2024-01-28 07:10:02
When we study medicine we come across subjects that, because they are not part of the body of knowledge related to the healthy or sick human body, we consider filler materials. Most are humanistic studies such as philosophy, history, psychology, anthropology or sociology. They are disciplines that at that time we perceive as marginal, peripheral, foreign to our main interest, which is obtaining the central knowledge that will allow us to practice the profession.
This feeling increases as the semesters of study progress, when we delve into the different medical specialties into which professional knowledge has been divided. Everything that does not focus on mastering some part of the organism seems to us to be a distraction that takes us away from the main objective. The pressure to obtain specialized knowledge increases beyond the university classrooms, even encouraged by economic interest, until it becomes omnipresent and convinces us that it is the only important thing.
Of course, we cannot deny the enormous advantages that specialized medical knowledge has brought, as recognized and alerted by Dr. José María Carrera, a gynecologist who directed the Obstetrics and Perinatal Medicine Service of the University Institute for nearly 40 years. Dexeus from Barcelona:
“We have made a lot of progress, there is no doubt, and our diagnostic capacity is simply overwhelming. But perhaps we have acted like a victorious army, which has advanced its technological vanguards too far, neglecting its humanistic and ethical rearguards. For this reason, it may be useful to stop a little on the side of the road and take inventory of what we carry in our saddlebags. I fear that in them we will miss the humanity that has always accompanied the doctor throughout history.”
This imbalance between our techno-scientific heritage and the cultivation of everything that enables us to comprehensively understand human beings should worry us greatly. Society has long noticed this and has expressed its discontent, even its distrust, towards the current medical profession. It seems that we have lacked sensitivity to realize this.
The issue is especially delicate when it comes to the training of new medical professionals. We must make a very great effort to reform the study plans and to prepare teachers who know how to transmit to their students not only the importance and usefulness of their humanistic training, but respect for the great mysteries that are part of the human condition.
In The essence of the doctor and the renaissance of medical educationJ. Donald Boudreau, Eric J. Cassell and Abraham Fuks, professors at the McGill University School of Medicine in Montreal, Canada, note the following:
“The main mission of medicine is the care of the sick. However, the “doctor as healer” has been replaced by the “doctor in search of illness”, aided and induced by technology. Contemporary medical education has been a decisive driver of this transformation. In today’s academic “health centers” there is an imbalance between the attention paid to the mission of medicine – the care of the sick – and the battle once morest the disease. Modern medicine is completely enamored of its technological achievements and has completely immersed itself in the scientific understanding of disease. At the root of this problem is the nineteenth-century conception of the objective of medicine that reduces illness to mere illness. “The essence of medical practice should not be seen as the hunting and eradication of disease.”
As a doctor in the last stage of my life and professional journey, I am concerned that disdain towards filler materials. It seems to me that it is a serious form of ignorance, perhaps the worst: ignorance of one’s own ignorance.
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