A Country Doctor Writes:

Cholesterol is bad. Cholesterol is an essential building block for important hormones.

Eggs are bad. Eggs are a complete protein food.

Salt is bad. Salt is essential for life.

High blood pressure kills people. No blood pressure defines death.

High blood sugar causes eye and kidney damage. Low blood sugar causes falls, fractures and car wrecks.

Low potassium causes heart rhythm problems. High potassium causes heart rhythm problems.

Too little vitamin B-12 causes nerve damage. Too much vitamin B-12 causes nerve damage.

The ancient physicians, from Hippocrates in Greece to the Yellow Emperor in China, to Ekiken in Japan and Charaka in India, all spoke of the virtues of moderation.

Why do we in our culture go to excess in our pursuit of wellness? We always seem to want to classify foods and nutrients as either good or bad. Depending on how we classify them, we go to excess in consuming them or we deprive ourselves of even necessary amounts of them.

There is even a newish disease, defining the extremes of such behavior, “orthorexia nervosa”.

The latest scuttlebutt of this sort is the new findings that low sodium diets are associated with greater risk of ending up dead than moderate salt diets. The editorial about the studies published in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine made me late for my nightly rounds to check on the barn animals Wednesday night. The piece was interesting, but ultimately no more enlightening than reciting the old adages “everything in moderation” and “nothing to excess”.

Somehow, we here in America have been conditioned to seek expert guidance over our own common sense or our Grandmothers’ advice. We listen to Government advice about drinking eight glasses of water per day whether we are joggers in Memphis during August or mailmen in Anchorage during January. We even listen to medical experts in unrelated fields who promote the latest nutrition and supplement fads on TV for their own profit.

The problem with turning the findings of scientific studies into practical advice or medical treatments is that science only produces data. “Data-driven” has become a buzzword today, just like “evidence based”, or a new one I heard recently, “evidence supported”.

What is wrong with both “data” and “evidence” is that neither entity equals truth, value, practicality or “wisdom”, not to mention the “fact” that the scientific “evidence” has changed many times over about a great many things just in the last few decades. If people wearing astronaut-like Ebola suits are less likely to also get the flu, does that mean we should all wear them during the winter months? Probably not. If tall bachelors have more dates than short ones, should we issue platform shoes to the vertically challenged (my very first blog post)? It was tried to a degree in the 1980’s, but never quite worked out.

Data is meaningless without context or “big picture”. Medical research, by its nature, analyzes small and easily defined parameters within the vast systems we call health and disease. What makes perfect sense to do for the well-being of one corner of our anatomy or physiology may have disastrous consequences for another and possibly for the whole organism. Each scientific study only aims at illuminating one small aspect of life. Only with an understanding of the bigger picture can we decide how to use the nuggets of “fact” science produces.

Even more than a view of the big picture is required to truly make use of data: Common sense, trivial as that may sound, is required when making judgements and setting priorities. This is what has gone missing in our collective enthusiasm at the advances of science in the past century. My Grandmother, who would have been 114 this year, but only lived to be 96, already knew that a little salt, fat or sugar never hurt anyone, but eating anything to excess was not healthy.

Both Hippocrates and Grandma, without the advantages of scientific data, knew in their hearts by virtue of their common sense what science has finally seemed to confirm.

We, as a culture, need to take advantage of both our shared, ancient wisdom and the advances of science, but either one without the other is likely to sometimes lead us astray.

Semmelweis’ analysis of why midwives’ postpartum infection rates were only a fraction of doctors’ and medical students’ is an example of science serving to explain what common sense already knew: Touching the dead before delivering babies made bad things happen.

Population studies, on the other hand, where we seek to find out if vegetarians, salt fiends, runners, nurses or yoga practitioners are healthier than others after decades of doing what they do are so fraught with uncontrollable variables that we are likely to be confused; it took twenty years to find out that postmenopausal estrogen treatment didn’t decrease heart attack rates in older women as the experts had speculated. Too many years of a good thing turned out to be bad.

My Grandmother could have told us that taking drugs to thwart aging didn’t make any sense. So could Hippocrates. They both had common sense. We need to cultivate ours in order to properly make use of today’s exponentially increasing amount of data.

Come to think of it, data seems to be a little bit like salt: Either too little or too much can be debilitating. We should let our common sense regulate our consumption.

“We must bear in mind the difference between thoroughness and efficiency. Thoroughness gathers all the facts, but efficiency distinguishes the two-cent pieces of non-essential data from the twenty-dollar gold pieces of fundamental fact.”

Dr. William Mayo

The practice of medicine involves a lot of details, but details without the big picture are meaningless at best and distracting at worst.

The expression “The Devil is in the Detail(s)” implies that the details can trip you up, whereas the original, older, idiom “God is in the Detail(s)” conveys the importance, even beauty or virtue, of paying attention to the details when trying to do good work.

I think medicine has lost sight of the big picture when it comes to its thoroughness and its pursuit of efficiency. And I don’t see much beauty or virtue in today’s medical charts.

This was going on before electronic medical records, but quantum leaped with the switch from transcribed dictation to click boxes and copy-and-paste functionalities.

The root of this problem lies with the Evaluation and Management (E&M) coding that literally gives points for how many questions a doctor asks about a symptom – onset, character, duration, severity and so on. Points are also given for documenting which symptoms a patient doesn’t have. In earlier times, we used the phrase “pertinent negatives” for items a reasonable physician would want to know in order to work through the possible differential diagnoses for a particular symptom

With the reimbursement system we now have, the number of questions and physical exam items, regardless of whether they are relevant or just filler material, drives physicians’ income and practices’ bottom line.

It was often possible when reading an old-fashioned, dictated, narrative to relatively quickly sort through the irrelevant items, particularly if the style and grammar were used to provide emphasis. For example, when dictating, you had the option of grouping all the negatives together and of keeping the positives separate and emphasized. With an EMR, the items in structured data entry fields tend to come in a predetermined order, making it much harder for the reader to find the relevant items.

The forest of details in today’s medical record serves purposes other than the efficient documentation for doctors to remember their own inquiry and thought processes. It also isn’t primarily designed for doctors to communicate to each other what they have observed and how they propose to treat it.

Today, under the new Government edicts, medical records have to contain hoards of details doctors never thought were relevant, but politicians and insurance actuaries do and future generations of researchers might. Plaintiffs’ lawyers and medical boards might need them, and patients need to be able to read them, so we can no longer create notes that efficiently document our findings, conclusions and plans. It is as if the conductor’s sheet music at the Symphony could no longer have musical notes, G-clefs and technical terms like “mezzo forte”, in case a non-musician wanted to follow along with the orchestra.

It is a bizarre situation: Imagine the Ministry of Culture requiring that all poetry contain certain elements about the beauty of America and the threat of global warming. Similar things have happened in countries that shall not be named here.

This is where the religious analogy really plays out: Which higher power decides the relative importance of what details in medical records? I have a theory.

Details, details, details…

“Once you start studying medicine you never get through with it.”

Dr. Charles Mayo

Marcus Welby, M.D. was 62 in the first episode of the TV series. My father, not a physician, retired at 62. As I am now beginning my sixty-second year, I seem to be thinking a lot about my place in time and in medicine.

Thirty years ago people often told me I looked too young to be a doctor, and I felt I had to work extra hard to seem wise. I developed a habit of carefully explaining what I understood of each patient’s condition, what I saw as the options for further testing and treatment, and what I expected the outcome to be. I also made a point of being respectful and seeking out each patient’s views and preferences.

That is still how I work, but I have found that over time, as my appearance more and more plainly suggests my years in the business, patients are more and more willing to take my advice with fewer explanations. They are also more openly seeking my opinions, support and advice in matters that go beyond the purely medical aspects of life.

It is an honor and a humbling responsibility to be in that position. It comes from not only looking like you have lived through a lot, and I have, but also from being privileged to see up close the joys and travails of so many fellow human beings.

Few professions see as much of the human condition as we physicians, and especially in these secular times, our role can sometimes have similarities with that of the village priest, especially because we deal with matters of birth, life and death.

Early on, I wrote a post titled “The Apostolic Nature of Our Profession”. The older I get in my vocation, the more I see of that; I feel more kinship and indebtedness to the ancient physicians and to my own mentors that guided me to where I am now, and I feel more tangibly the responsibility that goes with years of practice, suddenly graying hair and the earnest requests from some of my patients to fill their archetypal need for the services of a physician.

At the same time, I feel a strengthening of my desire to understand more of medicine. This truly is a lifelong pursuit, and every year I know more, but also wish for deeper and deeper knowledge than I have achieved. Dr. Charles Mayo said it succinctly in the quote above, and Sir William Osler elaborated eloquently:

“The hardest conviction to get in the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.”

Like Osler, I believe medicine is a genuine calling for many physicians, but unlike him, I believe it can be practiced into old age, as long as we have the physical and mental vigor this kind of work requires.

I bring the enthusiasm of a young man and the experience of a sixty-one year old to my remote clinic five days a week, and most nights and weekends I read, think and write about doctoring.

I hold these words by Dr. William Mayo close to my heart as I imagine myself following in the footsteps of mentors like my senior colleague Dr. Wilford Brown, III:

“The keen clinician, as he grows in experience, becomes more and more valuable as age advances.”

In order to be as valuable as I can be to my patients thirty-five years after medical school, I need to read a lot. I need to read the major medical journals not only to learn what applies directly to my everyday work, but also to be cognizant of how the basic sciences are evolving. I need to translate my life experience and what I have learned from well over 100,000 patient encounters into a language with many dialects that I can use in familiar and unfamiliar situations with patients from a multitude of backgrounds. I need to continually learn about psychology, philosophy and religion in order to be a support to patients who face life altering circumstances and diseases.

I need to maintain my equanimity through busy clinic days in our tumultuous national health care environment, so that my patients don’t become pawns in the system any more than they have to. I need to maintain my sense of proportion in everything I do: in differential diagnosis, in helping patients set priorities, in managing agendas imposed on me by “the system”, and in my own expectations as only one mere human.

This is what I hope to continue to bring to work with me every day for as long as I can do it well.