Health & Care results in mountains of data: c/o Burke & Cao 2024

"When medical schools train medical students, they teach them to treat patients as collections of various data points. They are laboratory tests and results, each measured to a standard number of significant figures. Notes students write hack down the richness of patients' identities and experiences: unemployment increases suicide risk while having a religion diminishes it. Each positive result that an interview or physical exam reveals adds another data point to the growing mountain, while a negative result erases a branch of possibilities in a treatment algorithm. It is a familiar process for every doctor, almost second nature, and yet it creates a chasm between patients and providers. Learning about a patient and their life becomes a process of deleting what's seen as irrelevant, and a patient's humanity gets lost in the chaos of data. ..."

"How would Nan Shepherd treat a mountain without her vision being mangled by medical training? She would probe it, palpate its surface, and listen to it rather than trying to comprehend it by reading reams of surveyor data. She would build a portrait of it in her mind beyond solely that which was intended to slot into the criteria of the IC-10. Perhaps she'd write a sensuous physical exam: ..."  

individual

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

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group

"CONSTITUTIONAL: a granite mountain range, millions of years old, overall stable and solid, teeming with living, breathing organisms CARDIOVASCULAR: its rivers are patent, low and high turbulence at turns, its veins crisscross the surface RESPIRATORY: the wind carves through it in mighty exhales MUSCULOSKELETAL: its stone carries a range of lives, and the wind, the snow, the sun slowly bend the range of its form GI/GU: it slowly digests, grows, evacuates, and seethes as its wastes give rise to new life NEUROLOGICAL: the mountain is awake but dreaming with you"

The Living Mountain

Burke, R., Cao, E. To Care for a Mountain - What medical practitioners can learn from Nan Shepherd. Oxford Review of Books, Summer 2024, Volume 8, Issue 2. p.14. In association with Stanford. Ack. length of quotations in relation to length of author's article.

Nan Shepherd 1893 - 1981:  Scottish Poetry Library 2024.
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/nan-shepherd/

Cover image: Allen and Unwin