. Or, maybe, if you’re a fraternity kid whose parents donated a cyclotron or the front lawn, because you’re getting your diploma even if your grades fall in the second half of the alphabet.

Yet the medical profession believes — according to my suit — that it is fine to subject people to exams they are totally unprepared to take.

Let’s face it. Americans are competitive people. If you don’t believe me, you never shopped at Filene’s Basement (although the free sample stands at Costco are a good approximation). How are you going to feel if you follow your doctor’s instructions and blithely breeze into the lab, only to find out that you did worse on your cholesterol test than your neighbor?

“It’s humiliating,” my wife will say. “George’s wife has been running through the neighborhood with his medical chart bragging about how well he did on his cholesterol test. What am I supposed to do? Just sit there and take it?”

“There’s really no way to study for the test,” my doctor told me. “Just exercise, eat right, get plenty of sleep and stay away from alcohol and cigarettes.”

Don’t look now, but that’s the same kind of blather they fed you about the SAT exam. “You can’t study for the SAT,” your teachers said. Then they hit up your parents for thousands of dollars to tutor you, preying on their dreams that their precious little darling can somehow remember the definition of sesquipedalian long enough to get into Harvard.

And, if that’s not bad enough, cholesterol is one of those tests in which a high score is a bad score.

Didn’t these doctors go to college?

I’ve yet to hear one of them proudly say that they got a D in anatomy, which is why they graduated third in their class. If they’d only studied harder they’d have gotten an F and been valedictorian.

At the very least, subtract my cholesterol score from some large number and report the result. Then, the biggest number wins, something we’re all more comfortable with.

This will be included in my suit, now that I think about it.

No, in the future, I want to be in a position to set a good example for the young people in the country who follow me. I may not be taking the SAT or math exam, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be allowed to cram for the tests I do have to take, although my doctor insists that my study ritual of slamming down three-quarters of a four-cheese pizza at two in the morning would be counterproductive.

“Oh,” my doctor said looking at my chart, “you’re also due for a colonoscopy.”

I might have to exempt that particular test from my suit. I’m not sure I can cram for that.