The Death of Intellectual Curiosity in Patient-Facing Medicine
Many advancements in modern medicine have worked to undermine the diagnostic process
I feel it’s warranted that I preface this article with a disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, which has for many years been a barrier to my voicing this critique of medical practice as I have experienced it. This is written from the perspective of a patient.
In society, you see that as things reach a certain stage of development, they undergo a degree of calcification. The free flow of ideas in any field tends to harden into absolutes and processes.
If things are to progress from there, some brilliant iconoclast must come along, challenge established beliefs, and turn the whole thing on its head. This process is, for example, very dramatic in physics, where an “Einstein” can come along and essentially redesign reality as we know it.
Still, a certain stagnation sets in with the sciences, and intellectual apathy accompanies it. It would seem medicine, at least where it is practiced day-to-day, far from the frontiers of pioneering research, has fallen into this sorry state.
There are four obvious factors contributing to this state of affairs:
