If Dr. Phil was your physician, you’d now be dead.

I’m serious. You’d go in with clogged arteries and he’d prescribe catfish. You’d have liver cancer and he’d schedule Tommy John surgery. You’d have ebola and he’d remove your tonsils.

Can’t you just picture him in a lab coat, the halogen lights bouncing off his beach ball skull as he lurches toward the exam table smelling like stogies and a clambake. Then he holds the wrong side of the stethoscope to your chest and cranks up that southern drawl: “Well, I’ll be. You ain’t got no heartbeat. Look, you need to make some changes and get a heartbeat!”

Of course, Dr. Phil can’t be your doctor because Dr. Phil is not a real doctor.

But by playing one on TV during a pandemic, it’s possible he’s going to get us all killed.

On Thursday night, via Skype, Dr. Phil was interviewed by Fox’s Laura Ingraham, the ruggedly handsome banshee who always looks like she’s just come from a snooty backyard soirée in the Hamptons that ended with a book burning.

The subject was the toll of lockdown. Fair enough.

But then Dr. Phil said this: “Look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying — 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 from swimming pools. But we don’t shut the country down for that. But yet we are doing it for this?”

I actually hit rewind three times after climbing back into my chair.

(Also, what is up with the lighting in Dr. Phil’s house? Was he in the middle of a séance? Sir, order some new lamps from Wayfair. And don’t sit so close to the camera.)

But let’s get back to his argument.

First of all, I can’t believe there are 360,000 drownings a year. I think Dr. Phil may have accidentally added two zeroes. But that aside, as a clinical psychologist presumably trained in statistical analysis, is he not guilty of — how would he say this — comparing apples to oranges down there in that fruit market called logic?

Yes, people die every day. But car accidents are not contagious. If you get less than two metres from someone puffing on a cigarette, you’re not going to wake up in a few days with a fever and inexplicable craving for Marlboros.

I don’t know how to swim. This is how I avoid drowning: I stay out of pools.

Problem solved. But there are no easy fixes during a pandemic when even wandering into a grocery store can be as risky as high-diving into the shallow end. And, yet, our celebrity doctors keep running their yaps with the glib sound bites that, in normal times, are always good for ratings and, during a pandemic, are bad for public health.

Remember when Dr. Drew claimed COVID-19 was media hysteria? Then there is Dr. Oz, who recently said reopening schools would only increase the mortality rate by two to three per cent. Only? That’s not responsible risk assessment — it’s a death sentence for thousands.

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Has anyone checked with Dr. Ruth to see if she has any pandemic tips? Forget the lungs — what does this novel coronavirus do to the G-spot? I’m honestly surprised Dr. Phil, his face bathed in a creepy blue glow, didn’t tell Ingraham: “Look, Laura. People get killed by lightning every year and last time I checked we don’t put clouds in quarantine. You catch my drift?”

“I can’t show you an X-ray of depression,” he did say.

Maybe not. But if he Xerox’s his face, I suspect he could show us a photocopy of a dumbass.

A global recession is going to destroy lives. Isolation and recession are a recipe for psychological distress and long-lasting financial hardship. But in the short term, what’s the alternative? Lift the lockdown immediately, as Dr. Phil suggested, and hope our hospitals and morgues can keep up?

Here’s something you won’t hear from a celebrity doctor: other diseases are not exactly on hiatus. People are still having strokes and heart attacks. Accidents still happen. Cancer is not vacationing on a beach in the South Pacific.

No city on earth has the capacity to deal with unmitigated spikes of COVID-19.

Striking the right balance between kick-starting the economy and not overwhelming our health-care systems is the most complex challenge the world has seen in decades.

But to be a successful celebrity doctor, you need to prescribe a heavy dose of simple fixes to viewers. That’s why Dr. Phil often sounds nuttier than a slop bucket full of pistachios. In a way, it’s not his fault. He’s got to make a diagnosis and cure someone in an hour with commercial breaks. He’s not running tests or taking in-depth histories of his “patients.” Those people are just grubby labourers in his lucrative content farm. This is what happens when fame and fortune collide with the Hippocratic Oath: entertainment becomes the only treatment.

The small screen is never about the big picture.

And that is why all celebrity doctors need to take a vow of silence right now.

I guarantee you, there are a lot of people out there who believe Dr. Phil is a real doctor. So if they’re losing their minds in lockdown — and who isn’t? — his remarks may well be the second opinion they covet: Look, Dr. Phil says I can go out again. Look, where’s my heartbeat?

Contradicting the consensus of real experts is not good television — it’s malpractice.

Heal thyself, Dr. Phil. Shut your yap. You’re going to have blood on your hands.

Get back to the séance until we return to all regularly scheduled programming.