<< people BELIEVE they experience better performance. I think doctors calls it Placebo effect >>
I think you may be right.
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Father and I used to discuss this late into the night. He would stress the importance of people's beliefs - belief in themselves, belief in their Physician, belief in the things that they think they know to be true - in heart and in soul and in a kind of human racial biology/memory/psychology that goes beyond the individual - things outside of each of us - all things that I had no means to measure - and how the skilled Physician makes use of his knowledge of these matters to mold them for the benefit of the patient, and how powerful an effect this all can be for good. Or for ill.
I, young skeptic, maintained the mechanistic point of view - the body is a machine, I said, and will respond to mechanistic diagnostic procedures and treatments in a statistically predictable manner. Each patient is an individual. Medicine is a Science, not and Art. Emotions only get in the way.
Medicine is not the place, I said, for poets.
Father would quietly shake his head. Still - I think, somehow, that he was fond of me.
I did listen to him. He was trying to pass thirty - no, forty - years of what he had seen - with his own eyes - on to the next in line - into his son's eyes, as well. As his father had done for him.
I realize now what he was trying to tell me. The need for people to believe in things that are beyond themselves. True or no by methods that one can measure.
And, of course, throughout life, to relish laughter.
Best regards,
Epaminondas
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The Oath
I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:
To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art - if they desire to learn it - without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.
I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asks for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give pessary for abortion. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.
Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations, male or female, slave or free.
What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.
If I fulfil this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored among men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite be my lot.
Hippocrates
circa 400 BC
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[ 02-10-2003, 11:44 PM: Message edited by: Epaminondas ]
