Organorama 6/2 [antikvár]

Insight and experience. Professor Dr. J. Charvát from Prague in his article "Modern insight into metabolic processes" describes the ways in which he expects various medical techniques to develop in the future. The most striking aspect of his article is that, in order to be able to understand his line of thinking, we must first lay aside our former time-wom dogmas and become receptive to new and fundamentally different concepts. We are only too well aware of how difficult it will be to bring about this "mutation" in our way of thinking and to integrate it, as far as possible, into our professional personalities. We are certainly ready to prescribe for our patients the new preparations which should be the logical outcome of this revolutionary development, just as we have already prescribed those thousands of medicaments which constitute our present therapeutic arsenal. But whether we are prepared to review entirely our concepts of illness and health is another question. One of the disadvantages of medicine to date has been the lack of an all-embracing medical philosophy to clarify our professional thinking. We can certainly do a great deal but the impression remains that we are guided principally by our experience, by concrete factual knowledge passed on to us, when necessary, by others. It can hardly be claimed that our profession stands or falls, in practice, by the application of "insight". In the first place specialisation is now carried to such an extent that there can be no question of any real insight into our own behaviour, and, secondly, by "real insight" we imply such an enormous quantity of hard facts that t'here seems to be hardly any room left for speculative thinking. We are far too accustomed to using the word "ethics" when in fact we are doing no more than giving our own views on a certain technical problem. In the future, though, we are going to need people who, freed from all practical and pragmatical dogmas, will have as their task the construction of a new vision of the future which, with all that this entails, will give shape to the philosophy which prompts our actions. It is very likely that in the not too distant future we shall be faced with a choice between the well-being of the individual or the survival of the group. Intervention in genetic processes is a hazardous business, the results of which cannot reliably be predicted. We argue about transplants which concern only a single individual and forget about the descendants of genetically "planned" figures. It is just one example, but it serves to show us that we are, as yet, a long way from attaining any insight.