![]() ![]() We have taken it to be both more perfect than it is and less extraordinary than it can be. And this gap complicates everything we do.Īs pervasive as medicine has become in modern life, it remains mostly hidden and often misunderstood. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. ![]() It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he’s still trying to learn. ![]() A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut. You have a cough that won’t go away- and then? It’s not science you call upon but a doctor. But we rarely see how it all actually works. And without question, these are at the center of virtually everything medicine achieves. Usually, when we think about medicine and its remarkable abilities, what comes to mind is the science and all it has given us to fight sickness and misery: the tests, the machines, the drugs, the procedures. ![]() The thing that still startles me is how fundamentally human an endeavor it is. ![]()
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