Heroes Not Zombies

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with numbers. They fascinate me but I distrust them. I’m really a sceptic when it comes to statistics and it often seems to be the case that people choose the figures to bolster their opinions or actions.

Here’s a couple of incidents related to numbers which stuck with me. One day I was invited to give a talk to a group of dentists. One of them told me the story of the local facial pain clinic. It had been set up and run by a particular chief surgeon who had fairly recently retired. The surgeon who had been appointed to replace him had a curious experience the first time he conducted the clinic. He’d introduce himself to each patient, and ask them how they were. If this wasn’t their visit to the clinic they’d reply with a number. “7” or “4” or whatever. He was a bit puzzled. He then discovered the previous surgeon was quite intimidating in his manner. He’d invented a number based pain scale to measure the amount of pain patients were experiencing and he had trained them to report their figures instead of describing how they were. Apparently he’d been known to cut talkative patients off and say “The next thing I want to come out of your mouth is a number!”

The other experience was a conversation with a junior doctor in training where I was explaining the importance of the patient’s story. The doctor said they’d been told in training “You can’t believe patients. They lie all the time. The only thing you can trust is data. Read the test results!”

Well, those attitudes were the antithesis of my principles and showed way too much belief in numbers at the cost of blinding the doctors to the human beings they encountered.

Numbers can be helpful, but only when used in context and when that context is a human life they are no substitute for the individual unique story which each of us has to tell.