E very family has its pivotal medical moments. One of ours was in July 1995 when my son Walker was just 11 days old. He had difficulty taking his feeds, he couldn’t hold anything down, and we took him to the paediatrician. The paediatrician put her stethoscope on his chest, listened for a moment, and then looked at us and said: “There’s something wrong with his heart.” She told us to take him to hospital right away.
Millions of moments like this occur every day: a human being coming to another human being with the body or mind’s troubles and looking for assistance. That is the central act of medicine – that moment when one human being turns to another human being for help.
And it has always struck me how small and limited that moment is. We have 13 different organ systems and at the latest count we’ve identified more than 60,000 ways that they can go awry. The body is scarily intricate, unfathomable, hard to read. We are these hidden beings inside this fleshy sack of skin and we’ve spent thousands of years trying to understand what’s going on inside. To me, the story of medicine is the story of how we deal with the incompleteness of our knowledge and the fallibility of our skills.
(More on The Guardian)
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