Re: How medicine has exploited rationality at the expense of humanity: an essay by Iona Heath
Quantum physics has shown us that phenomena are rarely black or white. The closer we get to boundaries, the fuzzier things become. We are all a mixture of qualities, positioned differently on thousands of different spectra. Height, obviously, but people with trisomy 21 or men whose X chromosome lacks the gene for factor VIII are not identical to others with the same genotype. Even gender is no longer seen as binary.
Attempts to force human experience into a straitjacket are doomed to reduce the humanity of medicine. It is built into the process of medical education: multiple choice exam papers are easy to mark but give the candidate no opportunity to consider and demonstrate how knowledge can be applied with humanity.
A complex society can’t function without categories, but a humane society recognises that life cannot be reduced to tick boxes.
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Re: How medicine has exploited rationality at the expense of humanity: an essay by Iona Heath
Quantum physics has shown us that phenomena are rarely black or white. The closer we get to boundaries, the fuzzier things become. We are all a mixture of qualities, positioned differently on thousands of different spectra. Height, obviously, but people with trisomy 21 or men whose X chromosome lacks the gene for factor VIII are not identical to others with the same genotype. Even gender is no longer seen as binary.
Attempts to force human experience into a straitjacket are doomed to reduce the humanity of medicine. It is built into the process of medical education: multiple choice exam papers are easy to mark but give the candidate no opportunity to consider and demonstrate how knowledge can be applied with humanity.
A complex society can’t function without categories, but a humane society recognises that life cannot be reduced to tick boxes.
Competing interests: No competing interests