2 + 2 = 5
The following may be offensive to some and I apologize in advance. It is merely fiction mixed with my opinions. I condemn the West Bengal indecent and violence against doctors or towards anyone any way shape or form.
A long time ago in a medical college, they taught that 2+2=5 to first-year students in the dissection hall. One student said that it’s 4, not 5. The professor immediately glared at him. The student suddenly felt his gut sinking, he knew he was right, but did not want to be insulted in front of 20 other people, who he thought he could be good friends with. The professor asked him where he is from, his father’s occupation then insults him, his family and everyone related to him. Everyone started laughing. The student was already an outcast. The professor said he has come to a medical college to learn, not to teach. He then asked the student to write 2+2=5 on a sheet of paper 100 times. The student does so. This student later writes a textbook. Many years later, when another professor teaches 2+2=5, everyone becomes restless. How many times will they teach this basic thing? It is known. It is a fact. It’s been written in countless textbooks. It is so obvious.
- Excerpt from “Unnecessarily Log Metaphors Vol 1” by Sidharth R
3 years into medical college, I’ve learnt the whole idea of medical education usually comes down to this: You cannot be wrong. You always need to know the right thing.
In fact, the fear of being wrong is so deeply ingrained in almost all medical students that they will not answer even if they know the correct answer, for the fear of being wrong. In class, there is a deafening silence. No one wants to talk. When the teacher usually asks questions and they can only hear their own voices back resonating on the speaker system.
In bedside postings, there is the practice of examining and questioning the patient and writing it down in an orderly manner, called case taking. No matter how diligently one performs, the professors and senior residents somehow end up ripping you apart, absolutely destroying your self-confidence by just pointing out how so many things that you said were wrong. It’s usually the little things. Why did you say that the patient smokes before talking about his sleep? Why did you elaborate on this symptom first? Why did you not talk about the other symptom? Sometimes there is a bit of reasoning to it, but other times it just feels like they like playing around with us to have fun after a long day at the hospital seeing cases.
They say too much education forms a hard shell around you. Once you keep studying too much of the same subject, you cannot unlearn, and be flexible enough to learn something new. When you have invested so much of your life learning and relearning something, rejecting all that you know to fit in new information that contradicts your existing knowledge becomes tough. It is almost like breaking the shell that you formed for so many years.
Today, people are flocking to alternative medicine like Ayurveda and Homeopathy. Every third patient that you talk to will tell you that they sought some form of alternative medicine before landing up in the hospital. In fact, the Indian government is going to recognize these so-called “sciences” the same way it does traditional western medicine. People are beating doctors left and right. They are angry. They are devastated. They think western medicine takes away too much money and gives not enough in return and want their money back. They want the life of their loved ones back. The treatment drove them to poverty and now the patient is dead. Their life is ruined.
The scientific method is when you have a testable hypothesis and you do an experiment to prove it. Medicine based on the scientific method is what we today call “Western”, “traditional” or more aggressively “allopathic” medicine. Everything else is “alternative” medicine. Even doctors secretly take consultation from Ayurveda and Homoeopathy consultants. They say it works, but their textbooks never mentioned anything about them. When the science about the healing power of believing, placebo and how much it can actually affect a person came out — it’s powerful enough to be a stronger analgesic than morphine, none of it was even touched upon by medical journals. It would break their beliefs and shatter their shell of knowledge. No doctor publicly agrees that any alternative system of medicine works. But it does. It could open a plethora of powerful tools to use on patients who suffer from chronic illnesses and for patients who cannot afford costly drugs. Textbooks mention that alternative systems don’t work. It’s obvious. 2+2=5.
Most research is not funded by pharmaceutical companies. That would be cooking up a conspiracy theory. However, it is a fact that they are well funded. It is also a fact that you need to spend a lot of money to get your paper published into a good journal. Half of the research done never gets published. And those that do, are the ones that are usually favourable to the use and marketing of a drug. When this kind of “research” keeps reducing the threshold for blood glucose cut off for diabetes and doubles the number of diabetic customers in the world in a single day, doctors should be wary. Medical students should be too. But they are more involved in their textbooks. Memorizing the new values. Fearing they would get screwed by the examiners tomorrow. They suddenly changed that 2+2=5.0004 and they learnt it. No one asked why. Now it’s obvious.
When an 80-year-old patient comes with Chronic kidney failure, the doctor knows that the patient is going to die in a few years. The family is poor and the only option for his survival is dialysis. But it is going to drain the family of all their life savings. However, he still tells the family that dialysis is the only option to keep him alive. He does not consider that his quality of life will deteriorate significantly after dialysis. That their family will go into debt. The fact that he is old and is going to die in a few years anyway, does not change the dictum that dialysis is the treatment of choice. He could have told them that there is alternative medicine that could also help with this and that it’s much cheaper and give them hope, for hope is all one needs in times of despair. They could have gone home without any feeling of guilt holding on to that bottle of placebo pills. It is not an easy decision to make, however, the textbook says that dialysis is the only treatment. There is no decision to make. 2+2=5. The patient’s relatives storm the hospital and beat people up when the patient died in a ventilator a few years later at age 84 with a total medical bill of Rs.40 lakhs. The whole family’s life savings: Rs.50,000.
Doctors are not wrong. They’ve just been taught as students that 2+2=5.
I am a sceptical person. And I have always tried to look at the medical system from an outside perspective because I never wanted to be a part of it. It was too late when I realized my heart was in technology and I had to pay a huge fee to withdraw from college after 1st year. You may not resonate with my ideas, but that’s what reading is for. To look at a perspective that is not your own.
