maverick medicine babe

EVERY PERSON IS DIFFERENT FROM THE AVERAGE: "The primordial relationship in medicine is the doctor sitting on one side of the desk and the patient on the other side of the desk, or the doctor standing by the bed and the patient lying in the bed, or whatever. The patient tells the doctor a lot of things, and the doctor can see more with his (or her) own eyes. Also various tests can be done to develop data from and about the patient. The question is: What does the physician do with these data once they are available?

 "The Empirical physicians viewed these data as possessing ultimate value in and for themselves. They did not attempt to penetrate beneath the surface, did not attempt to speculate about what was going on inside the patient's body, but used the symptoms as the data upon which to base diagnosis and treatment. In other words, they mistrusted anatomy and physiology as sources of medical knowledge — because anatomy and physiology are general and, as such, run counter to the Empirical principle of individualization. Whereas certain physiological and pathological processes occur in humans as a class, the individual presenting patient may or may not represent that particular class of patients. Every person is different from the average. The average is an abstraction. Every patient is different and is unique — this was always the strong conviction of the Empirical physicians."

 Harris Coulter, The Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine Vol. 9, No.3, 1994