So as some of you know, I am studying medicine.
No, not at a medical school, I mean I am literally studying medicine by reading a 20.000 page medical manual back to back on the weekends.
So far I’m 5000 pages in, and I decided to share some things that I learned.
For the record: I am not a doctor. I am an accredited therapist, but I am not a doctor. I have no “Dr.” in my title. This is just some reflections on what I’ve read.
Ludwig Wittgenstein warned us about the dangers of reading ourselves stupid. When we read, books do our thinking for us, so it’s important to balance your reading with careful reflection, lest you become book moron, such as Amadeo Bordiga or Theodor Adorno.
As such, I will reflect on some of the principles I have understood about medicine.
For starters: Our understanding of medical knowledge is surprisingly primitive.
This is not to disparage doctors, in fact, due to our limited understanding of the human anatomy, their jobs become all the more impressive. There are a lot of careful choices and balances to be made when administering treatments that often have a very broad effect on the body, whilst attempting to treat very specific problems.
All in all, every day doctors will attempt to sign their names on a grain of rice using the corner of a flathead screwdriver, and it’s very impressive.
For doctors who might be a bit confused by this, I will clarify my point:
The most obvious example I can think of when it comes to this primitive nature of our medicine is in the form of side effects. Side effects show that we have a lot of learning to do with the human physiology. As we figure out ways to manipulate enzymes and cells and tissues and so on, I believe the goal of medical research, at least in one critical sense, is accuracy.
This is what I mean, this principle. A thousand years from now as scientists of tomorrow look at something like corticosteroids, a vital and life saving tool in modern medicine, they might think “This is a very crude implement indeed.” Why? Because of the many dangerous side effects, because we use a pressure washer for something that future generations will do with a laser beam.
So again, do not misunderstand me, obviously we do not live in a perfect world, and the limitations of the tools that doctors use, and still manage to produce a good result is nothing but impressive to me.
In fact, in the future, I suspect that manuals such as the one I am reading will become obsolete for the same reason as to why the camera attachment to my mum’s Nokia in the 90s came with a booklet. Now it’s common knowledge how to use the camera app on a smartphone.
So what we lack in technology, doctors make up for with wit and resourcefulness. Medicine as it turns out is just as much of an art as it is a science.
What doctors really struggle to do is to maintain a wonderous machination that we have not fully reverse engineered. Sort of like when you’re trying to get a new DVD player to work, and the instructions are written in Cantonese, so you have to rely on the pictures. Or when you’re trying to figure out just how you get MP4 files to play on an LG smart TV, since there’s fuck all about it in the online documentation.
And I for one applaud them in their efforts to keep us alive, it must be very frustrating based on my own medical experiences with LG smart TVs.
