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WAKING UP FROM THE MEDICINE MATRIX: REALITY AND ITS REPRESENTATION IN MEDICINE

By Peter Davies
Contact the author by e-mail at christopher.johnstone@ntlworld.com

“The matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us…it is the world that has been pulled down over your eyes to blind you from the truth”
Morpheus, The Matrix

When a young person enters a profession they immerse themselves in a new system of thought and action. New ways of seeing things. New features that they had not noticed before. New ways of relating to things that they had previously related to differently. Lots of new ideas and paradigms to learn, some stated openly and some only implicit. And the teachers charged with spinning this web of knowledge are not admitting their role in creating this web of knowledge. The knowledge was supposed to exist objectively, out there, independent of the speaker, and the teacher was only acting as a transmission agent, not as a shaping agent. Indeed this very denial of the teacher’s agency is one of the most powerful weapons that the agents who spin the matrix use to falsely convince you that they are not doing this. Ever felt you were suffering from intellectual vertigo? What forms of intellectual stemetil have you used to calm this sensation down, to reassure yourself that’s it’s really all right, and based on a stable foundation? Who shaped this knowledge into its appropriate form was not considered a necessary, or even valid, question. The knowledge had validity, no matter who had shaped it as it was beyond personal subjectivity and therefore objective, real, manifest and discoverable. And if you only did the right experiment, or read the right article describing someone else’s experiment, you too would see that was how it was. It was replicable and this was enough to validate it. If you think Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell invented spin doctoring, think again. People have been spinning ideas around your defences and into your brain from the moment you were born. If Steven Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist, is right evolution has equipped you with certain ways of thinking and responding, even before you were born. The Blank Slate is not entirely tabula rasa, even at birth.

“I was struck by the large number of falsehoods I had accepted as true in my childhood”
Descartes

Julian Tudor-Hart once commented that he learned his medicine three times, once for finals, once for hospital and then again for general practice. This sense of cognitive dissonance, that the map you have been given by your education bears little or no relevance to the territory of work and life that you are crossing is one that I think most doctors will recognise in their own lives.

“In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the middle of a dark forest and the way forward was entirely lost”
Dante, Divine Comedy, Hell

Dante describes the extreme version of waking up from a false world. In his great parable there is only one way out, and you have to go down into Hell, and up the other side to get to truth. It is a journey many of us will shy away from. The author of Beowulf knew this territory well when he described the lake in which the fearful monster Grendel and his mother lived.

“No one knows its bottom, no wisdom reaches its depths.
A deer hunted through the woods by packs of hounds,
A stag with great horns, though driven through the forest
From faraway places, prefers to die on those shores,
refuses to save its life in that water.”

On what shore are you perishing? What bits of truth are you too afraid to consider? Fear can be considered as “false evidence appearing real” What falsehoods do you accept as real, and how comfortable are you really with them? For instance do you really believe in the Bevan delusion that spending on an illness treatment service can ever get rid of all illness? Would getting rid of all illness really make us all healthy? Yet that is the matrix in which current debate about NHS resources is played out in and it renders it an entirely meaningless debate. Going even beyond Tudor-Hart, I would say we have no current purposeful debate on health within our country.

Instead we have an idiotic tussle about who can get the most coronary artery bypass grafts, new hips and cataract operations out of the old system. We play entirely within the matrix of panacea and pray that someone will come up with a better fix to get us out of the mess that this creates.

The paradigms of Hygeia and “upstream intervention” lie within the currently neglected epistemological community of public health that has almost been written out of the script, considered only in certain arcane and un-influential backwaters.

“I know,I know,I know, I know,” I said,
“But you’ve got to try and make sense of it all.”
Seamus Heaney, Station Island

So how do we attempt to make sense of a world that seems to make less and less sense to us? The start is to go back to the beginning, and answer three questions about yourself and your make up:

1.What is the nature of the blank slate upon which you are writing?

2. Who decides who may write things there, and what may be written?

3. How do you know how to exercise judgement and discrimination about what to record, and what to erase, from the slate of your mind?

Start thinking just how many falsehoods you have accepted as true, and make up your mind to clear them from your memory.

“Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note”
Seamus Heaney,Station Island

Other hoolet online articles by Peter Davies can be found at:
hoolet edition 48 - Three Theories
hoolet edition 46 - Whinging
hoolet edition 44 - Cons In The Consulting Room
hoolet edition 41 - Who are we kidding on confidentiality?
hoolet edition 40 - First, let's kill the bureaucrats
hoolet edition 38 - Waking up from the medical matrix: Reality and its representation in medicine
hoolet edition 36 - Festina lente
hoolet edition 35 - Determinants or Prerequisites?
hoolet edition 34 - Propulsion Systems in Medicine
hoolet edition 32 - Time to give MRCGP away?
hoolet edition 31 - Proper work for a doctor
hoolet edition 30 - The Intruder
hoolet edition 29 - Edging towards the truth: Does it make any sense at all?
hoolet edition 28 - Thoughts from the Dark Forest
hoolet edition 27 - The Vision Splendid

hoolet is the magazine of RCGP Scotland. It is supported intellectually, financially and emotionally by RCGP Scotland.

This issue maintained by Robert Hallam.