The Physician’s Purpose
What makes physicians necessary? Why are they cornerstones of society?
This may seem like a stupid question. Most of us have been to doctors, healers, whatever, with one main purpose – we want to feel better! We want to not be sick!
But is that what physicians do? Heal? Cure? Make us well?
This is not an anti-conventional care post in the slightest – I mean “physician” in a very broad sense, more like “health care provider of any kind”.
I don’t know about you, but I often look around at the world of healthcare where there are supplement companies making bucketloads with NDs and/or MDs working as researchers or sitting on their boards, homeopathic companies that sell lotions and combination products that have never been tested, MDs on research committees at pharmaceutical companies, and I don’t see many people in the business of getting people better. I mean, I know people have to make a living, and private practice is exceedingly difficult, even if you are good at your job (It may even be more difficult if you are good at your job because people don’t come back!), but why are so many people seemingly not practicing (ie making people better) but selling stuff that I am not convinced make anyone feel better, just makes pockets lighter. Usually these products are touted as “evidence based” – meaning it’s been shown to make more than 30% of people better (30% of people get better on placebo, so better than placebo means a whopping 30% or better improvement), who may or may not be like you, and at a dose that may or may not be on the bottle. Basically, all these people, who are trained in medicine, seem to be doing anything but medicine.
Somewhere along the way, everyone (and I mean everyone, not just practitioners and not just patients) got distracted and seemed to equate medical with “smart” “intelligent” and “powerful”, so doctors end up on company boards and research committees and endorsing fancy toothpaste. Not only do we think the products will make us better because a doctor endorsed it, but also because we have equated medical education with “intelligence” and the subtext is “look, this is the product smart, educated people use to get better”. We are similarly impressed when someone diagnoses something, even if they say there’s no cure for that diagnosis and doesn’t know what causes it (SIDS anyone?). We are not impressed with their results (obviously, in the case of SIDS), but with their acumen.
Most of us believe that a “Physician’s highest calling…is to make sick people healthy” (aphorism 1 of the Organon). In other words, a physician’s mission is not to theorize or explain why we become ill, but to act and make people better (a paraphrase of the footnote to aphorism 1 of the Organon).
The truth, I believe, is that the best practitioner is one that heals the most people. The problem is that we struggle to know who that is. Not to mention, that’s not going to be the same person, nor even the same form of medicine, for every person. In other words, the best practitioner or best medicine for me may not be the best practitioner or medicine for you and vice versa.
But don’t forget that really, the point is that the patients should be getting better. So the next time you are getting treatment from someone, ignore the diplomas on their wall and their fancy language, just pay attention to their results.