And you get it, from the intern that wraps your broken arm after you’ve fallen off of a light tower at a Metallica show to the plastic surgeons handling Botox ruptures in the audience at Cher concerts, emergency medical facilities at live music events are often top-notch, and manned by the best and the brightest men and women in the health profession today.

But what about that gray area just outside the venue’s walls? What about that ill-defined, health-care twilight zone that begins where your personal coverage ends, and ends when the venue’s blanket coverage picks up the slack? What level of medical treatment can today’s concert fan expect between the parking lot and the turnstile?

They’re called Doctors without Tickets, and for over 50 years they’ve provide free, no-questions-asked medical care to concert fans throughout the world. Whether it’s bandaging freshly-tattooed chests just outside the gates to Ozzfest 2003, slapping oxygen masks onto the faces of hyperventilating fans waiting in line to see The Rolling Stones or treating overindulgent tailgaters shortly before concerts by ZZ Top and Bon Jovi, Doctors without Tickets is there, setting up triage stations and dispensing first-aid in major venue parking lots the world over.

But we’re not going to lie to you. Medical care isn’t cheap. In fact, when you get right down to it, it would take more than the promise of a backstage pass for the Dixie Chicks or the Eagles to entice even the most mediocre general practitioner to work non-gratis in the parking lot. A lot more.

That’s why we like to describe Doctors without Tickets as a second chance. That’s right, a second chance for all the doctors in the world that have lost their medical rights to practice, whether it be due to a malpractice suit gone awry, substance abuse, or too many appearances on 60 Minutes.

What can you do? Please give generously when you see a Doctors without Tickets representative sitting in the gutter outside your community’s major concert venue, and take the time to drop a few spare coins in his tin cup or paper bag. It takes more than a snappy brochure or promises of free legal assistance to enable Doctors without Tickets to continue giving their questionable medical skills to all those who need it, whether that be lancing a simple boil at a Biohazard gig, or separating Siamese twins joined at the wrist, thus allowing them to live out their dreams of clapping for their own personal favorites at Lollapalooza ’03. It takes cheap wine, threats made at gunpoint and sometimes even a tip on a horse in the fifth to lure these doctors out of hiding and into the world of pre-concert medicine.

Won’t you help?