Under the Knife

I just finished a book for my Medical Sociology class: Complications: A Surgeon's Note on an Imperfect Science, written by the surgeon, Atul Gawande. It is a brutally honest account displaying an inside-view of how the medical field actually is.

Just to give you a taste:

"Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business. The stakes are high, the liberties taken tremendous. We drug people, put needles and tubes into them, manipulate their chemistry, biology, and physics, lay them unconscious and open their bodies up to the world. We do so out of an abiding confidence in our know-how as a profession. What you find when you get in close, however -- close enough to see the furrowed brows, the doubts and missteps, the failures as well as the successes -- is how messy, uncertain, and also surprising medicine turns out to be."
...
"You have a cough that won't go away -- and then? It's not science you call upon but a doctor. A doctor with good days and bad days. A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut. A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he's still trying to learn." (p. 4 - Introduction)

These were some issues discussed in the text, in my class, and in my mind:

1) Doctors have to practice. We know this and support them, as long as they aren't practicing on us or someone we love.

2)We expect perfection and omniscience, but doctors are human and sometimes make mistakes. And when they do, we sue them. Granted, malpractice definitely exists, but often the mistakes are honest and/or something due to the situation being out of the control of the doctor/surgeon.

3) Many people go into medicine with the intent of helping people, but become desensitized through medical school and experience. Instead of someone to help, the patient becomes just another hernia case, or just another heart surgery. Some doctors become obsessed in making as much money as possible instead of doing what it takes for each person to receive the best possible care.

4)Does the patient or the doctor decide what's best and in which situations? The doctor may have a fuller knowledge on the subject, but sometimes the patient is right... and besides, it's the patient's body.

5)Health care is actually a business, dependent on sick people, and having "care" connected to the term makes it absurd to critique, because who would dare be anti-care or anti-love?

6)What is pain? How much of it is influenced by culture and society rather than neurology and chemistry?

Medicine seems so objective and scientific. I really enjoy looking at the subjective side of it, and thinking about questions like these. Perhaps they are unanswerable, but they reveal a lot about our society and culture, and what we value or deem unacceptable.