ABSTRACT
Ah, I hear you say, but what has all this to do with general practice? Well, my thesis relates to the dominance of intellectualism over instinct. The real problem is that we are not clever enough; our much vaunted intelligence is pretty superficial and to understand things at all we have to reduce complexities to simple building blocks, thus distorting the true nature of the phenomenon. The number of blocks gets nowhere near the mystery of the Great Pyramid; an equation cannot describe the beauty or the mind-numbing infiniteness of a Mandelbrot fractal. A Manchester rating scale cannot do justice to the subtleties of doctor-patient interac tions, and a deep understanding of the Krebs cycle doesn't help most doctors to cure anyone. On top of this, we become ridiculously possessive and overbearing with the bits of knowledge we have gleaned. Take the health professions. Cholesterol is bad for you as is too much fat, smoking is
anathema and obesity is a dangerous state. All such statements have some truth in them but take no account of values, human instinct or experi ence, and the real truth is much more complex, multivariate and capable of being viewed from many perspectives. Health messages become reduced to little more than slogans and the complex instinctive nature of human decision making is unacknowledged.
