Heroes Not Zombies

People aren’t simple. Any attempt to reduce a person to a single category dehumanises them. You can’t see, can’t hear, can’t understand someone if you put them into one or even several boxes.

To reduce a human being to a statistic or a particular characteristic does exactly that. It reduces them.

I had a habit of beginning a consultation with a new patient by saying “tell me your story”. They would then tell me a unique narrative, constructed from an endless variety of threads.

I stumbled across a Twitter spat the other day about Covid deaths. The U.K. government publishes the number of people reported each day to have died with a positive Covid test in the last 28 days. The argument was along the lines “but did these people actually die from Covid or something else?” And was this over-reporting or under-reporting.

One argument was the measure was absurd because someone might have died from walking in front of a bus but have had Covid recently. Others said such trauma cases were excluded. I thought “what a strange argument. On the one hand, death from a road accident is surely not a death from Covid, but on the other hand covid is known to seriously impair cognitive function so maybe if they hadn’t had Covid they wouldn’t have walked in front of a bus”.

One thing we know about Covid is it’s more likely to kill you if you have “co-morbidities”, if you’re elderly, frail and/or poor. All of which highlights the fact that neither life nor death are simple. Trying to categorise or label them is fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings.

So my preference is to avoid reductionism as much as possible. All deaths are multifactorial. All lives are multifaceted. Our individual stories are rich tapestries of multiple, probably countless, threads, some of which can be known, many of which never will be.