August 04, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Claude Bernard on Biology and Medicine
(9) Analogy – refers to use of similarities
between the observed events and any other known and well-studied phenomena.
Those were the nine criteria of Bernard
Hill that are in use today to establish causal relationship between an
organism/agent/factor and disease.
Claude Bernard thought more like a
scientist rather than a physician.
Of course in those days in mid 1800s modern
medicine did not exist and it was men like him, Robert Koch, Ignaz Semmelweis
of hand-washing fame who were inventing a whole new approach to medicine since
until then the theory of four humors held total sway over the minds of human
apes in its various avatars including our beloved ayurveda.
He considered it vital that we ought to
keep trying to disprove our own cherished favorite theories.
The only genuine way to go about is to
first leave emotions aside (we are highly emotional creatures rather than
reasonable ones and emotions greatly surpasses reason in making our choices,
decisions and beliefs) and perform controlled experiments.
He wrote, “We can solidly settle our ideas
only by trying to destroy our own conclusions by counter-experiments.”
One’s only authority should be observable
and verifiable experiments and not any person and his views.
If the experiment that you do goes against
your conclusions then the only option left for you is to discard you own
conclusion and accept the contradiction but with one caveat.
Now this accepted contradiction needs to be
proven too through repeated experimentations.
He laid caution to the application of
mathematics in biology and medicine and said that though application of
mathematics to every science is the desired goal biology is too complex and
poorly understood.
This statement to a large extent holds true
even today but perhaps more so then than now.
He felt that at least in medicine and
surgery qualitative analysis must precede before quantitative analysis.
He gave an example of a surgeon who
performs a surgery for stone and then later makes a statistical summary of
outcomes having columns of uneventful surgeries and lists of complications.
He concludes that the mortality rate for
this procedure is around say 10%.
Even though the number is impressive in
case of surgery great analysis must be made of each step of surgery and each
patient’s individual characteristics and variations.
This would shed far more light to outcome
of future surgery performed on a new patient that the statistical analysis
which again applies even today.
I remember in Aravind we were repeatedly
made to watch videos and soak in each step accurately and this habit has stayed
with most of us till today where each new video we get a chance to watch is
scrutinized to its greatest detail.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Advertisements
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
No comments:
Post a Comment