Heroes Not Zombies

“one swallow doesn’t make a summer”

Yeah, I know, but, first of all I was trying to get a photo of about a dozen hyper swallows zipping and zooming this way and that above my head, but, hey, I only got one! And only just!

The fact I only got one (in the middle of a summer’s day, by the way) reminded me of that old adage about how spotting one swallow doesn’t mean that summer has arrived. Which brings me to the subject of anecdotes….

Since the rise of “Evidence Based Medicine” I’ve heard it said many times that anecdotes are not evidence, and that a whole bunch of anecdotes isn’t evidence either. Only rigorous, controlled trials, statistically analysed provide evidence. But my problem is that I spent my working life meeting, listening to, conversing with, and treating, one patient at a time. Each patient came and told me a unique story. Not a single patient told me an identical story to one I’d heard before. I tailored my treatments for each patient according to their unique story and the way things progressed from there was unique, and also unknowable.

I had no way of knowing whether or not an “evidence based” treatment would deliver the promised results in this particular patient. On the grounds of probabilities and experience, of course, I could go forward in good faith and with some confidence, but I learned that I always had to be prepared to be surprised when the patient returned. It seemed that no two patients experienced exactly identical effects of the same treatments. Didn’t matter whether I’d prescribed painkillers, antidepressants, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics (seeing a pattern here?) or whatever, the future course of an individual life was, and always will be, unique.

Unique and emergent.

Emergent – that means the future unfolds as it happens in ways which could not be wholly predicted from the knowledge of the past and the present. All living organisms display emergent properties. It’s a characteristic of all “complex adaptive systems”. 

So, whilst I could never generalise from an individual “anecdotal” experience to apply it to every other patient, the truth is, generalisations can’t be applied to every single patient either.

The tendency to dismiss individual stories as irrelevant to medical practice has always struck me as illogical. Irrational even. It might make sense in a research environment, but the individual story remains crucially important in the clinical one.

In deciding on a particular course of treatment with a patient I’d want to take into consideration what I’d learned was good practice, and what the research evidence had shown about the various different options, but, on the day, in the room, with this unique individual sitting with me, and, maybe even more importantly, when they’d return to report what had happened, THE most important thing was them – their story, their experience, their life.

I didn’t know any other way to practice – it was one patient at a time. Ultimately, the patient was always more important than any data – despite the fact a junior doctor told me, not that many years ago, that she’d been taught “Never listen to patients. They lie all the time. The only thing you can believe is the data”

Nope. That’s no way to practice Medicine!

Oh, before I finish, thinking of “one swallow at a time” reminds me of one of my most favourite books about creative writing – Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird”. Recommended.