Saturday, January 19, 2008

Diagnosing is Extremely Difficult

There are some things you definitely know about yourself and one of those things for me is that I am absolutely terrible at diagnosis. Thanks to Dr. William Osler, I even know why I'm so bad at it. I'm a big fan of Osler because he was Canadian and because he was a brilliant diagnostician. According to Osler, "The whole art of medicine is observation, as the old moto goes, but to educate the eye to eye, the ear to ear, the finger to feel takes time and to make a beginning, to start a man on the right path, is all we can do." I glance rather than see and I'm not much into listening or touching. Sometimes you just have to stop and focus on what's in front of you or you miss the whole thing and missing the whole thing can kill a person. Because I like Osler so much, I'll give you two more of his quotes:
"Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your 5 senses." and
"Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease."

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