creative forces

Blog # 36…August 2014

Under construction in 1929

For more than half a century, thousands of Torontonians visited their physicians in the stately Medical Arts Building at Bloor and St George.  Of many art forms, the art of medicine touches us all directly or indirectly at some time or other. Over the past couple of decades though, technology has swooped in to shift the balance from art to science, replacing in many cases the doctors’ eyes, ears, nose and fingers with mechanical scans and probes and a range of tests of various body fluids and tissues. Now, headquarters for the Uof T medical school  is called the Medical Sciences Building.

The skill of diagnosis by applying a doctor’s knowledge and experience has been losing ground. Today’s practitioners are balanced on a knife edge, trying to keep a sense of the infinite uniqueness of each patient in the face of ever increasing pressure to know more and see more patients. Patients often arrive armed with information (only some of it correct) gleaned on Google and not so likely to be passive recipients of advice.

There’s no question that technology has brought enormous accuracy and speed to diagnosis, lessened the intrusion of surgery and made many treatments more targeted and effective. What’s been lost, as in many of our systems that have become faster and cheaper, is the ability to deal with the unusual, the situation that doesn’t fit the pattern…the zebras that technology may mistake for horses because it only hears the hoof beats, doesn’t see the stripes.

Dr Herbert Ho Ping Kong, known affectionately as HPK by colleagues and patients, is an internist trained in Jamaica and Britain.  He's currently senior consulting physician and co-founder of the Centre of Excellence for Education and Practice at Toronto Western Hospital.  His commitment to maintaining an emphasis on the human factor in the doctor-patient relationship, paying attention to both mind and body led him to write  The Art of Medicine, Healing and the Limits of Technology, released in February of this year,   

It’s an interesting history of his personal development as a diagnostician and teacher, interspersed with chapters from colleagues, a hospital administrator, psychiatrist and an educator amongst many others, who have been influenced and inspired by the HPK view of medicine.

   

HPK has given us  a huge gift.  We’re all grappling with many areas of our lives, trying to figure out how to maintain the value and originality of human thinking and behaviour while taking advantage (and control) of the technology that surrounds us. Not to dismiss the science but  the art form involved in living means a lot to all of us and we need to practise it.