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Modern and post-modern
- Kalman M Kafetz (4 April 2003)
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management
- Tamas Fenyvesi (6 April 2003)
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Kalman M Kafetz, Consultant Physician, Department of Medicine for Elderly People Whipps Cross Hospital London E11 1NR
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Those of us who went to medical school in the 60s, 70s and 80s were told by our teachers that they were modernising medicine. They taught us medicine grounded in science rather than medicine shaped by the individual views of dominant personalities of ages past. What Pieter Degeling and colleagues call modern is really post-modern. Post modernism in medicine implies that there is more than one version of the truth, that professionals are automatically supect and that individuals' experiences, as in pre-modern times, are as valid as science. Doctors are uncomfortable and feel offended when asked to modernise because they believed that they were learning modern medicine as students. This is the cultural divide that needs addressing. Competing interests: None declared |
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Tamas Fenyvesi, professor of medicine Semmelweis Univ 3rd Dept Med ,Kutvolgyi ut 4, Budapest, 1124 ,hungary
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Dear Professor Degeling, I am afraid your gloomy forcast in the conclusion of your paper is threatening to come true also in this country. The balance between management and medicine is not easy. Let me quote a not too recent definition of management from The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Third Edition 1944 (with revised Addenda,&c.),1946 p.695: "management, n. In vbl senses;also or esp.: trickery, deceitful contrivance...". So no surprise if we are suspicious. Yours sincerely, Tamas Fenyvesi, professor of medicine Competing interests: none |
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