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To boldly go where thinking hasn’t thought before……

June 17, 2007 by bobleckridge

Interesting article on ScienceDaily today about a physicist postulating the existence of non-particles. It’s one of those mind-bending thoughts that physicists are so good at – maybe not everything is made of particles? Maybe there’s something else? “Non-particles”?

The line that really caught my attention was this –

a theorist who restricts their imagination to merely the likely possibilities probably isn’t trying hard enough.

I totally agree. This is true in life as well as physics. If you only think about the kinds of things you’ve already thought about you’re either stuck in a loop or you’re restricting your view.

The area of clinical practice in which I work is Homeopathic Medicine – as a doctor in the National Health Service, in Scotland’s only NHS Homeopathic Hospital. Some people ridicule homeopathy because they say there is “no plausible mechanism” to explain how it can work. But two thirds of the patients we see at the Homeopathic Hospital have already failed to have their pain, wheeze, depression, whatever, relieved by the best “Evidence based” treatments, but get relief after treatment with homeopathic medicines. It might be hard to accept that a treatment we can’t explain can have a useful place within the Health Service but the daily reality is that it does. So, I say to other doctors or “scientists” who dismiss this form of treatment, learn from the physicists…..

Try harder, imagine the unlikely as well as the likely.

Posted in from the reading room, health, philosophy | Leave a Comment »

Don’t you love statistics?

June 17, 2007 by bobleckridge

A study published in The Archives of Internal Medicine looked at how doctors greet their patients. In particular they studied how often doctors used the patient’s name and how often they greeted the patient with a handshake. They claimed to show that most patients wanted to be greeted by name and with a handshake and that many times doctors failed to use the patient’s name. However, the statistics on the handshaking are fascinating –

Seventy-eight percent of patients surveyed wanted a doctor to shake their hands, while 18 percent did not. In the taped sessions, doctors and patients shook hands 83 percent of the time.

Read that carefully. 78% of patients said they wanted the doctor to shake their hands. 83% of time the doctor shook the patients hand. What does this mean? That doctors are shaking patients’ hands too readily? That more patients get their hands shaken than wish to do so? Funnily enough, there’s no comment about this strange anomaly.

Posted in from the consulting room, health | Leave a Comment »

Rain on the mountain

June 14, 2007 by bobleckridge

rain on the mountain, originally uploaded by bobsee.

Here comes the rain! In the distance, over Ben Ledi, I can see the rainclouds, frayed at the edges, dropping the rain onto the earth below.
I love seeing the rain start to fall in the distance like this. It’s as if the clouds are showing they can have rays too, just like the sun.

Posted in from the dark room, photography | Leave a Comment »

What would you like to win?

June 14, 2007 by bobleckridge

Here’s a quote from The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad

Supposing one were a conqueror – what would one win? The world? A little peace of mind? A name? Immortality? Oneself? Power? Women? There were times in Jonas Wergeland’s life when he felt there was only one thing worth striving for: health. To be fit and well.

What do you think? Do you agree with Jonas? What do YOU think is worth striving for?

Posted in books, from the reading room, health, life, philosophy | 3 Comments »

The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad

June 13, 2007 by bobleckridge

ISBN 1-905147-16-3. The Conqueror is the second in a trilogy by Norwegian author Jan Kjaerstad. The first volume, The Seducer, certainly seduced me. I read it when the English translation was published in 2003. That first volume hooked me before I even opened the book. On the back cover the blurb begins

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? Or, to put it another way: do they fit together at all?

Well, this is an idea which really intrigues me. I often think we have so many roles, so many aspects, so many threads running in our lives that it’s quite a challenge to see how it all fits together. Every time I sit with a new patient I’m doing the same thing – collecting the pieces of their lives, the fragments of their stories and trying to piece it all together, to make sense of it. The novel tells the story of one Jonas Wergeland, a famous Norwegian TV producer who arrives home to find his wife dead on the lounge floor. Shot. He is arrested and charged with her murder. The whole of the 600 pages of that first volume is made up of dozens of stories that try to explain how Jonas ended up at this juncture. By the end of the book we don’t know if he has been found guilty. The quality of the writing and the way he built up an understanding of Jonas by the telling of multiple stories of his life completely enthralled me. It’s taken four years to get volume two, The Conqueror, translated into English.

In The Conqueror we are made aware that Jonas has indeed been found guilty and Jan Kjaerstad uses the same technique to try to explain how a great TV producer, revered by a whole nation, could end up killing his wife. Here are a couple of lines from The Conqueror that will explain why this book so captures me as a reader

Maybe our existence is best understood as a story.

I don’t know any other way to understand either my existence or that of another. We construct ourselves and we communicate our private subjective unique experience of living through telling stories.

 For so it is: even though life is lived forward, it is always understood backward. You turn around and behold – in awe or fear – a pattern that you are not aware of having made.

Isn’t that so true? This man writes beautifully. I find his novels totally addictive. And how long will it be until the third and last part of this trilogy comes out in English? I suspect it’ll be around 2011! Well, you know what? I’ll content myself with a re-read or two of The Seducer AND The Conqueror while I wait!

There are many lines in The Conqueror that I’ve noted down and want to say something about. I’ll take them individually in separate posts (first of all over the next few days, then, probably, as I re-read these books, over the next few months). If you love stories, layers and layers of stories that develop an understanding of a person’s life, and you love good writing, I’d recommend you buy these novels and treat yourself.

This blog is titled “Heroes Not Zombies” because I have this belief that most of us sleepwalk through most of our lives, on automatic pilot, and that life can be better for any of us if we wake up, become more aware, more reflective and more creative. In short, the best kind of life is the one where we are the heroes of our own unique stories. Here’s Jan Kjaerstad again

Because most heroic tales can awaken forces which until then have lain fettered inside a person.

The BIG work of the main character of these novels, Jonas the TV producer, is his documentary series on Great Norwegians. As each episode is described, another Norwegian hero’s life and significance is manifested to the whole, hooked nation. Norwegians are described in the novels as a nation of spectators and the spectacle of this series on national heroes is what makes Jonas’ reputation. Every episode captured my imagination so much that I swung between wishing the series had been real so I could actually buy the DVD and watch it, and feeling I had seen and heard every detail in the author’s wonderful descriptions anyway.

This is a book which will make you think. It’ll make you think about stories and how we use them to understand ourselves and others. It’ll make you think this

But no occurrence, no day in a person’s life is so trivial that it might not be crucial. Important things happen all the time………all days are in a way, holy days.

Posted in books, from the reading room, narrative | 5 Comments »

Cloudspotting

June 11, 2007 by bobleckridge

anvil cloud, originally uploaded by bobsee.

I just looked out of my window and couldn’t resist snapping this.
What a wonderful anvil shape. You know there is a whole organisation and a book dedicated to noticing clouds. You can see why!
Sometimes the best place for my head is in the clouds…..

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography | 2 Comments »

Walking is good for you (but how can you be convinced?)

June 3, 2007 by bobleckridge

A BMJ-published study from the Scottish Physical Activity Research Collaboration has focussed not on the fact that walking 30 minutes every day will significantly reduce your chances of suffering from several diseases (potentially halving heart disease risk for example) but on how to motivate people to act on this advice.

What would it take for YOU to change your habits and walk for 30 minutes every day?  The answer is interesting –

Our findings are consistent with (but certainly not proof of) an assumption that different types of people may respond to different approaches, tailored to their psychological characteristics or life circumstances. In other words, one size may not fit all and various approaches should be offered: some people may respond best to personal advice from their doctor, others may prefer the private feedback from a device such as a pedometer, others (perhaps those in a more advantaged socioeconomic position) may benefit from interventions delivered through the internet, others may benefit from the social support of a walking group, and others may increase their walking in response to prompts about reducing their car use on environmental grounds.

In other words, what works for one person doesn’t work for another and if we want to help people we need to both actually communicate with them to find out a bit more about them, and then tailor our advice to best suit the individual.

This kind of study gives me hope. For too long Medicine has focussed on disease and then tried to treat every patient with the same disease in the same way, but we are beginning to see the glimmers of the New Medicine which focusses on the individual and tailors the treatments according to the individual’s uniqueness.

This is a move from Zombie Medicine (unthinking, treat everyone the same) to Hero Medicine (thinking, holistic and individualised)

Posted in from the reading room, health | 3 Comments »

“Novel” treatments?

June 3, 2007 by bobleckridge

A three year study of treatment for “acute promyelocytic leukemia” adding arsenic into the mix has shown that doing this can increase the survival rates significantly.
What really struck me in this story though was this comment by the Reuters journalist –

Arsenic has been used as a traditional therapy in China for more than 2,000 years, but its use in the United States is still rather novel.

Why is that? What is it about the tendency to certainty in Western thinking? I suppose we have a long history of believing we are right and that our ways are best. We live in a chaotic world where chance events change people’s lives forever every single day. When it comes down to the individual all the so-called certainty of our statistics-focussed view of the world is of little use. When I meet a patient with disease X, I have no way of telling whether or not they will CERTAINLY respond to the same treatment as other patients with the same disease, nor of knowing EXACTLY what will lie ahead for them. But as human beings we can’t cope with total chaos, and complete uncertainty. We need to have some idea of what’s happening in our lives and some idea of how things MAY turn out with particular choices we make. That’s just how we are. We need to juggle our knowledge of uncertainty and unpredictability of the particular with our knowledge of probability gained from the general. The problems arise once we turn those probabilities into certainties.
There was an interesting line of dialogue in CSI the other night – one character, a forensic scientist, said “I am confused”, and her boss replied “Good. That’s the best place for a scientist to be”. He was SO right. Well, not that scientists should always be confused but a scientist who stops doubting, stops looking and stops thinking.
Wouldn’t it be a good thing for us to look outside of our little boxes and see what phenomena are actually already well-observed (just by other people in other places – people who think differently from “us”)

I’m a homeopathic doctor and homeopathic arsenic was the very first remedy I had success with. Whether or not you believe in homeopathy, one thing a study of the subject brings is a greatly increased knowledge of substances used medicinally in different cultures over the centuries. It’s well known to homeopathic doctors that arsenic has traditionally been used to increase stamina and staying power (in fact, it was used to do just that in racing horses until it was made illegal!)  It’s also well known to us that arsenic is a commonly indicated homeopathic palliative treatment in cancer.

I wish we could replace the arrogant know-it-all and I-know-best in scientists and doctors with an attitude of lifelong curiosity and wonder.

What do you think? How would you change the education of scientists and doctors to increase open-mindedness, creative thinking and foster a spirit of humble, endless curiosity?

Posted in education, from the reading room, health, science | 2 Comments »

3 ways to think

May 27, 2007 by bobleckridge

According to the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, wrote that there are three ways to think. I know, you’re already wondering how you can think three ways with one brain! Well, you probably use the three ways all the time. In fact, Deleuze claimed it was important to know about the three ways so you could both see things more clearly and communicate more effectively. You’ve probably come across arguments where one person is saying “But what are the facts? Just give me the facts!” while another says “But what is your heart telling you here?” and a third wants to know “But what does this all mean?”. These three questions arise from three different ways of thinking and whilst they are all trying to get at THE TRUTH, they are all actually dealing with entirely different aspects of reality.

So here they are –

  1. Science – thinking about function. A scientific way of thinking takes a focus on how something works. Understanding how something works is very useful. It gives us the chance to try and make it work better, or at least to improve our experience by figuring out how the world works.
  2. Philosophy – thinking about concepts. Science uses concepts to design experiments and observational studies which will throw light on how the world works. Without the concepts though we wouldn’t know where to start. Many scientists unfortunately confuse concepts with facts, thinking that both are THE TRUTH which leads to closed minds and arrogance. This causes a kind of blindness – “my view is THE correct view, yours is WRONG”. We have to be able to think conceptually if we want to better understand our world.
  3. Art – thinking about percepts and affects. What do we perceive? And what feelings are associated with our perceptions? This is not about the how of perception or the how of feelings, it is about using conscious engagement with our perceptions and feelings to understand an aspect of reality which science and philosophy cannot achieve.

I really like this idea. When I meet a patient it’s important that I am aware of my perceptions and of the feelings that arise in me during a consultation. It’s important that I have a developing conception of illness and of health and it’s important for me to understand what isn’t functioning well in this person’s body-mind.

I also like this idea when it comes to teaching. We learn better when our learning experience engages our three different ways of thinking. We need education which shows us how things work, which teaches us to to conceptualise and which engages our feelings. Remember “Gradgrind” in Dickens’ Hard Times? His view of education was that children were empty vessels waiting to be filled with facts. Ring a bell? Oh, for more enlightened educators!

Posted in education, from the living room, life, perception, philosophy | 13 Comments »

Quasicrystals

May 24, 2007 by bobleckridge

You should never believe a scientist who claims to be certain about what is possible and what is not possible. For most of the 20th Century physicists believed that crystals could only have certain structures (based on their “rotational symmetry”). In fact, until 1982 they claimed that is would be impossible for a crystal to have a structure based on a five-fold pattern (like a pentagon). Then in 1982 somebody discovered the “impossible” – a crystal which had exactly that structure. As is often the case in science, once one had been discovered several others then turned up (you only see what you can see!). These structures were given a new name “quasicrystals”. Now, mathematicians are beginning to understand these strange materials –

“Mathematically speaking, quasicrystals fall into a middle ground between order and disorder,” Damanik said. “Over the past decade, it’s become increasingly clear that the mathematical tools that people have used for decades to predict the electronic properties of materials will not work in this middle ground.”

This is such an interesting comment – the “middle ground between order and disorder”. Finding patterns in apparent chaos is always somehow exciting. But for me, this story has another interesting element. There’s a kind of arrogance in many scientists which is the arrogance of certainty. Any scientists who stands up and declares that either all that can be known about a subject is already known, or that anything which does not fit our current understanding is just impossible, will, time and again, be proven wrong!

Posted in from the reading room, science | Leave a Comment »

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