Points of Interest, #41

And now, the moment you have been waiting for all week.  No– not that moment.  It is the moment when yours truly presents the best, the brightest, the most informative, interesting, and entertaining of my sojourn on the internet.  Today I have gratitude, no worries, losing recognition of our own face, the God of the future, marrying biblical sisters, Scrubs and the end of life, and a football team without a home field, and eloping six year olds, amongst a lot of other really, really good stuff.  So dig in and enjoy the best of the internet (I could find)-

Points of Interest #28

Welcome, one and all to my wrap up of all the best posts to be found on-line in my adventures in cyberspace.  This time we have no worries, the importance of intelligences, the fine line between creativity and madness, wet bugs and so much more, so dig in.

At What Price Medicine

   Medicine for the brain is incredibly complex.  Yet, the joke goes around medical circles that Neurologists are admirers of disease, not treater’s of it.  This is far less true now than forty years ago, and is rapidly becoming less and less true everyday, but that small kernel of truth does say something about we who are drawn to the field.  I really do find the disease processes that affect brain function seriously fascinating. 

 

 We learn almost everything we know about the brain from what happens when things go wrong.  Genetic diseases become our laboratory, nature the experimenter, allowing us to learn things we would be monsters for trying to recreate in the lab with people.  In fact, Nazi physicians are generally hailed as monsters for doing precisely this, reducing the person to lab rat.

empathy vs. objectivity in medicine

One of the first lessons a physician gets in caring for patients is the virtue of objectivity. “Doctors can’t afford to be too close to their patients.” They pound this into our heads. “It will cloud your clinical judgement.” “You will burn out.” “Your problems are not their problems.”

Something about that always seemed a little off with me. What doctor goes into medicine with NO expectation of knowing, connecting with and helping patients?

They claim it central to becoming a clinician. While critical thinking, pattern recognition and problem solving are central to the science of medicine, taken alone they neglect its soul.