Every doctor should be required to study The Art of War before being allowed to practice.
Practicing medicine is not like balancing an equation. Medicine is not a game of perfect information, nor are its rules unchanging. Indeed, each person’s health battles take place upon an idiosyncratic battlefield with various assortments of forces. The war of evolution, which has been raging for millennia, has developed in Homo Sapien what is likely one of the most highly adapted immune systems in the history of the planet. It is not surprising that doctors fail so often when they survey the battlefield and can think only to higher suspect mercenaries to fight proxy battles (drugs on secondary symptoms)...
We should think of our brain as a GrandMaster General, the spine her chain of command, every specialized organ a legion brimming with age-old veteran forces. Should we think the whole army, which have never yet succumb to defeat in millenia of evolution, could be defeated by average maladies? Should we assume that the General of millions of victories makes simple mistakes like misallocating resources (like making too much cholesterol)?
And when we’ve given the majestic human body its due respect, is it reasonable to expect people with 4 years of training, who are bombarded by biased solicitations and have to side-step personal biases, who primarily wield simple synthetic compounds and inelegant machinery… to have mastery over it?
The key thing to remember is: Correlation does not equal causation.
Every doctor should be required to study The Art of War before being allowed to practice. Practicing medicine is not like balancing an equation. Medicine is not a game of perfect information, nor are its rules unchanging. Indeed, each person’s health battles take place upon an idiosyncratic battlefield with various assortments of forces. The war of evolution, which has been raging for millennia, has developed in Homo Sapien what is likely one of the most highly adapted immune systems in the history of the planet. It is not surprising that doctors fail so often when they survey the battlefield and can think only to higher suspect mercenaries to fight proxy battles (drugs on secondary symptoms)...
We should think of our brain as a GrandMaster General, the spine her chain of command, every specialized organ a legion brimming with age-old veteran forces. Should we think the whole army, which have never yet succumb to defeat in millenia of evolution, could be defeated by average maladies? Should we assume that the General of millions of victories makes simple mistakes like misallocating resources (like making too much cholesterol)?
And when we’ve given the majestic human body its due respect, is it reasonable to expect people with 4 years of training, who are bombarded by biased solicitations and have to side-step personal biases, who primarily wield simple synthetic compounds and inelegant machinery… to have mastery over it?
The key thing to remember is: Correlation does not equal causation.