The physician of today is thoroughly trained in the Language of Medicine. This means he understands all the words, terms and symbolic references to body parts and body physiological and biochemical functions and their relationships to diseases. The modern physician is, in short, a scientist. This is to say he uses the scientific method, scientific language and their attendant and associated concepts, metaphors and allegories by means of which he understands the phenomenon of the body and the various disease processes which injure it.
The physician of today, the "modern" doctors, are MECHANICAL DOCTORS. They have used the 'body as a machine' concept, the body 'as' a thing, which operates and functions, each organ and part playing its role in the process.
But the people! The people who breath and work and get sick, they do not understand the scientific language, the scientific concepts and metaphors. They do not understand what the doctor is talking about. He may as well be speaking Greek, as we like to say. They hear his voice and speech. But the meaning of his symbolic language they do not understand. And worse, because they cannot understand, they do not and cannot trust. It's like finding yourself sick in Afghanistan. Who knows whether you can trust 'this doctor' or not?
But there is an additional factor. And that is even perhaps more important the language. And that is the fact of human nature. This means the fact of human needs. And while people, when they feel ill, simply and certainly want to FEEL better, this may not be a need as much as it is a desire. But human needs will always overpower the concern about human wants. Sure we want to feel better, to feel even good. But what we NEED is mystery and authority and security.
You probably are startled at this remark. But let me remind you that many a man has tolerated his illness and his suffering sense of ill-being having the crutch of God and religion to lean on. Many a suffering individual has endured great distress, threat, fear, and anxiety by having his concept of a Greater Power to appeal to, to count on, to think upon. And the presence of this mysterious authority yields a sense of increased security (or diminished threat) and gives man WHATHE NEEDS.
The physicians of today, the modern doctors, the scientists with scientific language, will one day be remembered like The Knights of the Round Table, honorable, striving and generally honest, but out of touch with Actuality. They share among themselves a private Reality. And this private Reality is kind, decent, useful, even correct in that it corresponds well to the Actual World. It is also coherent and the conceptual paradigms within the language of medicine all are internally consistent. There is no, or I should be more honest and say, relatively little, inconsistency or logical conflict. The philosophers who created the language system of medicine have gone to great lengths to develop a scientific language which is accurate and precise and internally consistent, keeping with the recorded facts of empirical experience obtained through scientific experimentation and careful observation.
But, but, but.....THE PEOPLE NEED MYSTERY, AUTHORITY AND SECURITY, DOCTOR!
The physicians of today are designed for an educated clientele who speak language based on actual observation or, at worst, on the existing dominant conceptual paradigm which I call Reality. But the masses are not educated, do not speak the language fluently, do not base their ideas and concepts upon actual experience and are not completely in tune with the dominant conceptual paradigm(s) which govern scientific language systems. They hold wild and unsubstantiated beliefs in every category. They believe in walkings on water, on conversions of pure water into wine, of bodily assumptions into "heaven," of lives after death (or life after life), of psychic surgery, magical cure-alls, pending scientific breakthroughs which will allow preserved heads and frozen dead bodies to be brought back to life, later, later....much later. And they (we) require, as the child, a sense of mystery of authority and of security. For we all eventually realize that we are all children, some, however, having wrinkled skin.
A. Iosue
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