More than 400 years ago, the great English
thinker, philosopher, scientist, jurist and essayist
- Sir Francis Bacon had said :
“It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and
to see ships tost upon the ea; a pleasure to stand
in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and
the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is
comparable to standing upon the vantage ground
of truth and to see the errors, and wanderings,
and mists, and tempests, in the vale below”.
These magical words emerge as our guiding
light. We must closely observe our errors and
wanderings that traverse the vale we all inhabit,
the magnificent valley of Medicine.
The theme is simply being to identify the
fault lines. This is to introspect and look at the
ways to better them. Medicine of recent, has
increasingly become a slave of metrics – of
machines, statistical numbers and artifacts which
nowadays appear to rule the hearts of physicians
and surgeons. The evidence based medicine
may look robust has some disadvantages also.
We are too much dependent on evidence based
medicine. A physician and surgeon must not
forget a simple truth that a physician / a surgeon
is treatment human beings, with a pulsating
biological system set with its own genetic code,
an ecosystem that is individual specific. If we still
yield ground and practice old fashioned methods
of touching, looking and listening, almost the
once prized, magical skills of the doctor, we
can swifty diagnose a peculiar walk, sluggish
thyroid or murmuring heart valves, using just
keen eyes, practiced hands and the stethoscope.
This is called as a “Clinical Intuition”.