Friday, November 27, 2015

Medical Education

It requires far more medical knowledge to practice quality medicine on the front lines of clinical medicine than ever it does in the specialties. The specialist's narrow focus limits competence in other specialties and the spaces in between. The education is all backwards, the primary care physicians need a more highly advanced more extended education. A six or seven year residency with a PhD in clinical medicine would serve nicely featuring a clinically relevant discipline such as genetics or epidemiology etc.

An abundance of exceedingly well trained family/personal physicians could solve most of today's problems, but large numbers of best qualified candidates could only be attracted if given a prestigious academic challenge with the rewards to match. The midevil medical school in Sarlrno, Italy 900 AD graduated medical students with a PhD, -- a just reward -- it could work today in leading medical schools and thereby attract the numbers and quality of primary care physicians needed to set the balance strait.

Physician extenders should receive much of the training family physicians get today, but never practice independently! The algorithms provided by specialty groups, burocratic planers, drug companies and best evidence can never accommodate the complexity and multiple problems inherent in the human condition: nutrition, environment, drugs, poverty and abuse. It will require a physician and a deep and shared relationship to grasp those problems and thus elevate the sad level of health that limits much of our population, our work force, our idle youth and many of our veterans. This unbalance, this distortion in our profession is worth fixing.

Monday, November 16, 2015

Hippocrates

Medicine today suffers almost as much from political intervention as ever it did from priests, shamans and religious dogma of the past. Reform, liberalism, and political correctness marginalize Hippocrates, the hippocratic method, and with him the sacred, ethical, humanitarian and scientific charactor of the profession.

Ideals of reform, political control, regulation, commercialization, political correctness and well intended lay ideals of social progress erode the authority, self regulation and ethics of the profession. Imagine lawyers without the standards and restraints of "The Bar."

Imagine doctors without the standards and restraint of peer review, held only to the gray areas of legality with profit, cynically, the only motive. The evolution of greed seems more and more evident at many levels. I fear that medical school reform proposes to adjust curriculum in order to accommodate this sad reality.

Take the now universal after hours sign off to 911. When did local medical societies decide that a doctor no longer needed to provide after hours availability for response to after hours emergencies or complications? I think in fact it was hospitals, not the medical society that made that change. Was there economic motive? You bet. Hospitals are now a multi billion dollar monopoly with legal sanction. For myself, I thank God for the VA and trust only the mainstream medical school.

On a historical level, medicine has suffered before and recovered; it will do so again. For the medical student, read Hippocrates, travel to some of the great medical schools abroad, be a humanitarian, a poet, a musician and always a scientist. Own a microscope. Do good works.

Quantum Biology

Richard P. Feynman in his published lectures, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter QED, wrote,
"The theory of quantum mechanics ... explained all kinds of details, such as why an oxygen atom combines with two hydreegen atoms to make water and so on. Quantum mechanics thus supplied the theory behind chemistry. So, fundementally theoretical chemistry is really physics."

The parallel in molecular biology is quite obvious. We deal with DNA at the molecular level. The next great step will be a theoretical explaination of molecular biology at the electron, photon and particle level, the level of quantum intanglement. Thus the theoretical understanding of molecular biology will also really be physics.

2,450 years ago Greek medicine was called physics. Aristotle had contemplated the existence of particles. The enquiry into how things worked, especially physiology was called physics and the stem of our word physician is indeed physics. With quantum biology we have come full circle.