Category: Culture Change

Knowledge grows faster than our capacity to learn. Our own knowledge shrinks as a sliver of the total available.

We risk becoming ignorant, provincial — ideological islands separated from all who disagree.

Look at any recent study. For example, on December 8 the Fraser Institute reported that Canadian patients now wait 27.4 weeks for treatment, the longest ever recorded.

What do you do with this information?

Accept it without question?

Try to digest the research?

Or ignore it, simply because Fraser published the piece?

The Fraser Institute does excellent research, but it challenges most of academia and much of the legacy media.

An Inevitable Age of Ignorance

R. Buckminster Fuller proposed the “Knowledge Doubling Curve” in 1982. He noted that in 1900 knowledge doubled every 100 years. By 1945, it doubled every 25 years, and by 1982, it doubled every 12-13 months.

IBM predicted knowledge would double every 12 hours by 2020. (Link for graph). ResearchGate reports there are over 7 million academic papers published each year.

The situation is no better for doctors.

In 2011, medical knowledge doubled every 3.5 years. Researchers predicted it would double every 73 days by 2020.

Pandemic publications prove the point. In the first 10 months of the pandemic, researchers published over 87,500 scientific papers, just about COVID-19.

Specialization

There is too much to know, but it does not scare us as it should. We take comfort in how much we seem to know, or we find ways to convince ourselves we know more than we do.

Until recently, we held back (apparent) ignorance with specialization and shortcuts. Continue reading “Can We Avoid Ignorance?”

A medical mind is precious and fragile: hard to create, easy to corrupt. Doctors invest over 10,000 hours learning how to diagnose and treat. The medical mind exists to help patients and should serve no other purpose.  But it is easily corrupted, distracted from its main purpose.

If patient care matters, we must protect the medical mind from service to popular, non-medical ends.

Hard to Create

Medical students submit to a 4-year shaping program: an immersion in a peculiar thought process. Residency continues the formation for another 2, 4, or even 12 years.

The medical mind continues to develop, in practice. Ultimately, patient care adds the fine and necessary texture.

Forming a medical mind is more than taking courses and learning techniques. You cannot become a doctor by memorizing Google Scholar or watching a video.

A mind is more than information. It is an information processing tool, created at great cost.

How Medical Minds Work

With one hand, doctors reach backwards and hang onto medical knowledge. With the other, they grope forwards for new ideas and solutions.

Medical knowledge is not monolithic; it always changes. But neither it is a clean wipe of the medical hard drive to start fresh with a blank mind every Monday.

Given this two-handed approach of past-plus-progress, a medical mind must remain open.

The fact of new information makes some of what we think we know wrong, by definition. The history of medicine is full of attempts to treat using tools which caused obvious harm in hindsight.

Thus, a medical mind must adopt the scientist’s “pride in his/her humility.” Doctors must promote the limits of our knowledge because what we think we know might not be so tomorrow.

Easy to Colonize and Corrupt

The medical mind could remain protected, hidden inside the institution of medicine. But the town comes in, as it should. Doctors serve real people, who live outside.

Inevitably, social ideas colonize medicine. Continue reading “The Medical Mind: Should Social Policy Define Medicine?”

David Hume, Scottish philosopher, said reason is slave to the passions.

Aristotle insisted knowledge required questions. If we cannot ask, ideas never improve. Policy becomes artifact. Then social media turns it into an endless siren of emotion: too often, doctors screeching at each other.

Historians tell us we live at the end of an age, perhaps even the twilight of a civilization. The fabric required to practice medicine wears thin.

Polybius (200-118 BC), a Greek historian, wrote that kings become tyrants, aristocrats become oligarchs, and members of democracies become mobs. A mob feels deeply, convinced of its own self-righteousness. Civility fades and barbarians emerge nasty and cruel, filled with anger and spite.

As Western civilization declines and democracy becomes mob rule, medicine becomes an anachronism, an artifact from the Greek age of reason. By age and disposition, medicine seems more and more out of place in modern society.

Medicine needs three things to survive: civility, logic, and free speech.

Civil Traditions

Civility is more than knowing the rules required to live in civil society. Social skill follows immersion in civil traditions. We develop a second nature of civility and become citizens (see Hannah Arendt quote below).

We have lost the spirit of civil traditions as well as the traditions themselves. We cannot regain the traditions without knowing the spirit animating them.

We cannot be Scottish by just donning kilt and pipes.  To be a Scot means more than just doing Scottish things. We become Scots first, and Scottish things follow. A cowboy in a kilt with bagpipes on his saddle is not Scottish.

Can people regain civility if they never knew the institution in the first place?

Can those who were polite, simply because it was fashionable, learn to be polite when the fashion fades? Continue reading “Can Medicine Survive Modern Society?”