Doctors are not scientists but we still need science
http://www.100md.com
《英国医生杂志》
EDITOR—It takes guts for a medical editor to disabuse his readers of their most cherished assumption that doctors are scientists, but it is true that they are not.1
We doctors like people to think we know what we're talking about, and may be so convincing that we convince ourselves too. Because other people's lives depend on it, we have a big emotional need to be right and are uncomfortable with the thought that none of us really knows enough to be a good doctor. Even if we know everything that is known, we still don't know that which is yet unknown.
Scientists, on the other hand, are very comfortable with the unknown; it is their bread and butter. When scientists disagree there is no more at stake than the scientists' amour propre, whereas medical disputes get rancorous because forever in the background is the thought that the other chap is damaging patients.
Science does not in itself make its practitioners haughty (the contrary, if done honestly), whereas medicine does. The main reason for that, I think, is because doctors get used to seeing other people undressed while they themselves are clothed. Once you have seen dukes and archbishops in their underpants they're never quite the same again.
Taken together it becomes ever so easy for us doctors to start believing that we know everything, and that makes us unreasonably unreceptive to new ideas. That is the reason why medical journals must continue force-feeding original scientific studies to their unwilling readers.
David L J Freed, allergist (private)
14 Marston Road, Salford M7 4ER dljfreed@doctors.org.uk
Competing interests: None declared.
References
Smith R. Editor's choice. Doctors are not scientists. BMJ 2004;328: 0-h. (19 June.)
We doctors like people to think we know what we're talking about, and may be so convincing that we convince ourselves too. Because other people's lives depend on it, we have a big emotional need to be right and are uncomfortable with the thought that none of us really knows enough to be a good doctor. Even if we know everything that is known, we still don't know that which is yet unknown.
Scientists, on the other hand, are very comfortable with the unknown; it is their bread and butter. When scientists disagree there is no more at stake than the scientists' amour propre, whereas medical disputes get rancorous because forever in the background is the thought that the other chap is damaging patients.
Science does not in itself make its practitioners haughty (the contrary, if done honestly), whereas medicine does. The main reason for that, I think, is because doctors get used to seeing other people undressed while they themselves are clothed. Once you have seen dukes and archbishops in their underpants they're never quite the same again.
Taken together it becomes ever so easy for us doctors to start believing that we know everything, and that makes us unreasonably unreceptive to new ideas. That is the reason why medical journals must continue force-feeding original scientific studies to their unwilling readers.
David L J Freed, allergist (private)
14 Marston Road, Salford M7 4ER dljfreed@doctors.org.uk
Competing interests: None declared.
References
Smith R. Editor's choice. Doctors are not scientists. BMJ 2004;328: 0-h. (19 June.)