The Oral Tradition

Keeping The Great Oral Tradition of Medicine Alive

When I tell these tales I feel like an ancient bard. Medical students and junior doctors sit around me spellbound. They have never such tales. They are becoming the stuff of myth and legend lost in the mists of time. Their protagonists are soon to be heroes of another age, their deeds to be unrepeatable, even  infeasible in the modern mindset where science is everything.

My audience has never heard of this worldview where great human clinicians outclass and outperform the machines with human powers of diagnosis, thought and treatment. All they know is the worldview of the academics of medicine and what is scientifically acceptable to write in a textbook. The real life truth of the masters of the clinical arts is unacceptable, even offensive to those who believe that the science and technology of medicine is everything. It is against the materialist, objectivist axiom that nothing outside of science should be believed.

The rational materialist hypothesis is that one day science might know everything but it does not know everything yet. To have faith in that speculation is no more than crystal ball gazing into the future. It is wishful thinking. To exclude what is presently beyond scientific explanation is simply wrong.

When I was in medical school, Epi-Genes did not exist.

It is irrational to believe current scientific knowledge defines the extent of reality but the is what is being conditioned into the irrational, emotional subconscious mind through experience in modern medical school education and teaching hospital experience. The subconscious mind enforces those beliefs through the physiology of stress and relaxation. When it hears or sees anything that is consistent with its experience-programmed beliefs, body and mind are sedated. Anything is accepted without thought or analysis as if the person has eaten too much Xmas lunch and wants a little snooze. Anything that contradicts the subconscious belief causes the release of adrenaline affecting both body and mind. The experience phyisological fight or flight. Mentally, they are agitated, over-criticising and over-analysing until the inconsistency is defeated. There can be uncomfortable physical symptoms. Physical and mental peace can only be found once the inconsistency has been resolved out of existence by fight or flight.

Emotionally, the subconscious mind is offended whenever its experience-programmed beliefs are contradicted.

All that is seen and heard of is the science and technology of medicine. Medical students and junior doctors only experience the wonders of science and technology. They are shown mountainous knowledge and are blinded to what lies beyond it.

They do not know of the wonders of the clinical arts or those that truly mastered them. They have never experienced them. They barely know what is humanly possible for a human clinician. Any exposure that they have had has been attributed to impossible, individual genius. It is easily forgotten. It is no long the norm. It is no longer the expectation or the hope of every practitioner to reach these heights.

That is when experience really counts for something in medicine. Those that have never experienced clinical genius have a hollow experience. They repeat that experience, teaching  it to others by example.

So one of the fundamental aims of The Clinical Arts blog is to represent the voice of the practicing clinicians, the masters of the clinical arts in a world where only the acaedmics and scientists of medicine have freedom of speech. It is to keep the oral tradition of medicine alive so that others may learn from it. They may learn from the experience of others to know what is possible.

An Open Inviation

Clinicians need to hear of other clinician's human genius. If all goes well, one day this will turn into a forum but until then, I would invite you to send your cases as replies and comments to this post so that they may be seen. The most significant examples, especially those where the subtleties of human perception can be put into words, will be reposted and achived for easy access and to start threads of particular interest.

This invitation extends to clinical theories from clinicians beyond the science and into the human unknown. They are the sort of theories that know-it-all materialist scientists fail to acknowledge such as the importance of the mind in health.

Thank you in advance for keeping the great oral tradition of medicine alive.