The famous writer doctor Sherwin B. Nuland, a clinical professor of surgery at Yale, author of nine previous books, the winner of the National Book Award - is a believer in miracles. Not the type of partition-of-la - Red Sea of miracles that suspend the laws of physics, but phenomena and events that cannot be explained by current scientific knowledge, and perhaps never will be.
In "the uncertain art: reflections on a life in medicine," a charming collection, companionable articles occasional nearly all which appeared in the magazine the American academic, Dr. Nuland feels free to pursue their interests when they take on the medical history, etymology, even art criticism. Writes about the joy of exercise, the pain of the 9/11, the satisfaction of the authorship, the pain of losing a cherished friend. But the most attractive items and stimulating topics that are mysterious, disturbing.
These pieces can enjoy the simple pleasure of science fiction for the inexplicable. Dr. Nuland, however, has one purpose in mind: undermine conceited certainties about modern science. To emphasize the extraordinary search challenge often to depend on their technology profession and restore the patient-doctor relationship, the susceptible human connection feely, in the Centre of the medical practice.
Doctors, insists, are more technicians. It is due, first of all, humanists, intuitionists, thankful of the individuality of each patient and special situation, a unique, unpredictable and uncertain art practitioners. True healers understand this. "To be comfortable with uncertainty," writes Dr. Nuland, "is one of the main objectives in the training of a doctor."
And so he leads readers on "amazing" realms where the science does not offer any explanation. He travels to China to determine first-hand whether acupuncture is an effective technique. After witnessing two operations and talk with the President of the University of Medicine of Shanghai, which he himself had undergone two operations of thyroid with acupuncture, Dr. Nuland comes away a believer - despite the fact that the procedure "still has not been explained in terms acceptable to the more orthodox Western scientists." using Orthodox Western research methods
Science as we know what has happened at least one part of the way in understanding Acupuncture: somehow the needles stimulate the brain to increase the production of endorphins analgesic. But it is not clear why this happens and Dr. Nuland is willing to take a leap into the unknown in search of an explanation: "perhaps philosophies may be needed beyond those who have had so much success since the scientific method became an important flow of Western thought".
He said virtually the same on the therapy of electroshock, undeniably effective in the fight against debilitating depression but also outside the boundaries of conventional science. Doctors use because it works. But they do not understand why it works. In an earlier book Dr. Nuland described his own experience with electroshock therapy during a prolonged battle with severe depression. "It's really a modern miracle," writes here.
The dark chapter of "The uncertain art" is "Mind, body and health" and refers to a "confusing nuisance," the placebo effect. From the time of Hippocrates and Galen, doctors have known cases in which people recovered from serious illness simply because they had the will to recover, often without reason rather than a desire to please their doctor. It is a more common phenomenon than one might imagine.
"Every doctor has anecdotes about this sort of thing," says Dr. Nuland. "I have a bagful." Writes on patients with terminal illnesses who survived "during a period beyond expert predictions," because they wanted to witness the college graduation of a child or loved one last time; and tells us that for years it has been monitoring the obituaries in the local newspaper: "almost always, the number of deaths has decreased drastically before Christmas, rising abruptly when the party is gone." In a striking example of the effect of placebo mind-over-matter, twits "establishing biomedical too rational" by jogging once again the word "miracle".
Other chapters of the book are more land. "Rob graves" is an irresistibly entertaining story of how doctors used to go about how obtain cadavers for their experiments. There are laws against desecrating bodies, so that the researchers had to rely on an underworld of unpleasant suppliers. Inevitably most business took themselves to increase the number of fresh corpses on their own, with the result that one of the most notorious of them contributed his name to an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary: "burke: kill (a person) to sell the body for dissection."
There is much to learn from these brief, scholarly pieces. Do we say "gesundheit" or "bless you" when someone sneezes? Because, traditionally, it was thought that expelled sneeze the soul from the body, requiring a prayer to retrieve it.
Some of the articles are less successful. Comments of Dr. Nuland 11 don't add really nothing the gazillions of words that have already been spent in the attacks. An essay on exercise is little more than an exercise in induction of blame finger pointing. But none of the chapters are much more than a few pages, and is no longer any extended argument to follow, a reader can skip, or put the book at any point and pick it up later.
It is ideal airport or bathroom reading. Dr. Nuland probably understand that it can be therefore, included a piece on evacuations and regular. What better place than the bathroom, after all, to know who was probably the Egyptians who invented enemas?
No comments:
Post a Comment