Likewise, have you noticed that after someone successfully undergoes a difficult, risky, multi-hour surgical operation to handle some kind of medical emergency, it’s far more correct to thank God for His mercy than it is to, say, credit modern medicine, or even the doctors who performed the operation?
People seem afraid to either claim accomplishment for themselves, or to acknowledge that others can accomplish great things, on topics that inspire fear and uncertainty.
As in your difficult and risky surgical operation example: the idea of being so injured and being in such a surgery seems to be so personally threatening that many people cannot cope with the idea that their lives are (literally) in a person’s hands. A fallible, weak person. And that the outcome is seriously influenced by chance.
It’s much more comforting to pretend that an all-powerful magic parent figure is intervening in a predictable and certain way.
Medicine is messed-up, doctors are messed-up, so we can’t possibly allow ourselves to acknowledge that they’re in charge. (And they are messed-up, quite deeply.)
Even moreso, the alternative seems to be placing blame entirely on the doctor for not being an omnipotent being when the surgery goes wrong. “It was his time, he’s in heaven now” seems like a pretty sweet cop-out, and it should come as no surprise that a more secular society would hold its surgeons too accountable.
But this doesn’t seem to be what we are seeing empirically: northern europe is a lot more secular than the US, yet it is the US that has the problems with excessive medical malpractice litigation.
The US has more lawsuits outside of the medical arena as well. I think this has more to do with our respective legal systems rather than how secular we are.
Being responsible and engaging in malpractice are two different things.
We might not say that a surgeon violated any of the proprieties, yet still hold that he failed to save a patient; the alternative seems to be saying that the death was fated and it was “his time to go”.
I would say that our accountability system for medical doctors is poorly designed. Some doctors are held accountable for things they should not be, others are not held accountable for things they should be. Its not at all clear to me that the former problem problem exceeds the latter.
I don’t agree that would be too accountable; holding someone responsible isn’t the same as holding them blameworthy. In any case, the vagaries of chance should be acknowledged as a contributing factor.
But I can easily imagine that, in very difficult surgeries in which the chance of catastrophic failure is quite large, doctors are perfectly willing to deflect praise for success in order that failure not be associated with them as well.
It’s easier not to be considered responsible for outcomes, sometimes, even when logically we have at least a contributing influence.
“To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other’s work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who’s counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws. ”
Likewise, have you noticed that after someone successfully undergoes a difficult, risky, multi-hour surgical operation to handle some kind of medical emergency, it’s far more correct to thank God for His mercy than it is to, say, credit modern medicine, or even the doctors who performed the operation?
People seem afraid to either claim accomplishment for themselves, or to acknowledge that others can accomplish great things, on topics that inspire fear and uncertainty.
As in your difficult and risky surgical operation example: the idea of being so injured and being in such a surgery seems to be so personally threatening that many people cannot cope with the idea that their lives are (literally) in a person’s hands. A fallible, weak person. And that the outcome is seriously influenced by chance.
It’s much more comforting to pretend that an all-powerful magic parent figure is intervening in a predictable and certain way.
Medicine is messed-up, doctors are messed-up, so we can’t possibly allow ourselves to acknowledge that they’re in charge. (And they are messed-up, quite deeply.)
Even moreso, the alternative seems to be placing blame entirely on the doctor for not being an omnipotent being when the surgery goes wrong. “It was his time, he’s in heaven now” seems like a pretty sweet cop-out, and it should come as no surprise that a more secular society would hold its surgeons too accountable.
But this doesn’t seem to be what we are seeing empirically: northern europe is a lot more secular than the US, yet it is the US that has the problems with excessive medical malpractice litigation.
The US has more lawsuits outside of the medical arena as well. I think this has more to do with our respective legal systems rather than how secular we are.
Being responsible and engaging in malpractice are two different things.
We might not say that a surgeon violated any of the proprieties, yet still hold that he failed to save a patient; the alternative seems to be saying that the death was fated and it was “his time to go”.
I would say that our accountability system for medical doctors is poorly designed. Some doctors are held accountable for things they should not be, others are not held accountable for things they should be. Its not at all clear to me that the former problem problem exceeds the latter.
I don’t agree that would be too accountable; holding someone responsible isn’t the same as holding them blameworthy. In any case, the vagaries of chance should be acknowledged as a contributing factor.
But I can easily imagine that, in very difficult surgeries in which the chance of catastrophic failure is quite large, doctors are perfectly willing to deflect praise for success in order that failure not be associated with them as well.
It’s easier not to be considered responsible for outcomes, sometimes, even when logically we have at least a contributing influence.
That reminds me of http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dennett06/dennett06_index.html
“To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other’s work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who’s counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws. ”